I'm not a person who read the local newspapers. I trust the city retains its hyper pace and tremendous volume of reality when I wake up every morning. It sure will catch up the gear to continue from where it's left at the end of yesterday - surer than my own wake-up.
But this headline caught my eyes "Playdown GDP, Set New Measures for Economic Development" on today's paper.
With the little economic knowledge I have, I always have a mistrust on the city or the country's GDP figures, and since most of technology and industrial development is out sight of my everyday life which confines within a small zone in downtown Shanghai where the only economic activity to be seen is shopping, since all I see on the spending of infrastructure is the continuous digging up of the old streets, brushing up on the same old walls of the same old buildings in this zone, I naturally grow a bias believing much of our GDP comes from such 0-value activity.
Hence I take the down-play of the GDP as good news.
What's more amusing is that while the beginning of the year is usually a time for us who work in corporates to "set objectives" and put down the measurements, it never occurred to me that the government also need to set their own "objectives" and look at the measurement. Sure, it's a good thing they do.
Now the paper says the gov stresses on the "change of structure" of the economy, the gov will no longer encourage the various districts to compete on GDP growth figure, but set some new measures such as "service industry development", "innovative industry development", "green economy development" - while the details are not clear here, the concepts sounds good, and I guess that's the first step.
A few colleagues were having a chat over lunch as usual, and talked about the issue of corruption, and one of us said brilliantly "a bureaucratic structure must have some corruption as a lubricant, it's fine as long as they're also doing some real work". He also cited that the Ming Dynasty, being famous on the ruthless crack-down on corruption (the emperor got the convict corrupted gov officials skinned - and made scarecrow out of the skins to warn the rest of gov officials), was also the Dynasty of most corruption… well, my history knowledge failed me here…
Well, I guess what I'm saying here is that I think it's a progressive sign that the city gov are setting new KPIs, I guess we coming so far indicated some people are really working and even learning.
Hope to look at their year-end report on these new measures!
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