And how. Ever since Deng Xiaoping launched China’s market-oriented reforms in 1979, Guangdong has always stretched the outer limits. The economy is growing faster than nearly any other in the world 27.2 percent in 1991. The 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown has hardly slowed the boom; Deng himself, on a recent two-week tour of Guangdong, called the region “Asia’s fifth tiger.” But can he cage it? Economic miracles have a way of disobeying politicians. From Hong Kong and Taiwan, pop novels and freewheeling newspapers slip easily over Guangdong’s porous borders. Guangdong’s leaders, confronted with Beijing’s intransigence, know better than to dream of outright independence. But the pace of Guangdong’s economic change may be enough to whirl it out of Beijing’s orbit.
Guangdong has always had a special relationship with the world outside China. Emigration gave the province a foothold in dozens of countries; one town, Taishan, has only 96,000 residents-and 1 million relatives overseas. The tightest ties are with Hong Kong, most of whose residents are former refugees from Guangdong and still speak the same Cantonese dialect. That makes Hong Kong the easiest - and most dangerous - source of independent information. Beijing authorities have tried to impose a ban on antennas that can pick up Hong Kong television, but to no avail. To Beijing’s dismay, jamming television signals during the spirited Hong Kong elections last year also didn’t work: freelance electronics experts from the People’s Liberation Army offered antijamming services to anyone who could pay.
And in Guangdong, people can pay. More than 2 million residents work for foreign joint ventures, making small fortunes by Chinese standards. Evidence of Guangdong’s fast-lane corporate culture is everywhere at hand. The parking lot at the Aide Electric Rice Cooker plant overflows with Mercedes-Benz cars. Managers in the executive dining room toast their clients with glasses of pricey Courvoisier. The company recently shelled out $150,000 for a new discotheque for its workers, replete with a state-of-the-art Japanese sound system and strobe lighting. These flamboyant private businesses have left the public sector far behind; state enterprises now account for just over one third of Guangdong’s economy.
State ideology, too, is becoming irrelevant. “The party is here, but we really don’t notice them,” says Li Hongkai, manager of a Japanese motorcycle retailer. Some Communist Party branches have caved in to practicality: they hold management-training courses rather than drilling their members on Marx and Mao. One municipal party committee recently went so far as to hold its biannual convention in capitalist Hong Kong. Guangdong’s politicians bristle at the notion of tighter political control from Beijing. “What have they invested here?” asks Zeng Guangcan, deputy director of the province’s economic-reform commission. “We pay for our railroads, our highways, our power plants.” A planner for a state company puts the point even more bluntly: “They have no right to tell us what to do.”
Yet Guangdong politicians know they have to move carefully. Nobody breathes a word about formally renouncing communism or declaring independence from Beijing. But neither do they hesitate to stand up for Guangdong’s rights. Ye Xuanping, the province’s powerful former governor and one of China’s few truly popular politicians, has managed to keep Beijing at arm’s length. In September 1990, when Prime Minister Li Peng announced a plan to recentralize fiscal control over the provinces, Ye stood up and boldly denounced the notion. The other governors applauded wildly. Last year Beijing finally succeeded in kicking Ye upstairs to a post in the central government. But he still spends most of his time in Guangdong, and under his protection the province continues to enjoy unusual political leeway. Many of China’s democratic reformers took refuge in Guangdong after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
Beijing’s worry is that upstarts in Guangdong will encourage others. The interior regions of China used to resent Guangdong’s privileges; out of spite, Hunan province prevented Guangdong’s trucks from transporting coal and grain over its borders. These days the provinces are converts. “We’re all heading to Guangdong to learn from them,” says one provincial representative who operates out of Hong Kong. Foreign companies such as Procter & Gamble and Avon are using Guangdong as a springboard to China’s billion-strong consumer market. And Guang-dong, in turn, is exporting to its poorer brothers. “Guangdong is beginning its own investment push into China,” says one economist for a state-run company. “That will be one of the biggest economic trends of the ’90s.” That smacks of real capitalism and even looser reins. Deng clearly meant his tour of Guangdong last month as a signal to his lieutenants to speed up the pace of economic reform, but he won’t let Guangdong do everything it wants to do. He’s still capable of restraining Asia’s fifth tiger-but m not forever.
