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Not Worthy as Models
Most objections to viewing the developmental trajectory in Wenzhou and Kerala as
models worth emulating are ideological and normative in character. In the case of Wenzhou, its
reliance on private enterprises and finance was politically controversial during the 1980s when
the direction of economic reforms in China was still unclear; and even after the locality was
designated an official experimental zone for reform in 1987, the Wenzhou model retained a
somewhat nefarious reputation among cadres, journalists, and certain academics. More recently,
however, headlines involving Wenzhou have lost their former eyebrow-raising qualities. In
areas such as private finance, Wenzhou remains one step ahead of other localities in terms of
experimenting with private equity investments in urban commercial banks and being the first
locality to have private entrepreneurs establish a venture capital consortium.
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But these
developments are consistent with the overall trajectory of national economic reform, and
therefore, less objectionable than Wenzhou’s innovative practices of the early reform years. In
brief, political critiques of the Wenzhou model are no longer heard and Chinese scholars have
not documented the changes in and more recent shortcoming of the model discussed above.
In sharp contrast, the Kerala model continues to elicit negative commentary from policy
analysts and public intellectuals who focus on its economic deficiencies. Ironically, while the
use of ideological objections to economic policy has waned in China, it remains quite polarizing
in India.
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To take one extreme example, the columnist T.V.R. Shenoy has called the Kerala
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“Wenzhou Pioneers Financial System Reform,” tdctrade.com, vol. 1, April 1, 2003; and “First Non-State
Consortium Emerges in Zhejiang,” China Economic Net, June 18, 2004.
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This is not to say that ideological debates are dead in China or that leftist sentiments are no longer articulated. For
a review of contemporary intellectual debates among the New Left and other intellectual branches, see Joseph
Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Convention