Zhou's Theories Clash With China's Realities
HONG KONG -- To his detractors, the scholarly head of China's central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan , is a bit too fond of "sea turtles."
A Chinese pun, "sea turtles" refers to people in China who travel abroad for study and then return. Mr. Zhou has made a habit of hiring them in his long career spent re-engineering China's planned economy. Like Mr. Zhou, they speak fluent English. But they also share a weakness: While they are schooled in complex market theories, they are strangers to the practice of local Chinese politics.
As Mr. Zhou seeks to cool an overheated economy with market-based tools such as interest rates, instead of administrative methods such as bank-lending curbs, he is running up against vested interests around the country whose wily ways can make fools of even the smartest economic mandarins in Beijing.
For the world economy, much is riding on the shoulders of Mr. Zhou, a 56-year-old Western opera buff, an accomplished tennis player and the only Chinese leader of his rank to have been published in a Western academic journal.
ECONOMY WATCH
Beijing Assesses Its Move on Rates
China accounts for nearly one-quarter of global economic growth, according to International Monetary Fund calculations based on "purchasing power parity," which measures output without the distortions of currency exchange rates. So when China's central bank raised interest rates on Oct. 28, shock waves rippled out toward copper mines in Chile, car makers' headquarters in Detroit and oil fields in Russia.
So far, Chinese government policy to slow things down is showing signs of success. Data released Friday showed consumer-price inflation in October slowed sharply to an annualized 4.3% from 5.2% in September.
Inflationary pressures still are bearing down on the economy from high oil and commodity prices, and further interest-rate increases can't be ruled out. Some economists predict China may even relax its currency peg to the U.S. dollar in coming months, a move that would likely make the yuan stronger.
Mr. Zhou, an economic systems engineer, is widely dubbed "China's most able technocrat." For the past 25 years, he has been helping to dismantle the planned economy and build markets instead. A protege of reformist Premier Zhao Ziyang and with a Ph.D. from Beijing's Tsinghua University, Mr. Zhou in the 1980s used computer modeling to help overhaul the tax code and decontrol prices.
During the 1990s, he moved into banking and financial regulation, running China Construction Bank and managing China's vast foreign-exchange reserves. Before taking up his current job at the People's Bank of China, Mr. Zhou was the top securities regulator.
There have been miscues, and at least one spectacular setback. Just last year, a central-bank move to curb lending by raising bank reserve requirements -- the amount of money commercial banks must deposit with the central bank -- sparked turmoil in the domestic money markets: A government bond issue flopped and smaller banks ended up so squeezed for funds that the central bank had to reverse itself and pump liquidity back into the system.
As the securities regulator, he was forced to shelve a plan to offload untraded state shares in listed companies that nearly collapsed the markets. Investors resent him to this day, and sneer at the 50-odd "sea turtles" that Mr. Zhou lured to the China Securities Regulatory Commission as intellectual policy wonks who couldn't figure out.
理论对撞现实：周小川的改革之路
在他的诋毁者们看来，中国央行的学者型领导人周小川太偏爱“海龟”了。
所谓“海龟”，指的就是海外学成归国的人。在周小川投身中国市场经济改革的生涯中，他养成了任用“海龟”的习惯。和他自己一样，这些人的英语都很流利，但也有一个共同的弱点：他们学习了各种复杂的市场经济学理论，但对中国的政治现实却知之甚少。
周小川试图用基于市场的手段，比如说利率调整，来给过热的经济降温，而不是采用限制银行信贷等行政性举措。在这个过程中，他触及了全国各地很多人的既得利益。而这些人老谋深算，就连北京最精明的经济官员也有可能被其蒙骗。
周小川现年56岁，不但爱好西方歌剧，善打网球，也是身居如此高位并在西方学术期刊上发表过论文的唯一一位中国官员。就是这位央行行长，其言行牵动著全球经济的神经。
国际货币基金组织(International Monetary Fund, 简称IMF)根据“购买力平价”计算出的结果显示，全球经济增长的近四分之一来自中国。“购买力平价”是扣除了汇率因素后的产值估算。因此，当中国央行10月28日加息后，冲击波迅速蔓延到智利的铜矿、底特律的汽车生产商总部和俄罗斯的油田。
截至目前，中国政府给经济降温的措施正在取得成效。上周五发布的数据显示，10月份中国消费者价格指数增幅折合成年率从9月份的5.2%锐降至4.3%。
通货膨胀压力仍然通过高企的油价和商品价格传递过来，央行再次加息的可能性难以被完全排除。一些经济学家甚至预计未来几个月内中国会放松人民币与美元的挂钩汇率，从而令人民币走强。
身为经济体系的规划师，周小川被大众视为“中国最有能力的技术官僚”，这在当前专业人士云集的政府高级官员阶层中，可是一种近乎吹捧的称呼。这25年来，他一直投身于计划经济体制向市场经济体制的改革。作为清华大学(Tsinghua University)的博士生，他早在八十年代就通过电脑模型来帮助检查税务代码和放松价格管制。
到了九十年代，他开始从事银行业和金融业的监管，他曾担任中国建设银行(China Construction Bank)行长，掌管过中国巨额的外汇储备。在担任目前的职位──中国人民银行(People's Bank of China)行长之前，他曾经是证监会(Securities Regulatory Commission)主席。
他当然也有失误，至少遭受过一次重大挫折。就在去年，央行决定通过提高准备金率来遏制商业银行的信贷规模，但一时激起了国内货币市场的动荡。国债发行大举受挫，小型银行资金紧缺，央行被迫调整策略，向金融系统注入大量资金以稳定形势。
作为证监会主席，他被迫将几乎导致股市崩盘的国有股减持计划束之高阁。为此他至今难获股市投资者的欢心，他们把周小川网罗来的50多位“海龟”嘲笑为不谙政策的书呆子，根本不懂得中国的现实状况。
又一位中国经济学家将周小川比作北京大街上拥堵路口的交警：白手套洁净无暇，指挥动作坚定不移，但周围车流混乱不堪。斯坦福大学(Stanford University)出身的上海证交所副总经理方星海反驳说，这不公平。在他眼中，周小川是一个目标清晰坚定的人。周小川出任建设银行行长期间，方星海曾是他的下属。
中国报界将周小川称之为美国联邦储备委员会(Federal Reserv)主席格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)的“好学生”。今年10月初，周小川作为中国第一次正式参加七大工业国会议的代表团成员之一，在华盛顿会晤了格林斯潘。但与格林斯潘不同的是，周小川并不能决定利率走向，中国央行在货币政策上有一定的影响力，而且在周小川的领导下，这种影响力日渐加强，但最终决策仍然来自中共中央政治局。
在中国，国家承担著90%的固定资产投资。要给经济降温就需要进行细致精密的市场调节，佐之以不那么细致的行政手段，后者往往是中央政府和地方政府之间互相妥协的产物。但周小川对这个领域没什么把握，他从没担任过市长或省级官员。
“周小川的弱点就在于缺乏这方面的经验，”美国西北大学(Northwestern University)政治学教授威克托?施(Victor Shih)说。虽然被视为一名有潜力的国家总理人选，但他在某些领域的资历仍然无法与前总理朱
