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发帖数: 865 | 1 继习总龙袍之后，经济学人隆重推出安倍cosplay
WHEN Shinzo Abe resigned after just a year as prime minister, in September
2007, he was derided by voters, broken by chronic illness, and dogged by the
ineptitude that has been the bane of so many recent Japanese leaders. Today
, not yet five months into his second term, Mr Abe seems to be a new man. He
has put Japan on a regime of “Abenomics”, a mix of reflation, government
spending and a growth strategy designed to jolt the economy out of the
suspended animation that has gripped it for more than two decades. He has
supercharged Japan’s once-fearsome bureaucracy to make government vigorous
again. And, with his own health revived, he has sketched out a programme of
geopolitical rebranding and constitutional change that is meant to return
Japan to what Mr Abe thinks is its rightful place as a world power.
Mr Abe is electrifying a nation that had lost faith in its political class.
Since he was elected, the stockmarket has risen by 55%. Consumer spending
pushed up growth in the first quarter to an annualised 3.5%. Mr Abe has an
approval rating of over 70% (compared with around 30% at the end of his
first term). His Liberal Democratic Party is poised to triumph in elections
for the upper house of the Diet in July. With a majority in both chambers he
should be able to pass legislation freely.
Pulling Japan out of its slump is a huge task. After two lost decades, the
country’s nominal GDP is the same as in 1991, while the Nikkei, even after
the recent surge, is at barely a third of its peak. Japan’s shrinking
workforce is burdened by the cost of a growing number of the elderly. Its
society has turned inwards and its companies have lost their innovative edge.
Mr Abe is not the first politician to promise to revitalise his country—the
land of the rising sun has seen more than its share of false dawns—and the
new-model Abe still has everything to prove. Yet if his plans are even half
successful, he will surely be counted as a great prime minister.
The man in Japan with a plan
The reason for thinking this time might be different is China. Economic
decline took on a new reality in Japan when China elbowed Japan aside in
2010 to become the world’s second-largest economy. As China has gained
confidence, it has begun to throw its weight around in its coastal waters
and with Japan directly over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Earlier
this month China’s official People’s Daily even questioned Japanese
sovereignty over Okinawa.
Mr Abe believes that meeting China’s challenge means shaking off the apathy
and passivity that have held Japan in thrall for so long. To explain the
sheer ambition of his design, his people invoke the Meiji slogan fukoku
kyohei: “enrich the country, strengthen the army”. Only a wealthy Japan
can afford to defend itself. Only if it can defend itself will it be able to
stand up to China—and, equally, avoid becoming a vassal of its chief ally,
the United States. Abenomics, with its fiscal stimulus and monetary easing,
sounds as if it is an economic doctrine; in reality it is at least as much
about national security.
Perhaps that is why Mr Abe has governed with such urgency. Within his first
weeks he had announced extra government spending worth ￥10.3 trillion (
about $100 billion). He has appointed a new governor of the Bank of Japan
who has vowed to pump ever more money into the financial system. In so far
as this leads to a weaker yen, it will boost exports. If it banishes the
spectre of deflation, it may also boost consumption. But printing money can
achieve only so much and, with a gross debt of 240% of GDP, there is a limit
to how much new government spending Japan can afford. To change the economy
’s long-run potential, therefore, Mr Abe must carry through the third,
structural, part of his plan. So far, he has set up five committees charged
with instigating deep supply-side reforms. In February he surprised even his
supporters by signing Japan up to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional
trade agreement that promises to force open protected industries like
farming.
Bad blood
Nobody could object to a more prosperous Japan that would be a source of
global demand. A patriotic Japan that had converted its “self-defence
forces” into a standing army just like any other country’s would add to
the security of North-East Asia. And yet those who remember Mr Abe’s first
disastrous term in office are left with two worries.
The danger with the economy is that he goes soft, as he did before. Already
there are whispers that, if second-quarter growth is poor, he will postpone
the first of two consumption-tax increases due in 2014-15 for fear of
strangling the recovery. Yet a delay would leave Japan without a medium-term
plan for limiting its debt and signal Mr Abe’s unwillingness to face up to
tough choices. The fear is that he will bow to the lobbies that resist
reform. Agriculture, pharmaceuticals and electricity are only some of the
industries that need to be exposed to competition. Mr Abe must not shrink
from confronting them, even though that means taking on parts of his own
party.
The danger abroad is that he takes too hard a line, confusing national pride
with a destructive and backward-looking nationalism. He belongs to a
minority that has come to see Japan’s post-war tutelage under America as a
humiliation. His supporters insist he has learned that minimising Japan’s
wartime guilt is unacceptable. And yet he has already stirred up ill will
with China and South Korea by asking whether imperial Japan (for which his
grandfather helped run occupied Manchuria) really was an aggressor, and by
allowing his deputy to visit the Yasukuni shrine, where high-ranking war
criminals are honoured among Japan’s war dead. Besides, Mr Abe also seems
to want more than the standing army Japan now needs and deserves. The talk
is of an overhaul of the liberal parts of the constitution, unchanged since
it was handed down by America in 1947, Mr Abe risks feeding regional
rivalries, which could weaken economic growth by threatening trade.
Mr Abe is right to want to awaken Japan. After the upper-house elections, he
will have a real chance to do so. The way to restore Japan is to focus on
reinvigorating the economy, not to end up in a needless war with China. | h***f
发帖数: 4541 | | y*h
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: 这不是于谦老师吗？
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