China is set to abandon it’s ‘Go West’ program, says Paul French (via CDT). If true, that’s welcome news. While the west does need development, central planning is not the way to do it. China is prospering today because it is abandoning central planning.

Thankfully Go West may soon finally go away. The long running and largely useless campaign to drive investment to the remoter western fringes of the country has been a disaster and it now seems that Beijing feels ready to (sort of) admit that, take a deep breath and move on. Go West was launched about five years ago to stimulate economics development. China claims that the policy has led to US$48 billion being invested in the region, but little of this has been FDI (at most US$3 billion). The vast majority has been central government funding for various projects. In general Go West was a leap too far for foreign investors and for most Chinese investors too.

French notes that there may be problems with disavowing the program because "it was a major plank of the Jiang Zemin administration and is considered one of Jiang’s gifts to the nation." I haven’t been here long enough to make a fully reasoned judgment about this, but it strikes me that Premier Hu Jintao is quite a player and is eager to dismantle Jiang’s legacy. That’s not necessarily a good thing in a broad sense, but here I wouldn’t mind Hu pulling off another coup.