CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

Among the guests at the 20th anniversary of the Chinese Economists 50 Forum was Vice-Premier Liu He, who helped get this club for 'bean counters' up and running.

"What we learned from the past 40 years is that we must insist on a market-oriented and law-based direction of reform," Wu told Liu and a room full of economists, entrepreneurs and government officials at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing.

The 88-year-old is considered one of the preeminent economists in China and is a passionate supporter of the pro-business policies which have helped transform the country.

But those reforms are starting to stall, he pointed out.

Known as Wu Shichang, or "Market Wu," he warned against "disharmonious voices" or those that have called for an end to private ownership in China.

"[The government has to] build a consensus [on reforms] through debate and then implement them one by one," Wu said.

After the speech, Liu reportedly left the gathering. Yet President Xi Jinping's economic tsar would have agreed with the sentiments along with the majority of the audience and speakers.

During the past few months, there have been concerns about China's lack of progress in economic liberalization.

Moreover, the private sector has been hit hard by the trade war, as well as the squeeze on financing and excess production, Li Yang, the former deputy head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, stressed.

"Many cannot survive amid this de facto discrimination," Li told the Chinese Economists 50 Forum.

The clampdown on credit as part of the broader onslaught against rising local government and corporate debt has been particularly severe for small companies struggling to obtain funding.

To underline the problems, Ma Jiantang, a senior Communist Party official at the Development Research Center of the powerful State Council, has been quoted as saying in the Chinese media that private companies are plagued by "dissatisfaction."

His comments will resonate with the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.

In May, the ACFIC reported that more than 90% of new jobs were created by private enterprises last year, as well as 60% of GDP growth.

"At the end of 2017, there were 65.79 million individually-owned businesses and 27.26 million private enterprises in China, which employed some 340 million people," Gao Yunlong, the head of the ACFIC, told the official state-run Xinhua news agency.

Yet there have been calls from more left-wing scholars, economists and government officials to dump the private sector "experiment."

"Communists can sum up their theory in one sentence - eliminate private ownership," Zhou Xincheng, a professor of Marxism at the Renmin University of China, wrote in Qizhi, a leading policy journal of the CCP, back in January.

Beijing has already set-up CCP committees, which are common among state-owned enterprises, throughout the private sector.

Qiu Xiaoping, the deputy director of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, has floated the idea that employees should "participate in the management" of corporations.

"Chinese Communist Party officials are increasingly calling on companies to support the creation of party organizations among their employees," China Business Review, the official magazine of the US-China Business Council, reported. "The potential for party groups to influence corporate decision making has raised concern among some US company executives."

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