Lost in Translation

Yesterday, in his NYT blog, word meister Ben Schott tagged the Chinese phrase, guo jin min tui ("the state advances as the private sector retreats") as one now frequently being used throughout Beijing's beltway.  Call it China's economic policy tagline.

We in the US might have to adapt it, too.  "The state advances as the private sector retreats" accurately describes the present ebb and flow of our economic tides.  With the global financial services industry in disarray, our government has had little choice but advance into the sucking vacuum our decimated private sectors have opened up.   

There is, however, a distinct choice of words in the Chinese phrase that bears pointing out. Here's a direct translation of the characters:

As someone fluent in Mandarin, I thought it particularly striking that the character min — a word primarily used to mean "people, public and citizenry" and secondarily, "private"— was the character chosen to represent "private sector" in this phrase.  This min is also the root character for min zhu, the binary-character word for "democracy."  A more common choice for "private" would have been si, the root word for all things private, like si chan, the word for "private property."

So, is this a question of usage or is there a cloaked meaning in this tagline?  As the state advances, do the people - and democracy - necessarily retreat?  Is the Chinese government communicating something to its citizenry with guo jin min tui?  (i.e., Is this a vaguely threatening and oblique response to the hilarious and subversive Grass Mud Horse Cao Ni Ma (aka, F-- Your Mother) YouTube videos that proliferated throughout the intertubes like a hundred dirty flowers last month?)