Reform And Development In China: After 40 Years. Группа авторов
and contexts. In some areas, residents with more market access or rich residents were found to receive more benefits from poverty reduction projects. Some rural poor who had been lifted out of poverty have returned poor. Qian also examines the case of Chongqing, where the government has attempted to address the poverty issue by promoting rural-urban integration. The dual structure of economy between urban and rural areas is one of the major constraints in poor regions. The Chongqing experience provides a different approach from traditional development programs. For future programs, the author believes industry-based or society-based poverty reduction should be the direction, bringing in enterprises in various industries such as agriculture, water conservancy, education, health, as well as social organizations for the same cause.
Four decades of rapid economic development have reached the point of searching for new modes of growth. The third thematic cluster in this book discusses China’s pursuit of environment-friendly and technological-driven development. From technological, financial, and governance perspectives, John A. Mathews in Chapter 9 believes China’s search for a new model of green-energy-based industrial development is not because of concerns about climate change, but because of necessities to handle environmental pollution and geopolitical tensions related to fuel energy. Politically, this alternative can provide energy security since energy can be derived from domestic resources such as solar, wind, and water. China’s adopting eco-modernizing strategy has spillover effects, encouraging firms in other parts of the world to pursue similar strategies, and therefore reinforcing the global ecomodernizing tendencies already under way. The author argues that a fundamental process is going on. Through the process, diminishing returns are replaced by increasing returns, and material processing is replaced by artificial product manufacturing. These are fundamental to eco-modernization, allowing for green growth in China.
China has parted from its decades of hyper-economic growth. Since the major factors driving the past growth have become exhausted, the country’s future growth hinges on its capability of making technological progress and innovation. Ding Lu reviews the evolution of China’s national planning and policy for science and technology in Chapter 10, finding the results are mixed. On the one hand, China’s R&D strategies have escalated the country’s domestic industries on the global value chains and innovation ladders. On the other hand, the innovation has yet to be translated into a major driver of China’s economy. In recent few years, the Chinese government has promoted market-based innovation and encouraged the general public with entrepreneurship to involve innovation. A number of local governments were selected for institutional reforms to improve market competition, intellectual property rights, technological transformation, financial innovation, personnel training, and science and technology managerial system. Lu believes those initiatives may be in the right direction and if successfully implemented, they will facilitate China’s transition to innovation-driven development.
Trying to summarize the 40-year experience of China’s reform and opening up in one volume is too ambitious for us. Yet with this book, we do hope to make a preliminary contribution to our understanding of certain aspects in this time period. The intellectual journey calls for unremitting involvement of the entire China study community and of the broader scholarship from different disciplines. We thank the IPP for organizing these conferences and the speakers who contributed to this book. Special thanks to the World Scientific for its effort in publishing the book, especially to Ms. Lixi Dong and Mr. Anthony Alexander who were actively involved in its publication. Our colleagues in IPP, particularly Ms. Ying Zhou, Ms. Zeng Hui and former colleague Mr. Wei Luo, were also involved the publishing process.
Chapter
1
China as an Innovative State and its Implications for the World
ZHENG Yongnian
East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore
1.Introdution
“Is China’s political system innovative?” The reason I use this title for this chapter is that while China is increasingly becoming relevant to people’s daily life in different parts of the world, the country seems to have become a political entity that we have never seen before. Its leaders have mentioned it on different occasions that China wants to chart a political course distinct from what is practised elsewhere.
What motivated me to discuss this subject are the two articles that I read in February and March of this year. Let me explain these two articles briefly.
The first article appeared in the Forbes magazine (February 23, 2014). It was written by Eamonn Fingleton, and the title of the article was “Upside-Down Propaganda: How China Keeps Fooling The New York Times, The BBC, and Other Wishful Thinkers.” According to the author:
“For nearly two decades now, Beijing has worked through various witting and unwitting surrogates, many of them Westerners, to persuade the United States and Europe that China’s rise is somehow an illusion. Beijing is playing on an apparently limitless capacity for wishful thinking in the West and, to anyone who has been following the story, the motive is obvious: to foster complacency and procrastination. The point is that the slower Westerners are to understand how profoundly the map of world power is changing, the less effective will be any Western efforts to moderate Beijing’s ambitions.”
The author cited many examples of wrong predictions made by Western media such as The New York Times, The Economist, and the Times: “Yet we now know that the earlier predictions proved not only wrong but the diametric opposite of the truth. Instead of conveniently collapsing, China continued to grow faster than any other major nation in history. The fact is that China is now more than three times bigger in real terms than it was in 2003 and nearly six times bigger than it was in 1998.”
I am not sure whether it was the Chinese government’s agenda to fool the media in the West. Since many in China are often surprised by the country’s radical development. I am sure that no one, including any of the Chinese leaders, is able to predict the future of China. But Fingleton was right in pointing out that all previous predictions of Chinese economic system’s demise have proved premature.
The second article is a six-page piece in The Economist (March 1–7, 2014), entitled “What’s gone wrong with democracy and how to revive it.” The article discusses how democracy in different parts of the world is going through a difficult time today. Democracy is in retreat, indeed. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. “Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies in the West, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion when politics is rife” (pp. 47–48). “Democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at home and overreach abroad” (p. 48). The argument that democracy is in crisis is widespread today. But what makes this article relevant to my discussion are the two following reasons that The Economist believes are behind today’s democratic crisis.
According to the magazine, the two main reasons are the financial crisis of the period 2007–2008 and the rise of China. The financial crisis exposed fundamental weaknesses in the West’s economic and political systems, thereby undermining the self-confidence that had been one of their assets. Many people became disillusioned with the workings of their economic and political systems — particularly when governments bailed out bankers with taxpayers’ money and then stood by impotently as financiers continued to pay themselves huge bonuses.
The 2008 financial crisis took place in the heart of Western democracies. It is not difficult to understand how this crisis has affected democracy. But why single out China? China is not a part of the democratic world. How did China affect democracy?
According to The Economist, the reason is simple; it is due to China’s economic rise. Here is an extract that I wish