Tobias ten Brink - Chinas Capitalism: A Paradoxical Route to Economic Prosperity

Chinas Capitalism

CHINAS CAPITALISM

A Paradoxical Route to Economic Prosperity

Tobias ten Brink

Translated by

Carla Welch

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Originally published in German in 2013 as

Chinas Kapitalismus: Entstehung, Verlauf, Paradoxien.

Copyright 2013 by Campus Verlag.

English translation copyright 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ten Brink, Tobias, author. Welch, Carla, translator.

Title: Chinas capitalism : a paradoxical route to economic prosperity / Tobias ten Brink ; translated by Carla Welch. Chinas Kapitalismus. English.

Translation of: Ten Brink, Tobias. Chinas Kapitalismus : Entstehung, Verlauf, Paradoxien.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018033468 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5109-8 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: CapitalismChina. | ChinaEconomic conditions2000.

Classification: LCC HC427.95 .T4513 2019

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033468

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften InternationalTranslation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Brsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association).

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

Economic growth in China since the end of the 1970s has now outperformed every other long economic upswing in modern history. While the largest member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) continue to struggle with the effects of the deepest recession since World War II, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is still enjoying growth rates that are massive by comparison. With these trends, China is leaving behind its role as workshop of the world and preparing to become a global engine for innovation.

Of course, beyond these developments is a different China, one still battling with social problems similar to those faced by other developing or large emerging countries. Nevertheless, according to criteria for measuring growth in economic efficiency, China is still the most successful and dramatic case of catch-up development in the world. Even experienced researchers in economics or industrial sociology are surprised by the scale of industrial expansion in some areas of the country. This particularly applies to the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas, which over the past thirty years have seen the construction of the largest industrial zones in global history. Often the most astonishing fact for Western observers is that the second largest economy in the world has emerged in a country dominated by an authoritarian party-state where the unrestricted rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prevails to this day.

The renaissance of the Middle Kingdom triggered strong interest in China and raised a number of questions: What social structure has developed during the course of Chinas reform process, the length of which has now exceeded that of the Mao era (194978)? What have been the driving forces behind the countrys development? What paradoxical consequences have been brought about by this economic miracle? The new China debate is characterized by a broad spectrum of different positions ranging from suspicion of an emerging China to Sinomania (Anderson 2010a). Todays enthusiasm about Chinas dynamic economic growth, although intermittently qualified by reports on political repression in the PRC, is reminiscent of the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers such as Leibniz, Voltaire, and Quesnay. These philosophers were exceedingly impressed by the prosperity of imperial China, attributing to it a more advanced level of civilization than Europe. Even their slightly more skeptical contemporaries (Montesquieu and Adam Smith, for instance) admired the countrys political regime and its wealth. However, in the nineteenth century, after parts of the country were colonized, there were dramatic shifts in attitude toward China, with the military, economic, and social backwardness of the crumbling empire coming to the fore. In the twentieth century, these antipathies escalated, culminating with the Maoist seizure of power. Today, though, admiration permeated by apprehension appears to be gaining the upper hand.

Research Interests