Peilin Li - Social Transformation and Chinese Experience

When people describe the modernization of a nation state, the terms growth and development are often used alternately. On most of the occasions, they are interchangeable. However, there are fundamental distinctions in these two concepts that represent two different outlooks on development.

Economic growth refers to an increase in the gross national product (GNP) or national income. Economic growth can simply mean an increase in the ratio of national product output and labor force to population growth. In the post-WWII era, the world has entered a relatively peaceful time of development. As a majority of countries shifted their focus to economic growth, an economic-centered perspective dominated the outlook on development. This is what we now call traditional development strategy the one that is centered on quantitative growth in GNP or national income. Influential theories such as the Harrod-Domar model, Joan Robinsons growth model, vicious circle of poverty, and theory of the big push took shape in this period of time. The United Nations (UN) has set the basic objective for the least developed countries in the first United Nations Development Decade (19601970) to grow their GNP at a rate no less than 6 percent. The Pearson Report to the World Bank in 1969 and proposals for the Second United Nations Development Decade in 1970 (known as Tinbergen Report) were emblematic of the traditional development outlook. The traditional development outlook holds economic growth as the expressway to social development. The more the economy grows, it reasons, the more surpluses are available for distribution so that poverty can be eliminated. Moreover, after the collapse of colonialism, Western developed countries attempted to maintain their control over raw material supplies from their prior colonies, which were also commodity markets for the former. For this reason, Western developed countries strove to incorporate the Third World into the orbit of the capitalistic economy, with the hope that their economic prosperity would be a convincing demonstration of the developmental model. It was against this backdrop that the hype of economic growth became prominent in Western theories, news coverage, broadcasting, and political addresses in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s.