When China Rules the World

In August 1993, I visited Guangdong province, north of Hong Kong, for the first time. The experience is engraved on my memory. The road from Shenzhen to Guangzhou (the provincial capital, known as Canton in colonial times) was sometimes made up, occasionally little more than a mud track. Although we were in the middle of the countryside, the road was overflowing with pedestrians and vehicles of every conceivable kind. Played out before my eyes was the most extraordinary juxtaposition of eras: women walking with their animals and carrying their produce, farmers riding bicycles and driving pedicabs, the new urban rich speeding by in black Mercedes and Lexuses, anonymous behind darkened windows, a constant stream of vans, pick-ups, lorries and minibuses, and in the fields by the side of the road peasants working their small paddy fields with water buffalo. It was as if two hundred of years of history had been condensed into one place in this single moment of time. It was a country in motion, its people living for the present, looking for and seizing the opportunity, as if it might never be offered again. I was engulfed by an enormous torrent of energy, creativity and willpower. The British Industrial Revolution must have been a bit like this: speculative, chaotic, dynamic — and a complete bloody mess. Guangdong was certainly a mess. Everywhere you looked there was construction — seemingly everything was in the process of being changed: the half-made road along which we were travelling, the countless half-finished buildings, the land being cleared as far as the eye could see. Guangdong was like a huge construction site.

Just over two years later I tried to retrace my steps with a television crew. There was not a single familiar sight I could find. The dynamic chaos had given way to order. There were brand-new motorways, bridges, factories, warehouses, and a lot more cars; and little sign of the juxtaposition of eras that had so fascinated me two years earlier. I enlisted the help of a couple of officials, but as I described the scenes I wanted to recapture on film they shrugged as if to suggest that they lay in the distant past. For me it was just two years ago; for them it could have been a different century. Guangdong, the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping, was well on the way to becoming the industrial centre of China, full of factories, many Hong Kong-owned, making cheap, mass-produced goods for the global market. This is how and where China ’s economic transformation started.

Now Guangdong, just fifteen years after that first volcanic eruption, is turning over a new page in its history. It can no longer sustain its old comparative advantage. Labour has become too expensive, too demanding, the expectations of its people transformed. Its factories are no longer able to compete with those in Vietnam or Indonesia. In 2007 alone, no less than 1,000 shoe factories closed in Guangdong, one-sixth of the total. [421] Their owners are moving production to the interior provinces, where living standards are as low as they once were in Guangdong, if not lower. And in their place, Guangdong is seeking to move up the value ladder, develop its service industries and shift into new areas of production that rely on design and technology rather than the perspiration of its people and the migrant workers from faraway provinces. Shenzhen and Guangzhou, like many cities in Guangdong, now look prosperous and well maintained, a far cry from former days when they resembled China ’s Wild West. Shenzhen may not yet enjoy Hong Kong ’s Western-style living standards, but it has significantly closed the gap. In little more than two decades, Guangdong has gone from the early days of the Industrial Revolution to something not too far short of the less developed parts of Western Europe.

At the time of Mao’s death in 1976, who would have predicted that China stood on the eve of a most remarkable period of economic growth that would entirely transform the face and fortunes of the country? Virtually nobody. It was as unpredictable and unpredicted as another enormously significant event — 1989 and the collapse of European Communism. China had been torn apart by the Cultural Revolution, in which the cadre that had largely steered the party through the 1950s and early 1960s had been vilified and banished by a ‘popular’ coup d’état staged at Mao’s behest, involving the mobilization of tens of millions of young people in the Red Guard. The movement was opposed to privilege — whether by virtue of family history or Party position — and super-egalitarian in its philosophy: a very Chinese phenomenon with echoes of the Taiping Uprising in the mid nineteenth century. By the time of Mao’s death, the Cultural Revolution had subsided and stood largely discredited, but the country’s future direction remained deeply uncertain. The vacuum created by Mao’s death was soon filled by the return of those same old leaders who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm. They were confronted by the economic ravages and political dislocation that were the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, but free at last to pursue their instincts and inclinations, unimpeded by the wild extremes and excesses of Mao, albeit in a situation where the party faced a severe crisis of legitimacy.

There was one favourable omen. By the end of the seventies China ’s relatively modest growth rate constituted something of an exception in East Asia. Many countries in the region were on the economic move: Japan was booming; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong had already experienced take-off; Malaysia, Thailand and others were in its early stages. The Chinese diaspora — centred on Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also in Singapore and Malaysia — were key players in this economic transformation. There were, in other words, examples around China ’s borders of the possibilities that now beckoned. The country’s East Asian hinterland was being transformed by a region-wide economic revolution based on catch-up. Of course China faced unique problems, in particular its vastness and diversity, together with the legacy of civil war, turmoil and occupation. In addition it had been isolated, a condition partly self-imposed and partly a result of an American embargo (involving a total ban on all transactions with China until 1971), plus the withdrawal of all Soviet aid and personnel in 1959. The challenges facing the new Chinese leadership, therefore, were far more formidable than those that had confronted Taiwan or South Korea, especially as these had enjoyed considerable American patronage and munificence during the Cold War.

The process of reform began in 1978 with the creation of a handful of special economic zones along the south-eastern seaboard, including Guangdong province, in which the rural communes were dismantled and the peasants were given control of the land on long-term leases and encouraged to market their own produce. It was based on a step-by-step, piecemeal and experimental approach. If a reform worked it was extended to new areas; if it failed then it was abandoned. Such down-to-earth pragmatism stood in sharp contrast to the grand ideological flourishes that informed the Cultural Revolution era and the Maoist period more generally. As Deng put it, in the time-honoured tradition of pithy and popular quotes by Chinese leaders from Confucius onwards: ‘Seek truth from the facts’; ‘Truth is to be found in practice’; and ‘Cross the river by feeling for the stones’. The new economic approach involved a new kind of mindset and way of thinking in the Party and government, which necessitated a massive change of personnel, starting at the top and working rapidly downwards. In 1978 Deng declared: ‘To make revolution and build socialism we need large numbers of path-breakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas.’ [422] The People’s Daily later commented that political reform was:

a gigantic social systems engineering project, which involves straightening out the relationships between the Party and the government, power and judicial organs, mass organizations, enterprises and institutions, and between central, local and grassroots organizations; it concerns hundreds of millions of people. This is an arduous and protracted task. [423]

The reform project has usually been seen in narrowly economic terms, as if it had few political implications. In fact Deng’s project involved not just an economic revolution, but also a largely unrecognized political revolution, which entailed a complete overhaul of the state, both in its modus operandi and its personnel, with the universalist, ideological model of the Maoist era being replaced by something closer to the developmental model of the East Asian tigers. An essential element in this transformation was the decentralization of the state, which was seen as a precondition for the reform of the economic system and economic growth. Decision-making, including the granting of de facto property rights and fiscal power, was decentralized to different levels of local government. [424] As a consequence the central government budget, as a share of GDP, shrank considerably. [425]

Almost from the outset, economic growth rates were transformed from the 4–5 per cent of the Mao period to an annual growth rate of 9.5 per cent between 1978 and 1992. [426] The momentum of reform, however, was seriously disrupted in 1989, little more than a decade after it began, by a massive student demonstration in Tiananmen Square that was brutally suppressed by the army. With the Party leadership seriously divided, it seemed likely that the reform process would be derailed, perhaps indefinitely. In the event, there was only a short hiatus before, in the grand style of Chinese emperors, and to coincide with the Chinese New Year in 1992, Deng made a ‘Southern Expedition’ to the coastal heartland of China’s economic revolution, during which he made a statement in Shenzhen — a brand-new city neighbouring Hong Kong — that not only reaffirmed the central importance of the market reforms but made a clarion call for the process to be intensified and accelerated, suggesting, in a famous passage, that there was nothing wrong in allowing the rich to get richer (and then eventually paying higher taxes to help the poor). [427] Until this point the reform process had largely been concentrated in the south, but now it began to move to the interior provinces and, most crucially of all, to Shanghai and the Yangzi Delta, China ’s former economic powerhouse. There was a further wave of foreign investment, largely from the Chinese diaspora based in Hong Kong and Taiwan (which to this day remains the largest single source of foreign inward investment), while Chinese exports, mainly to the United States, increased rapidly. An economic fever began to grip the country, encouraged by Deng’s call to embrace the market economy and fuelled by the annual double-digit growth rate. Nothing more graphically symbolized the ‘new frontier’ economic spirit than the tens of millions of rural migrants, China ’s reserve army of labour, who left their farms and villages in search of the work and glitz of the city. [428] The Red Guards were now but a distant memory. There was barely a Mao suit in sight.

From the outset, Japan and the Asian tigers had been an important influence on China ’s economic reform. [429] These countries shared with Deng a pragmatic and non-doctrinal view of how to conduct economic policy. It was recognized, however, that none of them could, in themselves, provide a suitable model: the conditions, especially those flowing from China ’s enormous size and diversity, were simply too different. In the era of globalization that began around 1980, moreover, it was no longer possible for China, unlike Japan and the Asian tigers earlier, to grow its industries and companies behind a wall of tariffs until they were ready to compete in the international market. A further complicating factor was that China, as a Communist country, was still viewed with a certain amount of suspicion by the United States: as a result, its entry into the WTO took fifteen years and was the subject of the most detailed agreement ever made with any country — contrasting strongly, for example, with the far less demanding terms required of India a few years earlier. China, for a variety of reasons, had to invent its own way. [430]

Although China enjoyed nothing like the intimacy of South Korea and Taiwan’s relationship with the United States, it recognized the crucial importance of winning American support and cooperation in its pursuit of economic growth. Just as its approach to economic reform was informed by pragmatism, so too was its attitude towards the United States. The Mao- Nixon accord of 1972 marked a profound change in their relationship, with the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1979, the settlement of property claims, the unfreezing of assets and the granting to China of most-favoured nation treatment. These steps created the conditions for China subsequently to join the IMF and the World Bank in 1986 and be granted observer status to GATT in 1982. The value of the United States to China was increasingly evident during the 1980s: it became the most important destination for Chinese exports; growing numbers of Chinese students went to study there, including many sons and daughters of the Party elite; while the US model of capitalism came to exercise a growing influence. The collapse of the Soviet Union only served to accentuate that influence, and the US’s prestige was further enhanced by the economic dynamism associated with Silicon Valley and the internet. Increasingly during the nineties, however, there was a rising tide of nationalist sentiment directed against the US, which found expression in the bestseller The China That Can Say No and the demonstrations against the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. [431] American influence on China’s modernization, nonetheless, remained considerable. Even China’s own economic path and popular mood was to bear some of the signs of neo-liberalism: the worship of wealth, the embrace of entrepreneurs, acquiescence in growing inequality, the retreat of the state from the provision of public goods such as education and health, the rapid lowering of tariff barriers and the adoption of an extremely open trade regime [432] — all of which were closely associated with the reign of Deng’s pro tégé and successor, Jiang Zemin.

The approach of the Chinese leadership, following Deng’s emergence as the paramount leader, had been built on caution and pragmatism, notwithstanding the obvious radicalism of the reform process. They eschewed shock treatment and grand gestures. Although drawing on elements of neo-liberalism, they resisted the Washington orthodoxy and instead pursued a very home-grown approach. [433] They were painstakingly meticulous in the way that they sought to introduce reforms by a gradual process of constant testing and trial and error. The state, in the time-honoured Chinese fashion, remained at the heart of this process of reform, even though the latter was to involve a drastic contraction in its economic role, with the share of government revenue decreasing from around one-third of GDP in 1978 to 17 per cent in 2005. [434] For the Chinese leadership, the objective of economic reform was never Westernization, but rather a desire to restore the Party’s legitimacy after Mao through economic growth, [435] and thereby to build a strong nation and state. [436] Political stability was accorded the highest priority. ‘[China ’s] modernization,’ Deng stated, ‘needs two prerequisites. One is international peace, and the other is domestic political stability.’ [437] The disintegration of the Soviet Union after 1989 only served to reinforce Deng’s belief in the vital importance of economic reform, an area in which the Soviet Union had palpably failed, and the need to avoid destabilizing political reforms, a trap which they saw Gorbachev as having fallen into. [438] The Asian financial crisis in 1997- 8 similarly confirmed the Chinese leadership in its aversion to shock treatment: that China should move with great caution in its financial reform and resist any premature liberalization of the capital account that would allow the free movement of capital into and out of China, and consequent floating of the Chinese currency, the renminbi (also called the yuan), which might lead to speculative attacks on the currency and the consequent destabilization of the economy, as happened to South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia — to their great cost — during the Asian crisis. [439] (As a consequence, the renminbi remains, unlike the dollar, yen and euro, for example, a non-tradeable currency.)

In response to the challenge posed by an increasingly globalized economy, the Chinese leadership, mindful of the need to accelerate the process of reform, did, however, opt for one important element of shock treatment. During the nineties, by dismantling tariff barriers and allowing huge flows of foreign direct investment — in contrast to the economic strategy pursued by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — they created a brutal competitive environment in which domestic companies desperately sought to survive against far richer and more advanced Western and Japanese rivals. This rapid opening up enabled the Chinese economy to take advantage of enormous flows of foreign capital and had the merit of forcing Chinese companies to learn from the outside world, [440] but the cost was high, with many struggling to survive. While their North-East Asian neighbours enjoyed a prolonged period of protection from external competition, during which their companies were given time to develop, China, in comparison, had none. Chinese companies were obliged to sink or swim, and the conditions attached to China ’s subsequent membership of the WTO meant the state faced various restrictions on the extent to which it was permitted to help state-owned enterprises, although it found various ways of circumnavigating some of them. [441]

Figure 10. The role of foreign direct investment in China compared with other Asian tigers.

Although the earlier phase of reform concentrated on stimulating the growth of the rural economy, by the end of the eighties the centre of gravity had decisively shifted to the cities and the industrial economy. Already, during the eighties, the Guangdong economy became a microcosm of the future shape and comparative advantage of the fast-changing Chinese economy, with Hong Kong entrepreneurs moving their manufacturing operations out of the city-state to neighbouring Guangdong province in order to take advantage of far cheaper labour; as a result, Guangdong rapidly became Hong Kong ’s manufacturing base. This process quickly spread north and east-wards during the course of the nineties, its magnitude transformed by the flood of Western and Japanese direct investment at the end of that decade in anticipation of China ’s membership of the WTO in 2001. Just as China pursued an open policy on trade, it adopted a similar approach towards inward investment. Since 1978 China has received $500 billion in foreign direct investment, ten times the total accumulated by Japan between 1945 and 2000. In 2003 China became the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment, overtaking the United States. [442] The inward investment was mainly ploughed into the local subsidiaries of foreign multinationals with the purpose, following the example of Hong Kong, of exploiting the huge resources of cheap labour in order to make exports as globally competitive as possible. Foreign firms are now responsible for up to 60 per cent of all Chinese exports, and dominate high-tech exports with a share of around 85 per cent. [443] China, in the process, has become the ‘workshop of the world’, by far the cheapest national base for low- and medium-end manufacturing on the planet.

As a result of the systematic lowering of tariffs, one of the singular features of the Chinese economy is its huge exposure to foreign trade, which accounts for around 75 per cent of GDP, far in excess of other major economies like the United States, India, Japan and Brazil, where the figure is 30 per cent or less. [444] Such exposure makes China that much more significant in the global economy; it also leaves the country more vulnerable to external shocks such as a global downturn, a US recession or growing protectionist sentiment in the West.

China is in the midst of what Marx described — writing of the British Industrial Revolution — as primitive accumulation, or what we now know as economic take-off: the process in which the majority of the working population moves from the land to industry, from the countryside to the cities. Between 1952 and 2003, agriculture’s share of GDP fell from 60 per cent to 16 per cent and its share of employment from 83 per cent to 51 per cent. [445] Although it took China only 10 years to double its per capita output (1977- 87) — a measure of the speed of economic take-off — compared with 58 years for the UK, 47 for the US and 11 for South Korea, after three decades of economic growth averaging 9.5 per cent, [446] around half the people still work on the land. It is estimated that even 20 years hence around 20 per cent of the population will still live in the countryside. [447] A crucial consequence of this relatively ‘limitless’ supply of rural labour is that wages for unskilled work will remain depressed for several decades to come: in other words, for much longer than was the case with the earlier Asian tigers. [448] This does not mean that wages in the more developed regions like Guangdong will remain low: on the contrary, as we have seen, they have already risen considerably. [449] But in the poor, still largely rural, interior provinces they will continue to be much lower, which is the reason why low-end manufacturing is steadily relocating there. The rapid growth of the Chinese economy since 1978 has largely been a function of the extremely high rate of investment, in the region of 40 per cent of GDP for many years, presently edging closer to 45 per cent, and soon to approach 50 per cent. [450] Such an extremely high rate of investment has been possible because of the similarly high rate of domestic savings, running at around 40 per cent of GDP, which, together with inward investment, has provided the main funds for China ’s take-off. In 2001 the average Chinese household saved 25.3 per cent of its disposable income, compared with 6.4 per cent in the US in 2002. The huge savings made by Chinese families have played a key role in funding the country’s rise (see Figure 11). [451]

Figure 11. China’s savings rate from 1981.

It is instructive to compare the experiences of China and Russia because both were confronted with the problem of how to move from a command to a market economy. Russia relied on the preferred Western prescription of shock therapy, which in the nineties led to hyper-inflation, large-scale capital flight, currency collapse and default on foreign debt. In contrast China, by pursuing a more gradualist approach, avoided hyper-inflation, the government remained internationally creditworthy and there was no capital flight. While in Russia the state sector was sold off at knock-down prices to assorted cronies, the state sector in China, rather than being subject to wholesale privatization, was contracted by a slow process of attrition. In Forbes Magazine ’s listing of the world’s 100 richest billionaires in 2007, thirteen were in Russia and none in China. In 1990, China’s GDP was less than twice as big as Russia’s; by 2003 it was more than six times as large. The subsequent rebound in the Russian economy, prior to the global downturn, was largely a result of the increase in the price of its oil and gas exports. The Chinese leadership has displayed great patience and considerable competence at tackling a succession of difficult and elusive problems. At the end of the nineties, for example, the government was faced with three extremely difficult domestic issues: closing a very large number of loss-making state enterprises; overhauling the state banks, which were saddled with a large and rising proportion of non-performing loans, mainly to indebted state enterprises; and strengthening the weak fiscal position of central government. A decade later, the government is well on the way to overcoming these problems, having greatly reduced the problem of indebted state enterprises, transformed the condition of the banking system and improved its own finances. [452]

Figure 12. Economic performance of China and the USSR compared.

Given its scale and speed, China ’s economic transformation is surely the most extraordinary in human history, notwithstanding the sheer novelty of Britain ’s as the first. The government’s economic strategy, shrewd and far-sighted, has been very successful, [453] resulting in stellar economic growth and a rise in per capita income from $339 in 1990 to over $1,000 in 2003, with the not unrealistic aim that this will be doubled within ten years. [454] Economic growth is no longer confined to a few ‘islands’ but has spread out in waves to most provinces of China, albeit in sharply varying degrees. In a remarkably short space of time, China has become the centre of global manufacturing. ‘Made in China ’ has become synonymous with a host of mass-produced consumer products throughout the world. It produces two-thirds of the world’s photocopiers, shoes, toys and microwave ovens; half its DVD players, digital cameras and textiles; one-third of its DVD-ROM drives and desktop computers; and a quarter of its mobiles, television sets, PDAs and car stereos. [455] The country has borne witness to the greatest poverty-reduction programme ever seen, with the number of people living in poverty falling from 250 million at the start of the reform process in 1978 to 80 million by the end of 1993 and 29.27 million in 2001, thereby accounting for three-quarters of global poverty reduction during this period. [456]

Figure 13. The decline in poverty in China.

Although foreign multinationals dominate the country’s exports, home-grown Chinese firms like Haier, Konka, TCL, Huawei and Galanz have done well in such sectors as domestic appliances, television and telecommunications. Encouraged by the ‘Go Global’ campaign initiated by the government, the larger Chinese firms have begun to invest abroad and establish overseas subsidiaries. [457] China has made astounding economic progress, but its transformation is far from complete. It remains a work in progress. Although it is already the world’s second largest economy in terms of GDP (measured by purchasing power parity), this is primarily a consequence of population size rather than economic sophistication. Can China fulfil its enormous potential and become an economic superpower?

HOW SUSTAINABLE IS CHINA’S ECONOMIC GROWTH?

At the centre of any discussion about China ’s future role in the world — let alone talk of a Chinese century — lies the country’s economic prospects. A commitment to a growth rate of around 10 per cent remains fundamental to the government’s strategy. China needs to create 8 million jobs a year for its expanding urban population, plus another 15 million or so for the new rural migrants who seek urban employment every year. [458] Rapid economic growth will therefore remain at the heart of government strategy, with any serious and sustained drop below 8 per cent carrying the threat of serious social unrest. But, after a quarter-century, can this kind of growth rate be sustained? What are the limits to China ’s present growth path? Could its present strategy go badly wrong? And, crucially, what will be the impact of the global contraction that has transformed the short-term outlook for China?

The basic global competitiveness of the Chinese economy — the remarkable performance of its exports, which have driven economic growth and made the country such an attractive destination for foreign investment — will persist for many years to come because the condition on which it rests, the huge migration of rural labour into the cities, is destined to continue for several decades. Even if labour costs rise, as is already happening in the coastal regions and the Shanghai area, the inland provinces, fuelled by migrant rural labour, will help to contain inflationary pressures. [459] China ’s present economic path, thus, can potentially be sustained, at least in its broadest outlines, subject to significant reform, for at least the next five to ten years, perhaps longer. [460] But there are no guarantees. Yu Yongding, one of China ’s top economists, suggested in an interview in 2006 that there was a 30 per cent chance of things going seriously wrong. [461] The economy, given its high degree of exposure to trade, is very sensitive to exogenous developments. The global recession will be a major test of the extent to which the Chinese economy can maintain rapid economic growth in a situation where it can no longer depend to the same extent on Western export markets — prior to the global crisis, the European Union accounted for around 22 per cent of Chinese exports and the United States 18 per cent. [462]

In the context of the gathering recession, China ’s economic growth rate is estimated to have been 9 per cent in 2008 and is projected to fall to 6–8 per cent in 2009, from 12 per cent in 2006 and 2007, and an average of well over 10 per cent since 2002. The government is seeking to compensate for falling Western demand by encouraging domestic consumption, which accounts for around one-third of total output, and engaging in large-scale public expenditure, mainly on infrastructure, education and health. The government is fortunate in enjoying very strong finances and is therefore in a position to lavish considerable resources on stimulating the economy. The contrast, here, between the debt-laden, cash-impoverished, low-growth Western economies and the cash-rich, fast-growth, surplus-generating Chinese economy could hardly be greater, not to mention the fact that while the Western financial sector is effectively bankrupt, that of China is deposit-rich. This notwithstanding, the problems facing the Chinese economy are severe. In early 2009, it was estimated that 20 million migrant workers had already lost their jobs, with the prospects for those many millions planning to leave the countryside in search of work in the cities bleak. It is possible that the government’s efforts to compensate for the drastic fall in exports and declining foreign investment by increased public spending on infrastructure and social services, together with increased consumer expenditure, will ameliorate the effects of the downturn. Much will depend on the gravity of the recession in the West. If it results in a major contraction in the size of their economies, as seems possible, and if the recession persists for several years, the consequences for the Chinese economy are likely to be severe, with growth rates falling below 6–7 per cent, and perhaps even lower. In such circumstances, the government might face rising social unrest as unemployment escalates. The most benign scenario is one in which the Western recession is not too deep and relatively short-lived, and the Chinese government’s counter-measures are relatively effective. The most pessimistic scenario is one in which the Western recession bears strong echoes of the slump in the 1930s, both deep and protracted, the US resorts to protectionist measures against China and the Chinese government’s compensatory policies simply cannot cope with the collapse of its exports and inward foreign investment; such an outcome could presage social instability and might weaken the government’s own position.

One advantage that the government enjoys in this situation is that the renminbi is a non-tradeable currency and therefore not subject to volatile movement or speculation. The government has hitherto resisted the temptation to liberalize the capital account and allow the renminbi to float, which would have the effect of enhancing the renminbi’s role, promoting China ’s financial position and making it easier for Chinese firms to invest abroad. The main downside with such a strategy is that the savings which have underpinned China’s huge level of investment might be undermined as savers go abroad in search of rates of return far in excess of the paltry levels they can find at home, thereby denying the country the funds for investment that it has hitherto enjoyed, with the inevitable consequence that the growth rate would decline. In addition, a floating renminbi would be vulnerable to the kind of speculative attack suffered by the Korean won, Thai baht and Indonesian rupiah in the Asian financial crisis. [463] Although Zhu Rongji, the then Chinese premier, intended to begin the liberalization of the capital account in 2000, the Asian financial crisis persuaded him that such a change would be imprudent. The present global financial turmoil only goes to confirm the wisdom of the Chinese leadership in continuing to regulate the capital account, despite persistent calls from the West to deregulate. In due course, a gradual liberalization could well be initiated, indeed there are already clear signs of this, but the Chinese government is aware that the existing system provides the economy with a crucial firewall, especially given its open character and consequent exposure to external events. [464]

Whatever the consequences of the global recession, there are powerful reasons for believing that the present growth model is unsustainable in the long run, and probably even in the medium term. Indeed, there has been a growing recognition amongst Chinese policy-makers and advisors that important modifications already need to be made to the model ushered in by Deng and intimately associated with his successor Jiang Zemin. [465] That process, championed by Hu Jintao, has already begun, with a shift away from the neo-liberal excesses of the nineties and towards a more harmonious society, echoing an older Confucian theme, with a new emphasis on egalitarianism, greater weight attached to social protection, a desire to lessen the importance of exports and increase that of domestic consumer spending, and a turn away from the influence of the United States — or ‘de-Americanization’, as it has become known. [466] Such changes are likely to be hastened by the global crisis and attempts to mitigate its effects.

Economic growth cannot depend upon a constantly rising proportion of GDP being devoted to investment, as is presently the case, because it would absorb an increasingly untenable proportion of the country’s resources, thereby imposing unsustainable pressures on consumption, for example. There needs to be a greater emphasis on the efficiency of capital and improving labour productivity, rather than an overwhelming dependence on investment, too much of which is wasteful: if not, economic growth will inevitably decline as the limits to higher and higher volumes of investment assert themselves. The ability to move up the technological ladder is fundamental to this. There is considerable evidence that this is already happening, with exports of cheap-end products like toys falling in the global recession and those of high-tech products rising. Similarly China will have to reduce its present level of exposure to foreign trade, which has made it highly vulner-able to cyclical movements in the global economy, as the global depression has shown. There is a danger too, especially in the context of a depression, that China ’s export drive will provoke a hostile reaction and moves towards protectionism. [467] Instead, it is already abundantly clear that China will have to attach greater weight to domestic consumption.

A growing problem is that the priority attached to breakneck economic growth above all else has resulted in China moving in a very short space of time from being a highly egalitarian society to becoming one of the most unequal in the world. [468] The causes of that inequality are threefold: the growing gulf between the coastal and interior provinces, with the richest province enjoying a per capita GDP ten times that of the poorest (compared with 8:1 in Brazil, for example); [469] between urban and rural areas; and between those in the formal economy and those dependent on informal economic activities. [470] This is leading to growing social tension — evident, for example, in the relationship between migrant workers and local residents in the cities — which threatens to undermine the cohesiveness of society and the broad consensus that has hitherto sustained the reform programme. [471] The government has already begun to pay much greater attention to promoting a more egalitarian approach, though so far with limited effect.

A key question here is the financial ability of the state to act in the ways that are needed. In the early reform period, decentralization was deliberately encouraged, with central revenue falling from 34 per cent of GDP in 1978 to a mere 6 per cent in 1995, according to the Chinese economist Hu Angang. [472] The state found itself increasingly shorn of many of its old sources of revenue and responsibility. [473] Expenditure by the central state, in its turn, came to account for a rapidly declining proportion of GDP: 31 per cent in 1978, reaching a trough of around 11 per cent in 1995. By the mid nineties there was deep concern about the loss of central state capacity that this involved, including the latter’s ability to promote balanced development between the regions, and a determined attempt was made to reverse the process. There were even fears that individual provinces were beginning to operate like independent countries, with an increase in their external trade and a decline in trade flows between them. [474] As a result, the government introduced major tax reforms including, for the first time, taxes specifically earmarked for central government; previously, central government was dependent on a share of the taxes raised in the provinces, based on a process of bargaining between the two. The central government also acquired its own tax-collecting capacity, with a large majority of revenue now being collected centrally, some of which is then redistributed to the provinces. [475] Not surprisingly, the rich provinces strongly resisted paying higher taxes to central government. [476] By 1999, however, state expenditure had risen to 14 per cent of GDP and by 2006 to around 22 per cent. [477] Crucially, the state needs to be able to fund its new social security programme in order to provide for the tens of millions of workers made redundant by the state-owned enterprises which had previously been responsible for virtually all of their employees’ social needs, including education, health and housing. [478] The problem is particularly severe with education and health, which have suffered from very serious public under-investment during the last decade, a cause of deep popular concern and resentment. [479] The government is deeply aware of these problems and in 2008 alone education expenditure was budgeted to rise by 45 per cent. [480] During the Maoist period, the state was responsible for almost 100 per cent of health expenditure: the figure is now around 16 per cent compared, for example, with about 44 per cent in the United States and over 70 per cent in Western Europe. As a result, a majority of the population can no longer afford healthcare. In April 2009 the government announced a major reform of the health system, including the short-term goal of providing basic insurance cover for 90 per cent of the population. The lack of a decent safety net and the threadbare character of key public goods fuel a sense of deep insecurity amongst many people, acting as a powerful incentive for them to save, even though the living standards of the vast majority, especially in the cities, have greatly improved. [481]

Finally, China ’s growth has been extremely resource-intensive, demanding of land, forest, water, oil and more or less everything else. Herein lies one of China ’s deepest problems. [482] The country has to support an extremely large and, for the most part, dense population in a situation where China is, and always has been, poorly endowed with natural resources. It has, for example, only 8 per cent of the world’s cultivated land and yet must sustain 22 per cent of the world’s population; in contrast, with only a fifth of China ’s population, the United States enjoys three times as much arable land and its farmland has been under human cultivation for one-tenth of the time of China ’s. [483] China ’s development, moreover, is rapidly exhausting what limited resources it possesses. Over the last forty years almost half of China ’s forests have been destroyed, so that it now enjoys one of the sparsest covers in the world. In 1993 it became a net importer of oil for the first time and now depends on imports for almost half its oil needs.

Figure 14. China’s growing dependency on oil imports.

As a result, China is becoming increasingly dependent on the rest of the world for the huge quantities of raw materials that it needs for its economic growth. It is already the world’s largest buyer of copper, the second biggest buyer of iron ore, and the third largest buyer of alumina. It absorbs close to a third of the global supply of coal, steel and cotton, and almost half of its cement. It is the second largest energy consumer after the US, with nearly 70 per cent produced from burning coal. In 2005 China used more coal than the US, India and Russia combined. In 2004 it accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the increase in the world demand for oil. [484] If the Chinese economy was to continue to expand at 8 per cent a year in the future, its income per head would reach the current US level in 2031, at which point it would consume the equivalent of two-thirds of the current world grain harvest and its demand for paper would double the world’s current production. If it were to enjoy the same level of per capita car ownership as the US does today, it would have 1.1 billion cars compared with the present worldwide total of 800 million; and it would use 99 million barrels of oil a day compared with a worldwide total production of 84 million barrels a day in 2006. [485] Of course, such a level of demand would be unsustainable in terms of the world’s available resources, not to mention its global environmental impact, which would be dire.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL DILEMMA

The effects of China ’s great paradox — namely, a huge abundance of human resources and extremely sparse natural resources — are being experienced throughout the world via the global market. China ’s surfeit of labour has meant that the prices of manufactured goods it produces have fallen drastically while the prices of those commodities that China requires rose dramatically until the onset of the credit crunch. Together these constitute what might be described as the new China-era global paradigm. The great beneficiaries of China ’s growth, hitherto, have been the developed countries, which have enjoyed a falling real price for consumer goods, and those nations which are major producers of primary products. The present global recession has seen a sharp fall in commodity prices, but there is little reason to believe that their rise will not be resumed once economic conditions start to improve again, driven by demand from China and India. The International Energy Agency has forecast that oil prices will rebound to more than $100 a barrel as soon as the world economy recovers and exceed $200 by 2030. [486] The resumption of rising commodity prices will make the present resource-intensive Chinese growth model increasingly, and ultimately prohibitively, expensive. Beyond a certain point, therefore, it will be impossible for China to follow the resource-intensive American model of progress; and that will happen long before China gets anywhere near the US’s present living standards. Indeed, it is already clear that China has decided to pursue a less energy-intensive approach.

China, however, will find it extremely difficult to change course. For centuries it has pursued a highly extractive approach towards a natural environment which, compared with that of most nations, is extremely poorly endowed with resources, most obviously arable land and water, as measured by population density. China, for example, has only one-fifth as much water per capita as the United States. Furthermore, while southern China is relatively wet, the north, home to about half the country’s population, is an immense parched region that threatens to become the world’s largest desert. [487] The Chinese state, from the great canals of the Ming dynasty to the Three Gorges Dam of the present, has long viewed the environment as something that can be manipulated for, and subordinated to, human ends. [488] The level of environmental awareness, on the part of government and people alike, has been very low, though this is changing rapidly, especially in the main cities. The poorer a society, moreover, the greater the priority given to material change at the expense of virtually all other considerations, including the environment. It is much easier for a rich society to make the environment a priority than a poor society — and China remains a relatively poor society. By 2015 China will only have reached the same standard of living as most Western countries achieved in 1960 and the latter, able to draw either on their own natural resources or those of their colonies, enjoyed the luxury of being able to grow without any concern for environmental constraints until they were already rich. [489] In European terms, China has torn from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century in little more than three decades, pursuing a similar resource-intensive strategy, with the environment never more than a footnote. The result is a huge ecological deficit of two centuries accumulated in just a few decades: growing water shortages, over three-quarters of river water that is unsuitable either for drinking or fishing, 300 million people lacking access to clean drinking water, rampant deforestation, sixteen of the world’s twenty worst-polluted cities, acid rain affecting a third of Chinese territory, desert covering a quarter of the country, and 58 per cent of land classified as arid or semi-arid. [490]

China, still poor though it may be, will not have the option of postponing until the time it has achieved rich-country status two of its most pressing environmental issues. Willy-nilly, it will be obliged by cost pressures to shift towards less resource-intensive technologies. With the price of oil likely to increase considerably, at least in the medium term, China has already begun to seek ways of limiting its consumption of oil by, for example, imposing heavier taxes on gas-guzzlers and encouraging the development of alternative car technologies: [491] in Shanghai, which is China’s environmental leader, it now costs around £2,700 to register a new car. [492] Chinese economist Yu Yongding is certain the country will take action: ‘A billion Chinese driving gas-hogging SUVs is just a fantasy. Believe me, the Chinese are not so stupid. China has to and will reduce its reliance on oil imports.’ [493] The other irresistible environmental challenge is global warming. This will in due course oblige China to seek ways of limiting its production of CO 2 in the same manner that, in time, it will force every other country to seek alternative forms of growth. [494] Like India, China has resisted the idea that it should be subject to the same constraints as rich countries, on the grounds that the latter have been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for much longer and therefore bear a much greater responsibility for global warming. The major contributor to China ’s energy consumption, moreover, is not the domestic consumer, whose needs are minimal, but the export trade. The reality is that 40 per cent of China ’s energy goes into producing exports for Western markets: in other words, the West has, in effect, exported part of its own greenhouse emissions to China. [495] The minimal historical contribution made by the developing world to global warming was recognized in the Kyoto Protocol, which excluded them from its provisions, but the refusal of the United States and Australia to participate rendered the accord largely ineffectual. But with China having overtaken the United States as the biggest emitter of CO₂ in 2007 [496] (even though its per capita CO₂ emissions remain one-seventh of those of the US), [497]the idea that countries such as China and India can be excluded from any future agreement is no longer plausible, especially as the effects of global warming — already very evident in China itself, with accelerating desertification, reductions in agricultural yields, changing patterns of precipitation, the increased incidence of storms and droughts, and extreme weather like the prolonged snowfalls in central China in 2008 [498] — grow ever more serious. The environmental impact of energy use in China is particularly adverse because its dependence on coal — of a particularly dirty kind — is unusually high (60 per cent compared with 23 per cent in the US and 5 per cent in France) and carbon emissions from coal are proportionately much greater than from oil and gas. [499] Although the Chinese leadership has resisted the idea that the country should be subject to internationally agreed emission targets, it has accepted the scientific argument concerning global warming and, in both speeches and the growing volume of new environmental regulations, is displaying a heightened awareness of the problem. [500] In fact on paper China already has some of the most advanced laws in the world on renewable energy, clean production, environmental impact assessment and pollution control, though these still remain widely ignored in practice. [501] The government continues to resist the idea that environmental considerations should detract from the priority of rapid economic growth, but there is, nonetheless, widespread recognition of their urgency at the highest levels of the Chinese leadership. [502] The need for China to embrace a green development strategy, rather than relying on the old intensive model, has been powerfully argued by the influential Chinese economist Hu Angang. [503]

Figure 15. CO2 emissions compared.

Figure 16. Growing concern over environmental problems.

China ’s position on climate change is evolving rapidly. The two targets it has adopted as part of its 2007 energy security strategy will have a significant impact on reducing the growth in emissions — namely, decreasing the energy intensity of the Chinese economy by 20 per cent by 2010 and increasing the use of renewables from 5 per cent to 20 per cent of energy production by 2020. It is already the world’s largest user of alternative energies, including wind power. [504] It is making huge investments in a wide range of clean-technology innovations, especially in wind, solar and hydrogen. Such is the scale of these investments that whatever technologies China develops in clean and renewable energies are likely in practice to become the new global standard. It could easily become the world’s leading manufacturer of renewable energy plants, and at a price, furthermore, affordable to other developing countries. [505] It is widely believed that in the relatively near future some of the most exciting potential breakthroughs in photovoltaics (the use of solar cells for the generation of electricity) and hydrogen-powered vehicles may come out of China rather than the United States. [506] The two largest Chinese car producers are in the process of launching hybrid models, and, encouraged by the government, they, together with other manufacturers, have ambitious plans to become world leaders in electric and other alternative-energy vehicles. [507] Just as its economic development combines both the backward and the advanced, so the same could well prove to be the case with the environment, as the drastic action taken by the central government in advance of the Beijing Olympics to try and improve the capital’s appalling air quality, including major restrictions on the use of cars, illustrated. [508]

LOW TECH OR HIGH TECH?

At present, China’s comparative advantage lies in low-end manufacturing, where it is able to exploit the huge supply of cheap unskilled labour and thereby produce at rock-bottom prices — or ‘China prices’, as the new global benchmark has become known — for the world market. [509] In the longer run, there are two inherent problems with this. First, in terms of the total costs of getting a product to market, the proportion represented by manufacturing is very small — around 15 per cent of the final price — with the bulk of costs being creamed off by design, marketing, branding and so forth, tasks which are still overwhelmingly carried out in the developed world. [510] Second, most of China ’s exports are produced by Western and Japanese multinationals, with Chinese manufacturers cast predominantly in the role of subcontractors. In other words, China ’s role is basically as the low-end manufacturing subcontractor in the multifarious global operations of multinationals based in the developed countries. [511]

There is, however, plenty of evidence that China is steadily climbing the technological ladder. Like all newcomers, it has been obliged to make it up as it goes along and find its own distinctive path. One avenue used by China to gain access to new technologies has been a combination of copying, buying, and cajoling foreign partners in joint-ventures to transfer technology in return for being granted wider access to China ’s market. The lure of the latter has proved a powerful bargaining counter, especially with second-tier multinationals. [512] In a short space of time, China has already overtaken many South-East Asian countries in important areas of technology, and its ability to drive a hard bargain with foreign multinationals has been a major factor in this. While Proton, Malaysia ’s national car company, has been unable to persuade any of its various foreign partners — most notably Mitsubishi — to transfer key technology, the Chinese car companies have, one way or another, been rather more successful. The bargaining counter of size carries great clout: China has fifty times the population of Malaysia. [513] There is another route by which China has been negotiating its way up the technological ladder: when foreign multinationals move their manufacturing operations to China, there is a strong tendency for other functions to follow so as to take advantage of economies of scale, for reasons of convenience, and because highly skilled Chinese labour is plentiful and cheap. [514] The textile industry in Italy, for instance, has progressively migrated to China, starting with manufacturing, followed by more value-added processes like design. [515] Microsoft, Motorola and Nokia have all established major research and development centres in Beijing, while Lucent-Alcatel has done the same in Nanjing. As a consequence, Chinese professionals will become increasingly important players in the R & D activity of such leading-edge multinationals. [516]

In the longer term, however, the key to China ’s technological potential will lie in its ability to develop its own high-level research and development capacity. Because China ’s growth has hitherto relied overwhelmingly on imported technologies, only 0.03 per cent of Chinese firms own the intellectual property rights of their core technologies. Moreover, Chinese companies spend on average only 0.56 per cent of turnover on research and development, and even in large firms this only rises to 0.71 per cent. [517] However, enormous efforts are being made to change this state of affairs, with the aim of increasing R & D spending from $24.6 billion (1.23 per cent of GDP) in 2004, to $45 billion (2 per cent of GDP) in 2010, and $113 billion (2.5 per cent of GDP) in 2020. [518] Considerable progress has already been made in a very short space of time. China has become a major player in the production of scientific papers, its contribution rising from around 2 per cent of world share in 1995 to 6.5 per cent in 2004. [519] Citation rates, although very low, are also rising exponentially. [520] The overall figures hide strengths in particular areas, most notably material science, analytical chemistry and rice genomics. A recent analysis of nanoscience publications shows that China ranked second behind only the US in 2004. [521] Not surprisingly, publications are concentrated amongst a handful of elite centres such as the Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing University and Tsinghua University (also in Beijing), which China is seeking to develop as world-class institutions. [522]

Among China ’s strengths is the fact that it possesses a large number of highly educated professionals as well as a strong educational ethos. [523] The country is now producing over 900,000 science, engineering and managerial graduates every year. In addition a significant number of Chinese students are educated at the top American universities, although a sizeable proportion choose to stay on and work in the US afterwards: Chinese, for example, account for around one-third of all professional and technical staff in Silicon Valley. [524] The Chinese government has been intensifying its efforts to persuade overseas Chinese to return home: 81 per cent of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 54 per cent of the Chinese Academy of Engineering are now returned overseas scholars. [525] Overall, it is estimated that around 20 per cent of Chinese professionals working overseas have now returned, thus repeating a similar pattern that occurred with earlier Korean migration. [526]

Figure 17. Lenovo commands largest share of China’s PC market.

Figure 18. Percentage of multinationals with R & D centres in various countries in 2006.

The technological picture, as in virtually every other aspect of China ’s development, is extremely uneven, combining the primitive, the low-tech, the medium-tech, and pockets of advanced, even very advanced, technology. [527] There is, however, little reason to doubt that China will scale the technological ladder. [528] This, after all, is exactly what happened with other Asian tigers, most obviously Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which started on the lowest, imitative rungs, but which now possess impressive technological competence, with Japan and South Korea well in advance of most European countries. The evidence is already palpable that China is engaged in a similar process and with the same kind of remarkable speed. [529] It is an illusion to think that China will be trapped indefinitely in the foothills of technology. In time it will become a formidable technological power.

China ’s growing ability to climb the technological ladder, however, does not imply that it will be successful in building a cluster of successful international firms. Until very recently, China fared very poorly in the Fortune Top 500 global firms. Of the world’s top ten brands, only one, China Mobile, is Chinese, and of the top 100, only four are Chinese. [530] However, the picture is beginning to change. In 2006, 2 °Chinese firms featured in the Fortune Top 500, by 2007 the number had risen to 24, and by 2008 to 29, including four state-owned banks, the largest construction companies and the oil giant Sinopec. This compares with 153 from the US, 64 from Japan, 39 from France, 37 from Germany, 34 from the UK, and 15 from South Korea. Major Chinese manufacturers like Haier, Galanz and Konka, which have cornered the lion’s share of the domestic market in consumer appliances and also made serious inroads in many developing markets, however, still remain, in comparison with their American, European, Japanese and Korean competitors, very weak in terms of size, management, governance, and research and development. [531]

Unlike the early Asian tigers, Chinese firms were unable to postpone their move into foreign markets and production until they had acquired a solid financial foundation, technical competence, a well-established brand and high profitability based on domination of their home market; the major motive for many Chinese companies going abroad, in contrast, has been their desire to escape the cut-throat competition — much of it foreign — and sparse profits of the domestic market following China’s accession to the WTO. [532] Peter Nolan, an expert on Chinese business, has argued that it will be extremely difficult for Chinese companies to make the A-list of multinationals precisely because they have not had the chance to build themselves up domestically behind a protectionist wall. He also suggests that over the last twenty years there has been a global business revolution, as a result of which Chinese companies, far from catching up, have fallen even further behind the top international firms, making their task even more difficult. [533]

If China fails to produce a cluster of major international firms it will stand in sharp contrast to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. [534] But it is premature to think in these terms. However difficult and different the circumstances China faces, it is already busy inventing its own path of development, as Britain did as the pioneer country, the United States as the inventor of mass production, and Japan as the innovator of a new kind of just-in-time production. What might this be? In the Chinese car market, the more expensive sectors are overwhelmingly the preserve of European, American and Japanese firms, but emergent Chinese firms like Chery and Geely dominate the lowest segment. [535] Chinese firms are able to produce cars much more cheaply than foreign producers because they use a modular, or mix and match, approach rather than the integrated method of production for which Japanese firms are renowned. Firms such as Geely and Chery utilize a range of parts which are borrowed, copied or bought from foreign companies. The end product is of relatively low quality but extremely cheap. The Chevrolet Spark, which is very similar to the Chery QQ, sells for twice the price. A similar kind of approach can be seen with the Tata Nano in India, which sells for less than $2,500, half the price of the next cheapest car on the market. [536] Modular — or open architecture — production is extremely well suited to a developing country, being relatively labour-intensive and very difficult, if not impossible, for Western and Japanese firms to imitate. In the Chinese case, it was first developed by the motorcycle, truck and consumer appliance industries and then adapted by the domestic car firms. [537] The fact is that in China, as in most other developing countries, the low end of the market will remain by far the largest sector for many years to come. Despite fearsome competition from foreign producers, Chinese car manufacturers have very slowly been increasing their share of the Chinese market, currently the world’s second largest: in 2006 their combined market share was 25.6 per cent, just behind the total Japanese share of 25.7 per cent and ahead of the aggregate European share of 24.3 per cent, with Chery and Geely, the two largest, enjoying a combined share of around 10 per cent.

Figure 19. How to make a cheap car, Indian-style: the Tata Nano.

Figure 20. Sales of Chery cars, 2004-7.

This suggests that we should expect Chinese firms to enter at the bottom end of the global market for mass consumer goods, initially mainly in the developing world — of which there is already clear evidence [538] — but later moving into the developed world. It will take time for firms like Chery and Geely to establish themselves in Western markets, where standards and tastes are very different from the ‘cheap-end’ advantage presently enjoyed by Chinese firms. Indeed, both have postponed their American launch dates until around 2009 or later. A cautionary tale in this respect is provided by TCL, the Chinese TV manufacturer, which entered into a joint European venture with the French firm Thomson. It made a number of serious miscalculations based on its ignorance of the European market and announced in 2006 that it would close its European operations. [539] But TCL is an exception: Chinese electrical appliance firms have overwhelmingly chosen to establish their overseas manufacturing subsidiaries in developing rather than developed countries. There is a certain parallel, in this context, between Chinese firms initially targeting the developing world and the earlier experience of Japan and Korea. Japanese companies, for example, first dominated the then relatively poor local East Asian markets and only later began to make serious inroads into Western markets. In Europe and the United States, furthermore, both Japan and South Korea started at the cheap end of the market then steadily worked their way up. The same will be broadly true of China, except it will probably prioritize the developing world even more strongly. Chinese exports to Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America have recently been growing far more rapidly than those to the United States. China sent more than 31 per cent of its exports to the US in 2000 but that figure had dropped to just over 22 per cent by early 2007 and is now 18 per cent. [540]

Although China is already making significant progress in low- and medium-technology industries such as white goods and motor vehicles, it is also intent, in the longer term, on becoming a major player in a high-tech industry like aerospace. China will shortly begin production of its own regional passenger jet, [541] while Airbus has announced its intention of shifting some of its manufacturing capacity to China. [542] Possibly as a way of leapfrogging the development process, the main Chinese aerospace group was reported in 2007 to be considering investing in, or bidding for, six of Airbus’s European plants that had been deemed surplus to requirements, although in the event no offer materialized. [543] Given time, it is inconceivable that China — already the second largest aircraft market in the world [544] — will not become a major aircraft producer in its own right. The fact that it is steadily developing its space programme — it conducted a successful manned space flight in 2003, launched a lunar orbiter in 2007 and plans to launch its own space station in 2020 — indicates that China is intent on acquiring highly sophisticated technical competence in the aerospace field. [545]

Looking into the future, therefore, one can anticipate a number of broad trends regarding the development of Chinese companies. We will continue to see the slow but steady emergence of Chinese multinationals in areas which play to their domestic comparative advantage, such as white and electrical appliances, motorcycles, trucks and cars. [546] We can expect Chinese brands to emerge in fields such as sports equipment (for example Li-Ning) [547] — linked to China ’s growing strength as a sporting nation — and Chinese medicine. We are likely to see Chinese firms become major competitors in high-tech areas such as aerospace (AVIC 1), telecommunications (China Mobile and Huawei), computers (Lenovo) [548] and perhaps in renewable energy (for example, Suntech Power Holdings). China ’s banks, construction companies and oil companies are already rapidly emerging as global giants, helped by the scale of the Chinese market and the resources at their disposal. In 2007 the boom on the Shanghai Stock Exchange saw PetroChina briefly overtake Exxon as the world’s largest company. By the end of 2007 China possessed three of the world’s five largest companies, by value though not by sales, namely PetroChina, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Mobile. [549] We can also anticipate some of the big Chinese firms seeking to expand overseas by taking over foreign firms. There have already been examples of this with Lenovo acquiring IBM Computers and the Chinese oil giant CNPC unsuccessfully seeking to buy the US oil firm Unilocal; awash with cash and eager to shortcut their expansion, it is not difficult to imagine this happening on a much wider scale. An obvious area is commodities, with Chinalco’s stake in Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining group, an example. [550] With many Western companies suffering from a serious shortage of cash as a result of the credit crunch, the takeover opportunities for cash-rich Chinese companies, the oil companies in particular, are likely to be considerable, with Western political opposition weakened by the recession. [551] Meanwhile the establishment of the China Investment Corporation, armed with funds of $200 billion, of which some $80 billion is for external investment, could give China growing potential leverage over those foreign companies in which it decides to invest. [552] Finally, we should not forget the increasing importance of Chinese subcontractors as ‘systems integrator’ firms in the global supply chain of many foreign multinationals, a development which might, in the long term at least, prove to have a wider strategic significance for these multinationals in terms of their management, research capability and even ownership. [553]

Crucial to the creation of international firms is overseas direct investment. One forecast has suggested that as early as 201 °China ’s outward direct investment will overtake foreign direct inward investment. It is estimated that overseas investment in 2008 was over $50 billion, a huge increase compared with 2002; official figures indicate that in 2006 60 % went to Asia, 16 % to Latin America, 7 % each to North America and Africa, 6 % to Europe and roughly 4 % to Australasia. [554] (See Figure 21.)

THE CHINESE MODEL

The transition from a command economy to a market economy, involving a major diminution in the role of the state, has understandably focused attention on the similarities between the Chinese economy and Western capitalist economies. It is becoming evident, however, that just as the Japanese and Korean economies have retained distinctive characteristics in comparison with the West, the same also applies to China. Given that the Chinese leadership consciously chose to follow the path of market reform, rather than having it imposed upon them by force majeure, as in the instance of Russia, this is not surprising. The key difference in China’s case concerns the role of the state. This should be seen as part of a much older Chinese tradition, as discussed in Chapter 4, where the state has always enjoyed a pivotal role in the economy and been universally accepted as the guardian and embodiment of society. The state in its various forms (central government, provincial government and local government) continues to play an extremely important role in the economy, notwithstanding the market reforms.

Figure 21. Growth of Chinese overseas investment.

Around the time of the Asian financial crisis in the late nineties, it appeared that China was on the verge of drastically contracting the role and number of its state-owned enterprises (many of which were highly inefficient and heavily subsidized), and following the well-worn path of privatization trodden by many other countries. In fact, a decade later, a rather different picture is emerging. Certainly, the number of state-owned enterprises has been severely reduced, from 120,000 in the mid nineties to 31,750 in 2004, a process which has been accompanied by major restructuring and pruning, with tens of thousands of jobs cut. [555] Rather than root-and-branch privatization, however, the government has sought to make the numerous state-owned enterprises that still remain as efficient and competitive as possible. As a result, the top 150 state-owned firms, far from being lame ducks, have instead become enormously profitable, the aggregate total of their profits reaching $150 billion in 2007. This has been part of a broader government strategy designed to create a cluster of internationally competitive Chinese companies, most of which are state-owned. Unlike the approach most countries have followed with regard to state-owned firms, which has seen them enjoying various degrees of protection, and often quasi-monopoly status, the Chinese government has instead exposed them to the fiercest competition, both amongst themselves and with foreign firms. They are also, unlike in many Western countries, allowed to raise large amounts of private capital. Of the twelve biggest initial public offerings on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2007, all were by state enterprises and together they accounted for 85 per cent of the total capital raised. Some of the largest have foreign stakeholders, which, despite tensions, has usually helped them to improve their performance. China ’s state-owned firms can best be described as hybrids in that they combine the characteristics of both private and state enterprises. [556] The leading state enterprises get help and assistance from their state benefactors but also have sufficient independence to be managed like private companies and can raise capital in the same way that they do. This hybrid approach also works in reverse: some of the largest privately owned companies, like the computer firm Lenovo and the telecommunications equipment maker Huawei, have been considerably helped by their close ties with the government, a relationship which to some extent mirrors the Japanese and Korean experience. Unlike in Japan or Korea, however, where privately owned firms overwhelmingly predominate, most of China ’s best-performing companies are to be found in the state sector. [557] The steel industry has been awash with private investment, but the industry leader and technologically most advanced producer is the state-owned Baosteel. Chinalco, also state-owned, has become one of the world’s largest producers of aluminium, and has designs on becoming a diversified metals multinational. Shanghai Electric is increasingly competing with Japan ’s Mitsubishi and Marubeni in bidding to build new coal-fired plants in Asia. China ’s two state-owned shipbuilding firms, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation and China State Shipbuilding Corporation, are growing rapidly and starting to close the technological gap with their Korean and Japanese competitors. Chery, the state-owned car producer, with the fifth largest market share, has proved an extremely agile competitor and, given its limited resources, technologically ambitious and innovative. For the most part, it is these state-owned enterprises which are increasingly competing on the global stage with Western and Japanese companies.

The emergent Chinese model bears witness to a new kind of capitalism where the state is hyperactive and omnipresent in a range of different ways and forms: in providing assistance to private firms, in a galaxy of state-owned enterprises, in managing the process by which the renminbi slowly evolves towards fully convertible status and, above all, in being the architect of an economic strategy which has driven China’s economic transformation. China ’s success suggests that the Chinese model of the state is destined to exercise a powerful global influence, especially in the developing world, and thereby transform the terms of future economic debate. The collapse of the Anglo-American model in the wake of the credit crunch will make the Chinese model even more pertinent to many countries.

A MATTER OF SIZE

The combination of a huge population and an extremely high economic growth rate is providing the world with a completely new kind of experience: China is, quite literally, changing the world before our very eyes, taking it into completely uncharted territory. Such is the enormity of this shift and its impact on the world that one might talk of modern economic history being divided into BC and AC — Before China and After China — with 1978 being the great watershed. In this section I will concentrate on the economic implications of China ’s size.

When the United States began its take-off in 1870, its population was 40 million. By 1913 it had reached 98 million. Japan ’s population numbered 84 million at the start of its post-war growth in 1950 and 109 million by the end in 1973. In contrast, China ’s population was 963 million in 1978 when its take-off started in earnest: that is, twenty-four times that of the United States in 1870 and 11.5 times that of Japan in 1950. It is estimated that by the projected end of its take-off period in 2020, China ’s population will be at least 1.4 billion: that is, fourteen times that of the United States in 1913 and thirteen times that of Japan in 1973. If we broaden this picture, India had a population of 839 million in 1990 when it started its major take-off, nearly twenty-one times that of the United States in 1870 and ten times that of Japan in 1950. [558]

Total population is only one aspect of the effect of China ’s scale. The second is the size of its labour force. Although China ’s population presently accounts for 21 per cent of the world’s total, the proportion of the global labour force that it represents is, at 25 per cent, slightly higher. In 1978, when the great majority of its people worked on the land, China only had 118 million non-agricultural labourers. In 2002 that figure had already increased to 369 million, compared with a total of 455 million in the developed world. By 2020 it is estimated that there will be 533 million non-agricultural labourers in China, by which time it will exceed the equivalent figure for the whole of the developed world by no less than 100 million. In other words, China’s growth is leading to a huge increase in the number of people engaged in non-agricultural labour and, as a consequence, is providing a massive — and very rapid — addition to the world’s total non-agricultural labour force.

The third effect of China ’s rise concerns the impact of its economic scale on the rest of the world. China ’s average annual rate of growth of GDP since 1978 has been 9.4 per cent, over twice the US ’s growth rate of 3.94 per cent between 1870 and 1913. It is projected that the duration of their respective take-offs may be roughly similar: 43 years in the case of the US, 42 years for China, because, although the latter’s growth rate is much faster, its population is also far larger. When the US commenced its take-off in 1870, its GDP accounted for 8.8 per cent of the world’s total, rising to 18.9 per cent by 1913. In contrast, China ’s GDP represented 4.9 per cent of the world’s total in 1978, but is likely to rise to 18–20 per cent by 2020. In both instances, their GDP growth has had a major impact on the expansion of global GDP. In the 1980s, for example, the United States made the biggest single contribution of any country, accounting for 21 per cent of the world’s total increase; in the 1990s, however, China, even at its present limited level of development, surpassed the US, which remained at 21 per cent, while China contributed 27.1 per cent to the growth of global GDP.

The fourth effect is the impact China will have on world trade. Before the Open Door policy, China was one of the world’s most closed economies. In 1970 its export trade made up only 0.7 per cent of the world’s total: at the end of the seventies, China ’s imports and exports together represented 12 per cent of its GDP, the lowest in the world. China ’s economic impact on the rest of the world was minimal for two reasons: firstly, the country was very poor, and secondly, it was very closed. But since 1978 China has rapidly become one of the world’s most open economies. Its average import tariff rate will decline from 23.7 per cent in 2001 to 5.7 per cent in 2011, with most of that fall having already taken place. [559] Although its trade dependency (the proportion of GDP accounted for by exports and imports) was less than 10 per cent in 1978, by 2004 it had risen to 70 per cent, much higher than that of other large countries. China has now overtaken the United States to become the second largest exporter in the world, while in 2004 it ranked as the world’s third largest importer, accounting for 5.9 per cent of the global total. By 2010 a developing country, in the shape of China, will for the first time become the world’s biggest trader.

Each of these scale effects — population, labour, economy and trade — clearly has a mainly positive impact on the rest of the world, stimulating overall global growth and the expansion of national economies. But the fifth effect, China’s consumption of resources, has a largely negative global impact: because the country is so poorly endowed with natural resources, its population so enormous and its economic development so intensive, its demand for natural resources has the double effect of raising the price of raw materials and depleting the world’s stock of them, a process that, on the basis of recent trends, is likely to accelerate in the future.

CHINA’S GLOBAL ECONOMIC IMPACT

Although China remains a poor country, its per capita GDP only reaching $1,000 in 2003, it is already having a profound impact on the world. Along with the United States it has been the main engine of global economic growth, contributing no less than one-third of the world’s growth in real output between 2002 and 2005. It has been widely credited with having pulled Japan out of its long-running post-bubble recession, having been responsible for two-thirds of the growth in Japan ’s exports and one-quarter of its real GDP growth in 2003 alone. [560] The emergence of China as the world’s cheapest producer of manufactured goods has resulted in a sharp global drop in their prices. The price of clothing and shoes in the US, for example, has fallen by 30 per cent over the last decade. Major gainers from this have been consumers in the developed world, while the rise in commodity prices consequent upon Chinese demand had a beneficial effect on primary producers — many of which are based in the developing world — until the global downturn intervened. Anxious to secure sufficient supplies of raw materials to fuel its booming economy, China has been highly active in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, concluding major agreements with Iran, Venezuela and the Sudan amongst many others. Another net gainer has been Russia, which is a major producer of many commodities, notably oil and gas; and, though rather less trumpeted, Australia. It is China ’s shortage of raw materials that has driven a major diplomatic offensive with many African and Latin American countries, including the ambitious China- Africa summit in Beijing in November 2006. [561] The main losers have been those developing countries, like Mexico, whose comparative advantage lies in similar labour-intensive production and that find themselves in direct competition with China. [562] They have also lost out to China in terms of foreign direct investment, with many international firms relocating their operations from these countries to China. The other obvious losers are blue-collar workers in the developed world who have found their jobs being outsourced to China.

By far the greatest impact of China ’s rise has been felt in East Asia. The main gainers have been the developed Asian tigers of North-East Asia — South Korea and Taiwan, together with Japan. They have been the beneficiaries of cheap manufactured goods produced in China while at the same time enjoying growing demand from China for their knowledge and capital-intensive products. [563] Their own companies have relocated many of their operations to China to take advantage of much cheaper labour, as in the case of the Taiwanese computer industry. [564] The losers have been the same as those in the West, namely those workers displaced by operations outsourced to China. Unlike the United States, which has a huge trade deficit with China, all of these countries enjoy large surpluses with China. The nearest example in the region to a grey area is South-East Asia, whose economies are not so dissimilar to that of China, though Singapore and Malaysia, in particular, are rather more developed. Over the last decade, the ASEAN countries have seen a large slice of the foreign direct investment they previously received going to China. They have also lost out to China in the mass assembly of electronic and computer equipment — Singapore and Malaysia being notable examples — and have, as a consequence, been forced to move up the value chain in to order to escape Chinese competition. [565] The country that has suffered the greatest is Indonesia, whose economy most closely resembles that of China. Indonesia has lost out to China in terms of direct investment by foreign multinationals, which have opted for China rather than Indonesia as their preferred production base. On balance, however, China’s growth has greatly benefited the ASEAN countries too, with China now comfortably ensconced as their largest trading partner, one of their biggest markets (if not the biggest), and in many cases their main provider of inward investment. [566]

A measure of China’s growing impact on the world is the leverage that it enjoys in its relationship with the United States (notwithstanding the fact that the United States still enjoys a much larger GDP than China and an immensely higher GDP per head) as a result of the economic imbalances which lie at the heart of their relationship. China is comfortably the largest exporter to the US, with Americans displaying an enormous appetite for Made in China consumer products. As the United States exports relatively little to China, the latter has enjoyed a large and rising trade surplus which has grown very rapidly since 1999. [567] China has invested this surplus in various forms of US debt, including Treasury bonds, agency bonds and corporate bonds — in effect, a Chinese loan to the US — thereby enabling American interest rates to be kept artificially low to the benefit of American consumers and especially, until the credit crunch, holders of mortgages. Although the US was deeply in debt, China’s continuing large-scale purchase of Treasury bonds (which I will use as shorthand for various forms of US assets held by China) allowed Americans to continue with their spending spree, and then partially helped to cushion the impact of the credit crunch. In September 2008 China ’s foreign currency reserves totalled $1.81 trillion — a sum greater than the annual economic output of all but nine countries. [568] The rapid growth of its foreign exchange reserves has made China a colossus in the financial world. The importance of this has become even more apparent with the Western financial meltdown. While Western financial institutions, many Western companies and even some countries have found themselves starved of liquidity, China, in contrast, is blessed with an abundance of it. Strategically this puts China in a potentially powerful position to enhance its international financial and economic influence during the global recession, for example by buying foreign companies, especially oil and mineral firms.

How China deploys its reserves remains a matter of great concern, especially to the United States, since most are invested in US dollar-denominated debt. If China transferred significant amounts into other currencies — it is believed that it holds rather more than 60 per cent of its reserves in dollars (with less than 30 per cent in euros), though this is a tightly guarded secret [569] — it would have the immediate effect of depressing the value of the dollar and forcing US interest rates to rise: the larger the sum transferred, the bigger the fall in the dollar and the larger the rise in interest rates. But the government is also faced with something of a dilemma. It would certainly make good economic sense for China to transfer a large slice of its reserves out of US Treasury bonds: the dollar’s value fell steadily in 2006- 8, then recovered somewhat, but there remains the strong possibility that its price might fall even further, perhaps precipitously so. China ’s vast dollar investments in US Treasury bonds furthermore earn miserable rates of return, which makes precious little sense for what is still a poor country. [570] However, if it tries to transfer significant sums of its reserves into other currencies, thereby provoking a further fall in the value of the dollar, then the value of its own dollar reserves will also decline. China is in a catch-22 situation. The two great, but utterly unlike, economic powers of our time find themselves — at least for the time being — in a position of bizarre mutual dependence. [571] This was graphically illustrated in the darkest days of the financial meltdown in September 2008, when it is believed that the Chinese were pressing the US government to rescue Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and subsequently AIG out of concern for its holdings in them, and the Americans were understandably afraid that China might otherwise sell off some of its dollar reserves, with dire consequences for the value of the dollar and its role as a reserve currency. [572]

Before these tumultuous events, China had already been exploring other ways of using its vast reserves. In early 2007 the government announced the formation of the China Investment Corporation, a new state agency to oversee investment of $200 billion of China ’s foreign currency reserves — similar to Temasek Holdings, the Singapore government’s successful investment agency, which manages a $108 billion global portfolio of investments. [573] To test the water, the new agency placed $3 billion of its holdings with Blackstone, the US-based private equity group, thereby signalling Beijing ’s intention to switch some of its investments from US Treasury bonds into more risky equity holdings. [574] In fact it has since emerged that the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which oversees China ’s reserves, has itself been investing rather more widely than was previously believed. [575] These moves herald China ’s rise as a major global financial player. [576] In the second half of 2007, as the credit crunch began to bite, China Development Bank took a significant stake in the UK-based Barclays Bank [577] and Citic Securities formed a strategic alliance with the US investment bank Bear Stearns before the latter went bust. [578] Three Chinese banks were also in talks about acquiring a stake in Standard Chartered, the UK-based emerging markets lender. [579] But most of this came to nought as the Chinese increasingly realized the likely severity of the credit crunch and the potential threat it represented to any stakes in Western financial institutions that it might purchase. When the financial meltdown came in September 2008, the Chinese found themselves relatively little exposed. Nonetheless, the enormous funds enjoyed by Chinese banks, based on the fact that the average household saves more than a quarter of its income and has nowhere else to invest it, mean that Chinese banks will become an increasingly formidable global force.

The relationship between the United States and China needs to be set in a broader global and historical context. The belated acceptance of China as a member of the WTO in 2001 marked the biggest extension of the world trading system since the beginning of the contemporary phase of globalization in the late 1970s. As the largest recipient of foreign direct investment and soon to be the biggest trading nation, China ’s admission immediately transformed the nature and dynamics of the trading system. By acquiring a low-cost manufacturing base and extremely cheap imports, the developed world has been a major beneficiary of China ’s accession. But China itself has also been a big gainer, achieving wider access to overseas markets for its exports and receiving huge flows of inward investment, thereby helping it to sustain its double-digit growth rate. [580] Thus, so far, China ’s integration into the global economy has been perceived in terms of a win-win situation. Is that likely to continue?

China’s impact on the global trading system is so huge, and also in the longer term so uncertain, that this is a difficult question to answer. There are already tensions over China’s relationship with the WTO: on the one hand, there are accusations from the developed countries that China is failing to implement WTO rules as it ought to, while on the other hand, both the US and the European Union are using anti-dumping clauses (designed to prevent countries selling at unfair prices) as a pretext for deploying protectionist measures against Chinese goods. [581] There has been constant controversy around Chinese exports to the US. During 2007 these were concentrated on the safety of Chinese products, notably food and toys, as well as China’s failure to observe intellectual property rights. [582] So far these skirmishes have been at the relative margins of their trading relationships but they could be a harbinger of growing tensions in the future. Although the present era of globalization was designed by and is the creature of the West, above all the United States, the greatest beneficiary has been East Asia, especially China. [583] If the West should decide at some point that China has been the chief beneficiary — and to the West’s growing detriment — then the latter is likely to become increasingly protectionist and the present global system will be undermined. The process of globalization has already ground to a halt with the failure of the latest World Trade Organization Doha Round and is extremely unlikely to be revived. [584] But it remains to be seen whether this will be the prelude to a wider breakdown.

Hitherto, the main losers in the Western world have been those unskilled and semi-skilled workers who have been displaced by Chinese competition. But their grievances have been dwarfed by the winners — the multinationals which have used China as a cheap manufacturing base and the many consumers who have benefited from China prices. What will decisively change this political arithmetic is when China, as it rapidly moves up the value chain, starts to enter spheres of production which threaten the jobs of skilled manual workers and growing numbers of white-collar workers and professionals. The process of upgrading is already taking place in a limited way, as the example of textiles in Prato and Como in Italy illustrates, with design following manufacturing to China. [585] How quickly China upgrades its technological capacity thus lies at the heart of the likely Western response: the quicker that process proceeds, the more likely it is that the political arithmetic will change and that protectionist barriers might be erected; the slower it happens then the more likely it is that trade tensions can be managed and in some degree defused. The first scenario seems at least as likely as the second.

The economic rise of China has already led to a multiple redistribution of global economic power: from South-East Asia to China, from Japan to China, and from Europe and the United States to China. Given that China is only a little over halfway through its take-off phase, with over 50 per cent of the population still living in the countryside, it is clear that we are only in the early stages of this process. [586] It is inconceivable that one-fifth of the world’s population, embracing all the various scale effects that we have considered, can join the global economy with — by historical standards — enormous speed without ramifications which are bound to engender tension and conflict. So far China ’s incorporation has been relatively conflict-free. But the present aura of win-win that has surrounded this process seems unlikely to continue. The political arithmetic will shift in the West as the number of losers rises, with the entirely plausible consequence that the West — the traditional proselytizer for free trade — will lead the charge towards protection and the end of the era of globalization that began in the late 1970s. [587]

These considerations have now been recast in a new context: the most serious recession since the Great Depression of 1929- 33. Global trade is rapidly contracting, capital flows likewise, and unemployment is rising steeply across the world. The present era of globalization has come to a shuddering halt — and gone into reverse. How far this process will go remains entirely unclear. Almost everywhere governments are seeking to provide forms of assistance and subsidy for their threatened industries. There are growing demands for protection, evident in the ‘buy American’ pressure within the US Congress. China, as the world’s second biggest exporter (just behind Germany), will inevitably be a key target of such demands. In these circumstances, a trade war, accompanied by a withdrawal into rival trading blocs, is a distinct possibility. [588] The world is in new territory. The global parameters of China ’s economic rise have, at least for the time being, changed profoundly.