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This chapter discusses some other important consequences of rapid growth. It considers the prospect for China's continued rapid economic growth. It examines the various factors that might slow down the growth rate, including whether the current serious macroeconomic imbalances of the Chinese economy are sustainable and whether the social costs and adverse consequences of rapid growth will bring it to an end.

This chapter argues that the Chinese economy was going through internal disintegration between 1850 and the late 1870s. This was followed by a successful period of integration which lasted until around the end of the Qing era. Then there was a shiftback towards disintegration until 1937, after which war moved the Nationalist government to the interior, splitting areas of China from the Japanese-occupied parts of the littoral region at the same time. Putting the findings of this and the next chapters together, it is possible to see that the period to about 1911 saw the growth of a complex network of interregional commodity flows, involving vast hinterland areas.

China has outwitted the other East Asian economies in terms of sustained high growth rates. This chapter looks into the question of whether China would continue to defy the laws of economic gravity and prosper in the future as well. The varied projections made in this regard are elucidated and discussed. This question is addressed by the author taking a broader perspective. Certain continuing drivers of growth, production efficiencies, and urbanization have the potential to sustain the growth process. But the Chinese economy is getting more complex and integrated into the global trade and financial systems. This would pose certain impending challenges like sustainability, social cohesion, demography, and macro policies peculiar to the Chinese economy, which need to be looked into in the near future. These challenges and the possible solutions to them are elucidated in this final chapter.

This is the last of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It focuses on US perceptions of the political economy of China from the 1950s to 1978 and its perceived consequences for China’s capabilities both internally and as a political and economic model for other developing countries. Although the decline in Beijing’s hard and soft power resources did not follow a linear trajectory, the apparent overall weaknesses of its economy eased America’s fears about the Third World impact of its politico-economic model, and also reduced concerns that any contact between Washington and Beijing would raise the prestige of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the point where its path to development would be revived as a serious source of inspiration in large parts of the developing world. The chapter dwells primarily on China’s perceived soft power attributes. The different sections look at domestic order and advancement in China in the 1950s, the Chinese model under stress from 1959 to 1965, the impact of the early Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1960s, and restabilization and re-emergence in 1969–78.

By the early 20th century, an impressive body of Western-language sources was available to historians concerned with Britain’s involvement in East Asia. The explosion of Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and Chinese demands to end the foreign privilege system attracted growing public and scholarly interest in the West. The more conciliatory relationship between the British government and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang administration in the 1930s stimulated interest among some British historians. The expansion of higher education in the developed world after the Second World War bred a new generation of professional academic historians, eager to explore fresh approaches to the study of history. There was considerable discussion about whether the Chinese economy profited or suffered from foreign attempts at modernization. The historiography of British imperialism in the Far East stands at a crossroads, with a number of contrary paths beckoning. A new generation may dismiss British imperialism as a short, if at times traumatic, interlude in the long history of an ancient country.

The first 18 months after the Tiananmen bloodshed marked the height of global criticism of China's human rights record, but the years 1992–1995 quickly gave some indication of the difficulties that would be faced by those who wished to move China beyond tactical concessions towards genuine acceptance of the validity of some of the core human rights norms. Major Western states, together with Japan, continued to reduce the bilateral pressure, for economic and strategic reasons, and China's recapturing of its high economic growth rates from 1992 enhanced its ability to pose policy dilemmas for those interested in competing in the Chinese market, as well as for far weaker countries that were poised to benefit from China's economic dealings with them. The Beijing leadership, which was plainly on the defensive with respect to its international interlocutors on human rights, decided to renew its efforts to regain the initiative. China's 1991 White Paper, which signalled limited engagement in the human rights discourse, was a major first stage in that strategy, providing China with an authoritative text upon which to draw in response to international criticisms. Beijing, however, went further and tried to link up with other governments in East Asia in the exploitation of a common dislike of Western triumphalism, and a common commitment to ‘Asian values’, questioning the universal application of democracy and human rights. The Chinese leadership began to launch more extensive, direct attacks on Western countries and on the major international NGOs. Nevertheless, the relative density of the human rights regime ensured that some constraints still operated on China's international diplomacy, and as the major states’ sanctions policies weakened, governments tended to make greater use of such multilateral institutions as the UN. The different sections of the chapter are: The Uses of the 1991 White Paper; Relativism versus Universalism —in democracy and human rights; The Economic Weight of China; The Rootedness of Human Rights Policy; The UN Commission on Human Rights; China and the Thematic Mechanisms — the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs and the new 1995 Chinese White Paper; and Conclusion.

The troubled history of Sino-Japanese relations affects contemporary ties as the two nations vie for regional leadership. This chapters holds that the contest is still open—many experts have declared China the winner—first electoral loss in its entire and the rivalry will not result in a military confrontation because of economic interdependence. If China dominates the Asian Community when Asia is preeminent in global economic growth about 2030, Japan will become a large Asian Switzerland.

As of the second half of 2008, the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) experienced dramatic fluctuations. The global financial crisis, together with a cyclical downward adjustment that started at the end of 2007, resulted in extreme reduction in inventories and production during the fourth quarter of 2008. The magnitude of the slowdown in the real economy was much greater than most economists had expected. The government quickly adopted a number of stimulus policies to avoid further slowdown of the real economy. The chapter reviews the impacts of global financial crisis on the Chinese economy. Then, it discusses key policy measures the PRC government had adopted to deal with the crisis and their results. Finally, it identifies some issues that the PRC's government must pay greater attention to sustain its growth momentum.

This chapter analyzes the impact of the rise of the Chinese economy on the international economic structure. While looking at the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, analysis reveals that China has yet to challenge the United States as the anchor of the global financial system: the renminbi remains negligible in international financial transactions. Indeed, since the 2007–8 global financial crisis, the U.S. dollar has expanded its importance relative to the renminbi in global finance. The chapter suggests that the renminbi is far from becoming a significant international reserve currency and that the United States will continue to dominate the regional financial order. In trade relations, however, the chapter establishes the significant importance of the Chinese market for economies throughout East Asia.

This book outlines the history of Chinese business and argues that business practices in China have been shaped by broader trends in the evolution of the Chinese state and society since 1500. It discusses three changes that provided the backbone of long-lasting development in the late imperial state of the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Firstly, the Chinese economy was increasingly monetarized from the sixteenth century onwards as silver was imported into China in large quantities from abroad in return for Chinese exports. Secondly, the recruitment of a bureaucracy by examination was consistently applied from the early Ming into the last years of the Qing dynasty, and it created a class of administrators who prided themselves on their scholarship. Thirdly, the scholar-official class from the 1500s saw their political interests vested in the maintenance of ritual order which assigned all members of the state, including the emperor, rights and responsibilities.

This chapter discusses why the Chinese economy lagged behind in the nineteenth century. One of the major reasons was China's difficulty in acquiring steam technology due to its state of traditional technology and nineteenth-century politics. China did learn about steam engines, but too little and too late. By the 1880s, breath-taking advances were coming on in the science of stream in Western technology: the Second Industrial Revolution was supported by research in the laboratory and it was sustained by mathematics. In 1800, China might have acquired some of the industrial advances of the West with the minimum change to the traditional curriculum, but to do so in the 1880s meant reforming school education to put a premium on a new mathematics and the forever elusive superiority of Western technology. China was doomed, therefore by the impossibility of timing.

This chapter traces how the Chinese booksellers in the Chessboard Street neighborhood utilized the tradition of merchant guilds and the Qing government's reform initiative to create their quasi-legal institution in order to regulate and protect what they believed to be banquan/copyright. It illustrates in particular how the Shanghai shuye gongsuo (SBG), a civic organization with no legal jurisdiction or official authorization, enforced its banquan/copyright regulation and punished pirates according to their ideas of morality, norms, and customs. It illustrates how the SBG's rich records not only reveal the daily operation and conflicts in the modern Chinese cultural economy, but also the booksellers' conceptions of property ownership, civility, and trust that were articulated and contested in routine transactions. The chapter also focuses on how the SBG interacted and negotiated with the state's formal legal system after the promulgation of China's first copyright law in 1911. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, although new legislation regarding the protection of copyright appeared, it was rarely enforced in reality because consistent political upheavals had prevented the Chinese central state from establishing sufficient legal control over its territory.

This chapter relates Henri Lefebvre's space theory to contemporary Chinese economy and urban landscape, and then examines the manifestations of space as represented in four Chinese films: Shower (1999), Beijing Bicycle (2001), The World (2004), and Cell Phone (2004). These films represent the cityscape as fraught with trauma and displacement, and haunted by ghosts of both the past and the future.

This chapter describes how business was conducted under the late imperial regime. It also considers China's encounter with capitalism, focusing on the history of the application of the institutions which enabled capital to impact on the economy. It also explains how China diverged from the West, why the Chinese economy was so successful in the eighteenth century, and why it suffered so greatly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter highlights how economic activities were relatively unhindered in comparison to those closely monitored under imperial and communist regimes. Technological transfers were greatly facilitated by an open society at all levels, whether local workmen building truck bodies to fit imported engines in Beijing or the engineers instructed by Belgian specialists at a cloth-making industry established in distant Lanzhou even before the fall of the empire. The economy was not “stagnant” or “regressing” from 1870 to 1930, but steadily growing and thriving, even in the countryside. It particularly pays attention to the first half of the twentieth century, and a number of important changes did occur to open up the movement of goods. With the legal and institutional changes in mind, it is not surprising that the economy boomed in the first decades of the twentieth century. While movement by cart or boat in China around 1900 generally proceeded at a walking pace, a revolution in transportation in the following decades meant that people across the social spectrum could move faster, further, and cheaper than ever before.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the accumulation, distribution, and governance of capital in China, and then provides an overview of the subsequent chapters, demonstrating the interconnections between their findings. These interconnections are illustrated by placing the various chapters in the context of broader research on China, especially recent research into public and private sector governance. Once these interconnections become clear, the chapters coalesce into a comprehensive picture of the uniquely Chinese institutions that characterize its market socialism, and present a picture of the inner workings of the world's soon-to-be largest economy.

This chapter examines the contributions remittances made to Chinese economic development in general and to the qiaoxiang in particular. It considers the role played by the Chinese state and state-associated organizations in setting policies and guidelines for the qiaopi trade. The Chinese state sought to destroy or assimilate premodern postal services like the qiaopi system and to assert the authority of the post office over them. The state’s striving for a monopoly of postal services and its commitment to universal-service obligations brought it into conflict with existing postal services, including the qiaopi trade. The chapter reaches three main conclusions. First, the qiaopi trade played a key role in China’s economic modernization in Guangdong and Fujian and even to China’s survival as an independent nation-state. Second, in the course of interacting with and participating in China’s domestic economy and body politic, the agents and institutions that underlay the qiaopi trade underwent tremendous changes. Third, the nation-states’ growing power and influence over the qiaopi trade (and its agents) finally led to the trade’s demise in the late 1970s.