مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

China has experienced the most rapid of economic growth in the past 35 years that has effectively transformed the country from one of the world’s most backward nations, whose economy was on the brink of collapse at the end of the tumultuous decade-long Cultural Revolution (1966–۱۹۷۶), to the economic powerhouse it is today. In December 2014, the International Monetary Fund announced that China has overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy — $۱۷٫۶ trillion vis- à-vis $17.4 trillion, albeit China’s per capita GDP is only a quarter of that of the U.S. (Gorman, 2014). In 2030, China is projected to surpass Japan to become the second largest capital market in the world (Emerging Capital Markets, 2014). In addition, China possesses the world’s largest foreign reserves and is the principal holder of U.S. debt. Furthermore, for more than a decade, according to A.T. Kearney’s Foreign Investor Confidence Index, CEOs and CFOs from around the world have ranked China as the most attractive destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world. In 2014, China overtook the U.S. to become the top destination for FDI, albeit not on a cumulative basis (Su and Yao, 2015). Viewed in this context, the phoenix has indeed risen from its ashes in the short course of three-and-a-half decades.

From a historical perspective, China’s current ascendancy in the world stage is not new. For many centuries, China was one of the most developed nations in the world and has been credited with many innovations and inventions, including paper money, the magnetic compass, bureaucracy, gun powder, among other things. In his 2002 best-selling book, 1421: The Year China discovered America, Gavin Menzies, a retired submarine lieutenant-commander in the British Navy, posited that Zheng He of the Ming dynasty may have discovered the Americas, seven decades ahead of Christopher Columbus’ voyage. Even though some of Menzies’ assertions can be disputed, the fact remains that in the distant past, China’s influence and economic might extended far beyond its geographic boundaries, and its culture and civilization were imitated by many neighboring countries.

The question is will China continue on its current trajectory as a (not necessarily the) leading economy or will it eclipse once again into oblivion, a fate that it suffered in the mid-nineteenth century when the country succumbed to unequal treaties and concessions under the gunboat policy of the West? There is no shortage of Chinese watchers who insist that China will fail. Perhaps the most prominent of these “bears” is Gordon Chang, an American lawyer of Chinese descent, who penned China’s demise in five to ten years in his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China. When Chang’s prediction did not materialize, in a 2011 article in the Foreign Policy magazine, he insisted that he was wrong by only one year and asked his readers to “bet on it” (Chang, 2011). To paraphrase Mark Twain, China’s imminent demise has been “greatly exaggerated”. Chang’s pessimistic assessment of China stands in stark contrast to the optimistic outlook posited by Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist and senior VP at the World Bank and currently a Professor and honorary Dean of the National School of Development, Peking University. Lin asserts that China can continue to grow at the rate of 8 percent per annum for two more decades.