
	Inheritance Tradition's Legacy Socialist Foundations Revolution to Reform The roots of China’s recent boom extend deep into its imperial and communist past. But tradition’s legacy is a complicated one. To achieve modern development, China had to throw off the “yoke” of traditional society. Yet the long traditions of centralized government administration, kin-based entrepreneurism, and value placed on education and diligence prepared the Chinese well for capitalism. Despite catastrophes like the Great Leap Forward and the famine in its wake, Mao Zedong’s nation building efforts between the founding of the PRC in 1949 and the unleashing of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 laid socialist foundations for the subsequent boom. Even the disastrous, decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution contributed to the boom: By eroding public support for radical politics, the ground was cleared for a transition from revolution to reform—for new policies that were gradualist, internationalist and capitalist.

China Alone Performed Well

Period: Inheritance (Pre-1978)

Hu Shuli

Dean, Zhongshan University

Hu Shuli was born into a family of prominent journalists and publishers. During the Cultural Revolution, however, her family fell out of political favor, and while in her mid-teens Hu, along with her parents, was sent to work in the countryside. She joined the army in 1970, and after the Cultural Revolution ended, she gained entrance to China's Renmin University in Beijing. After graduating with a degree in journalism, Hu worked as a reporter for the Worker’s Daily. She was awarded a World Press Institute fellowship in 1987 that allowed her to study at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Returning to China, she participated in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. She later joined the staff of the China Business Times, becoming chief of the newspaper’s international desk in 1995. With the financial backing of a group of US-educated Chinese businessmen, Hu launched Caijing in 1998. Under her editorial guidance, Caijing quickly became known for its hard-hitting journalism. Frequently referred to as “the most dangerous woman in China” because of her emphasis on aggressive investigative reporting, she consistently pushed the limits of press freedom in her country, publishing articles that ranged from exposés of bribery and deceitful business practices to well-researched critiques of government policy. Since leaving Caijing in 2009, Hu has joined the faculty of the School of Mass Communication and Design at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou and started two new publications, China Reform and Century Weekly.

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I think that, generally, we can say that China was lucky. But, simply using the word lucky doesn't explain the processes behind the growth. The core of it is that the 1997 Asian crisis had a huge impact on the region. But, at that time, on the one hand, China did not have a floating exchange rate regime, so the impact on China was not direct. In the first half of 1997, China started to adopt active fiscal policies, similar to what you'd call stimulus plans. From '98, it started to adopt active monetary policies. These macroeconomic policies had important effects. At the same time, China went through two major reforms, and these reforms helped, because China's fiscal and monetary policies directed investment towards manufacturing, the production of goods. But what about demand? Who is going to buy these products? In 1989, China started housing privatization. As you know, outside of the villages and countryside, most of the housing in the cities was distributed by the government, it was government owned, and living spaces were very small. So, from 1989, when they started the privatization of housing, on the one hand, the existing houses were privatized, and on the other, this stimulated demand for housing; people discovered that they could buy a house and the government would even provide them with subsidies. A huge impulse was domestic demand [due to housing privatization]. Another aspect was that in 1999, China began talks on the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, and in 2000, formally joined the WTO. After that, China benefited hugely from being open to the world, Chinese products could now enter into the markets of various countries. This period of development occurred almost exactly when China had accumulated the productivity of the past 20 years of Reform, so China's economy, in recent years, has been very strong, especially in the past 10 years. Last year was the 30th anniversary of the Reform and Opening, but it was in the past 10 years, amid the many problems faced by the Asian region, that China, alone, performed well.