China Boom Logo Center on china us relations
  • Viewbythread
  • Capitalism
  • Globalization
  • The Party
  • Crisis Management
Pre 1978 1978 1984 1985 1989 1990s 2000s Present

Prospects

  • Consumer Economy
  • Greening the Boom
  • Winners and Losers
  • The Politics of Growth
  • Making Room for China
Gradient Line

An iconic billboard in the quintessential boom city of Shenzhen features Deng’s famous statement that China's “basic line will not waver for 100 years.” If Deng was right, we are less than one-third of the way into the era of “reform and opening.” But four challenges identified by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, that growth becomes “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, or unsustainable,” threaten the boom. The key to balance lies in increasing the consumer share of GDP, allowing China to create a modern consumer economy. Stability will depend on the government's ability to address grievances as the gap between winners and losers widens. Coordination is the great test facing the ruling Communist Party, of whether it can manage the politics of growth without fundamental changes to the system. Sustainability is an issue that has global implications, as citizens of a warming planet watch anxiously to see if China is successful in greening the boom. The fifth great challenge, left out by Premier Wen, may be the external one: whether the world is successful in making room for China.

Individual, Atomic Sands

Period: Prospects | The Politics of Growth

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Videosinthisperiod

Slideup

  • Almost Everything We've Done Is Illegal

    Yao Yang

  • Individual, Atomic Sands

    Yoichi Funabashi

  • Economic and Political Reform

    Susan Shirk

  • Boom Cannot Go On Without Political Loosening

    Winston Lord

  • China is Walking A Tightrope

    Lei Bo

  • Chinese People Do Not Want Another Period of Chaos

    Edward Tse

  • China is Like a Raft in Category 5 White Water

    James Fallows
Slideup
White Bg
Meettheexpert

Yoichi Funabashi

Editor-in-Chief, Asahi Shimbun

Yoichi Funabashi is editor-in-chief and columnist for the Asahi Shimbun. He is also a contributing editor at Washington-based Foreign Policy. In 1985, he received the Vaughn-Ueda Prize for his reporting on international affairs. He won the Japan Press Award, known as Japan's "Pulitzer Prize," in 1994 for his columns on foreign policy, and his articles in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy won the Ishibashi Tanzan Prize in 1992. He has taught at the University of Tokyo’s Public Policy Institute, Korea University, and Asia-Pacific University.

Funabashi's civic engagements include: member of the Trilateral Commission; international trustee, Asia Society; editorial board member of the The Washington Quarterly (CSIS); member, Government Commission for Reform of the Foreign Ministry; and the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century. He received his BA from the University of Tokyo in 1968 and his Ph.D. from Keio University in 1992. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (1975-76), a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics (1987) a Donald Keene Fellow at Columbia University (2003), and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo Public Policy Institute (2005-2006).
Videotranscript
Caret

Click to expand

collapse transcript Closebigger

But, at the same time, I think it's still maybe too early to tell what they actually have lost. The chapter is not closed yet. For instance, taking the example of Confucianism: Do they really believe in that? Do they still pretend to believe in that? How does it fit into that stale orthodoxy of communism, a credo? I think they still have yet to reach the consensus. I remember I had a very good conversation with Zhang Ruimin, the CEO and chairman of Haier Corporation, when I wrote a book about East Asian maritime civilization and I think Haier is one of the most symbolic enterprises for China to explore their maritime identity. Haier, its name itself is "sea." And he told me, this is one of the most international companies, Chinese company, very dynamic company, home appliances company. And he told me that one of the most difficult tasks for a CEO in that big Chinese company is how to actually teach ethics to the employees, what kind of ethics, or belief system, they should share. And Confucianism is the only thing he can think of. But, yet, it's so difficult for the Chinese employees to share that mutual belief and trust in the company, the company's future. So, basically, I think Chinese society is still not too dissimilar to what Sun Yat-sen called just sand, individual, atomic sands; not a cohesive thing. So, I think that globalization, this Chinese boom, still is very much [at a] precarious part.

Add New Comment

comments powered by Disqus
Cite this Source >>
“Individual, Atomic Sands | Yoichi Funabashi | Prospects | The China Boom Project.”
The China Boom Project.
The Asia Society Center on US-China Relations.
1 June 2010.
Web.
21 November 2024.
<https://chinaboom.asiasociety.org/period/prospects/33/177>.
Map Sm

Map the interviews

Click on the map to see where inteviews took place
+
Map Threads Timeperiods Essays
Click map to browse videos by location.
Map Preview
  • Capitalism
  • Globalization
  • The Party
  • Crisis Management
  • Inheritance (Pre-1978)
  • Emancipation (1978-1984)
  • Reckoning (1985-1989)
  • Rebirth (1990s)
  • Overdrive (2000s)
  • Prospects
  • Mao's Failure, Deng's Success
  • China Boom: Rural China in the 1980s

Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations | 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, NY, NY 10021