It could be said that China boomed because the world wanted it to. China benefited enormously from the wave of globalization that washed the world into the 21st century. The stage was actually set in the Mao Zedong era as an unanticipated consequence of US-China rapprochement. Motivated by a common fear of the Soviets, normalization of US-China relations allowed Mao’s successors to concentrate on development instead of survival. Meanwhile, the East Asian “tigers” experienced miraculous growth in the 1960s and ‘70s, establishing a model for China and generating nearby capital and markets ready to buy and invest. Then, in the 1980s, the Chinese diaspora played a vanguard role in bridging the gaps between Communist China and capitalist East Asia. By the ‘90s, China’s export Leviathan found its sweet spot on the global production and supply chain. China established itself as a pillar of the global financial and currency structure between the two global financial crises of 1998 and 2008, emerging as the world’s largest trading nation, and amassing nearly 3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves along the way. The China boom is one of the great legacies left by globalization at the turn of the millennium.
Federico Rampini is la Repubblica's New York Bureau Chief. Previously, he has served as a columnist and correspondent for la Repubblica in Beijing, where he inaugurated the publication's China bureau in July 2004. As a special envoy, he travels frequently to India, Japan and Southeast Asia. From 2000 to 2004, Rampini was la Repubblica's West Coast correspondent based in San Francisco, California. From 1997 to 2000, he was the European editor of la Repubblica.
In 2005, his essay "The Chinese Century," topped the Italian bestseller charts in non-fiction for several months and is now in its sixteenth edition. His 2006 book The Chindia Empire: China, India and Their Surroundings: the Asian Superpower with 3.5 billion Citizens (Knopf), has exceeded 100,000 copies sold. In 2007, Rampini released his latest book, Mao's Shadow (Knopf). Rampini was named among the "EV50," the European Voice poll of the fifty most influential personalities in Europe in 2005. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism and at the Shanghai University of Economics and Finance.
What happened after 2001, and the big surprise, if I may so, is that the world economic growth was based on this extraordinary symbiotic relationship between China and the United States. The US was able to sustain high growth, with the exception of the post-September 11 recession, which was short and shallow recession. But, it was highly leveraged growth, and now, with the hindsight, we can say that this growth was fueled by very, very lax monetary policy, low interest rates, an almost irresponsible abundance of credit, a lot of debt, a highly leveraged economy, and cheap consumer goods provided by China, together with the financing for these imports of Made-in-China goods. So, China began accumulating huge trade surpluses, with the US even more than with the European Union. The trade surpluses became important with the European Union only later on, but with the US, almost immediately. At the same time, these surpluses were recycled through the reinvestment of currency reserves into US dollar-denominated securities, mainly Treasury bonds. So, this was rather extraordinary. You don’t find in world economic history a precedent of the most advanced and richest economy running a structural deficit and becoming a structural net importer of capital from an emerging country. This is a very, very strange situation. Britain, at the apex of its empire, was a net exporter of capital. Britain was a net investor in the rest of the world. So, it is a very, very exceptional situation, and this was certainly one of the recipes of the boom.
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