Globalization

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.

US and China Are in the Same Boat

Period: Prospects

Deng Understood That the World Had Changed Wu Jianmin US-China Symbiosis Fed the Boom Federico Rampini US and China Are in the Same Boat Yao Yang Share

Yao Yang Professor, China Center for Economic Research, Beijing University  Yao Yang is a professor of Economics at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) and at the National School of Development (NSD), Peking University. He currently serves as the Deputy Director of CCER and Deputy Dean of NSD in charge of academic affairs, and the editor of the center’s house journal, China Economic Quarterly. His research interests include economic transition and development in China. He has published widely in international and domestic journals in addition to authoring books on institutional economics and economic development in China.   Click to expand collapse transcript There is a social theorist named Giovanni Arrighi, he is teaching at Johns Hopkins. He has a book that was recently published; the title is very interesting, it is “Adam Smith in Beijing.” And he says Western Europe benefited from China and India in the past, benefited from the world system centered in Asia in the last millennium. But, now, the current world system is built and protected by America that China is part of this system. China benefits from this system. I think he’s very right, he’s a true thinker on that. He realizes, not a single country can escape from globalization, it’s a fact you have to take. Now of course, it’s upon yourself [to decide] how to utilize the chances and opportunities that presented by globalization, and China, somehow, has taken full advantage of this round of globalization. So, my opinion is that China benefits from the current world system, and the US and China, the world, is in the same boat. I do not like the idea of delinking China from the world system. Of course, there’s a strong voice in China trying to say that China should delink from the world system. I think that’s a very short-sighted view. Add New Comment comments powered by Disqus

Cite this Source >> “US and China Are in the Same Boat | Yao Yang | The China Boom Project.” The China Boom Project. The Asia Society Center on US-China Relations. 1 June 2010. Web. 14 May 2025. <https://chinaboom.asiasociety.org/thread/38/185>. Map the interviews Click on the map to see where inteviews took place