The economy of China is a mixed
socialist market economy. State-owned enterprises, central planning and private
businesses and investment permitted to flourish are the general characteristics
of its economy.
The Government began reforms in 1978. As
at end 2019, it is the second largest economy in the world in terms of nominal
GDP (USD14.3 trillion). As of 2017, it is the largest economy in the world by
purchasing power parity. Growth rates used to average 9-10% per annum over 30
years. The public sector accounts for 63% of total employment. China has an
estimated worth of USD23 trillion in natural resources – coal and rare earth
metals. China has world’s largest total banking sector assets of around USD40
trillion. It has the second highest number of billionaires with wealth of
USD996 billion.
Historically, China was one of the
largest economic powers in the world from 1st century to about the
19th century. China’s past has shaped its present, as Prof. Rana
Mitter (University of Oxford) suggests:
(i) Trade
China remembers a time when it was forced to
trade against its will. Today it regards Western efforts to open its markets as
a reminder of that unhappy period.
The US and China are currently in a dispute over whether China is
selling into the US while closing its own markets to American goods. Yet the
balance of trade hasn't always been in China's favour.
There are long memories of a period, nearly a century and a half ago,
when China had little control over its own trade. Britain attacked China in a
series of Opium Wars, starting in 1839. In the decades that followed, Britain
founded an institution called the Imperial Maritime Customs Service to fix
tariffs on goods imported into China. It was part of the Chinese government,
but it was a very British institution, run not by a mandarin from Beijing, but
a man from Portadown.
Sir Robert Hart ended up becoming inspector-general of the Customs of
China, which became a fiefdom for Brits for a century afterwards. Hart was
honest and helped to generate a great deal of income for China.
It was very different in the Ming dynasty, in the early 15th Century,
when Admiral Zheng took seven great fleets to South East Asia, Sri Lanka and
even the coast of East Africa to trade and show off China's might.
Zheng He's voyages were partly about making an impression. Few other
empires could boast the massive fleets that it sent out across the oceans, and
it was also an opportunity for strange and wonderful items be brought back to
Beijing - such as China's first giraffe.
However, trade was also important, particularly in other parts of Asia.
And Zheng could, and did, fight when he wanted to, defeating at least one ruler
of Sri Lanka. Yet his voyages were a rare example of a state-driven maritime
project. Most of China's overseas trade for the next few centuries would be
unofficial.
(ii) Trouble
With the Neighbours
China has always been concerned to keep states
on its borders pacified. That's part of the reason it deals so warily with an unpredictable
North Korea today.
This is not the first time that China has had problems with those on its
borders. In fact, history reveals it has had worse neighbours than North Korean
leader Kim Jong-un.
The shifting lines on the map show that the definition of China has
changed over time. Chinese culture is associated with certain ideas such as
language, history and ethical systems like Confucianism.
However, other peoples, including Manchus and Mongols from the north,
have taken China's throne at various points, ruling the country using the same
ideas and principles upon which their ethnic Chinese counterparts relied. These
neighbours did not always stay put. But sometimes they embraced and exercised
Chinese values just as effectively as the people from whom they took them.
(iii) Information
flow
Today China's internet censors politically
sensitive material, and those who utter political truths deemed problematic by
the authorities may be arrested or worse.
The difficulty of speaking truth to power has long been an issue.
China's historians have often felt they had to write what the state wanted
rather than what they thought was important.
The author of one of the most important works chronicling China's past,
in the 1st Century BC, dared to defend a general who had lost a battle. In
doing so he was held to have snubbed the emperor, and was sentenced to
castration.
Yet he left behind a legacy which has shaped the writing of history in
China to this day.
(iv) Freedom
of religion
Modern
China is much more tolerant of religious practice than in the days of Chairman
Mao's Cultural Revolution - but past experience makes it cautious about
faith-driven movements which could potentially spiral out of control and pose a
challenge to the government. Records show that openness to religion has long been part of Chinese
history.
At the height of the Tang dynasty in the 7th Century, the Empress Wu
Zetian embraced Buddhism as a way of pushing back against what she must have
regarded as the stifling norms of China's Confucian traditions.
In the Ming dynasty, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived at court and was
treated as a respected interlocutor, although there was perhaps more interest
in his knowledge of Western science than his attempts to convert his listeners.
But faith has always been a dangerous business.
In the late 19th Century, China was convulsed by a rebellion started by Hong Xiuquan, a man who claimed to be Jesus's
younger brother.
The Taiping rebellion promised to bring a kingdom of heavenly peace to
China but actually led to one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, killing
as many as 20 million people, according to some accounts. Government troops
initially failed to tame the rebels, and had to allow local soldiers to reform
themselves before they eventually put down the Taiping with great cruelty in
1864.
Christianity would be at the centre of another uprising decades later.
In 1900, peasant rebels calling themselves Boxers would appear in north China,
calling for death to Christian missionaries and converts, the latter being
characterised as traitors to China.
At first, the Imperial Court backed them, which led to the death of many
Chinese Christians, before the uprising was eventually put down.
Through much of the following century, and to the present day, the
Chinese state has veered between tolerance of religion, and the fear that it
may upend the state.
(v) Technology
Today China seeks to become a world hub for
new technology. A century ago it went through an earlier industrial revolution
- and women were central to both.
China is a world leader when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI),
voice recognition, and big data.
A large number of the smartphones around the world are built with
Chinese-made chips. Many of the factories which manufacture them are staffed by
young women who often endure difficult conditions of work, but who are also
finding a place in the industrial market economy for the first time.
They have inherited the experience of the young women who came 100 years
ago to the factories that sprang up in Shanghai and the Yangtze delta.
They were not making computer chips, but silk and cotton threads. Work
was hard and likely to cause lung disease or physical injury, and conditions in
the workers' dormitories spartan. Yet the women also recalled the pleasure of
having their own wages, however, small, and the ability to visit a fair or
theatre on a rare holiday.
Today, on Nanjing Road in that city, you can still see China's new
working and middle class enjoying a wide range of consumer goods as part of
China's contemporary tech-driven economy.
We are living through another significantly transformative era for
China. Future historians will note that a country that was poor and
inward-looking in 1978 became - within a quarter of a century - the second
biggest economy in the world.
But to be “Great Again”, China needs to address or reform its:
· Legislative (one-party state);
· Executive (corruption and devolution
of powers (local/central)
· Judiciary (laws in line with
international standards and independent judges)
· Human rights;
· Adherence or compliance to accepted
global practices, including intellectual property and copyrights; and
· Promote peaceful coexistence,
cooperation and collaboration in science, technology and economy with its Asian
neighbours.
One thing is almost certain - a century from now, China will still be a
place of fascination for those who live there and those who live with it, and
its rich history will continue to shape its present and future direction.
Reference:
Five ways China’s past has shaped its
present, Prof. Rana Mitter,
University of Oxford,
20 April 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43714279)
