CityReads│Economists Review China’s Reform

Garnaut et al. 城读 2022-07-13

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Economists Review China’s Reform

Economists review China’s 40 years of reform and development.

Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song, Cai Fang. 2018. China’s 40 Years of Reform and Development: 1978–2018, ANU Press.

Source:https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/china-update/china%E2%80%99s-40-years-reform-and-development-1978%E2%80%932018

People’s Republic of China is about to celebrate the 70^th anniversary. The year 2018 marks 40 years of reform and opening in China. These were years in which China moved from being a poor, backward country to a chieving livingstandards above the world average and now approaching those of the high-income countries. Over these four decades, China moved from near economic isolation tobe the world’s largest trading economy and largest manufacturing nation. To mark 40 years of reform and development in China (1978–2018), Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song and Cai Fang bring together the work of many of the world’s leading scholars on the Chinese economy. The result is a over 700-page volume, China’s 40 Years of Reform and Development: 1978–2018. In 31 separate contributions, they reflect and present views on policy reform, economic growth and structural change over four fateful decades. On the website of the publisher，Australian National University Press, you can download the book for free（Click on "Read more" at the end of the article to download it）.

A key feature of this book is its comprehensive coverage of the key issues involved in China’s economic reform and development. Included are discussions of China’s 40 years of reform and development in a global perspective; the political economy of economic transformation; the progress of marketisation and changes in market-compatible institutions; the reform program for state-owned enterprises; the financial sector and fiscal system reform, and its foreign exchange system reform; the progress and challenges in economic rebalancing; and the continuing process of China’s global integration. This book furtherdocuments and analyses the development experiences including China’s large scale of migration and urbanisation, the demographic structural changes, the private sector development, income distribution, land reform and regional development, agricultural development, and energy and climate change policies.

The contributors to this volume discuss, from differing perspectives, the origins, content, consequences and future of reform. The 31 chapters explore what has happened in the transformation of the Chinese economy and how that has affected the world economy. They discuss an unfinished agenda for reform. They draw lessons for the future from the experience of the four preceding decades. They begin to sketch what the world can expect in China’s fifth decade of reform and development.

This book is organized into five parts. Part one contains eight chapters providing general interpretations of the reform experience by deeply experienced and well-known scholars who have been closely engaged in analysing, interpreting and explaining the Chinese experience of reform for all of its 40 years(Gregory C. Chow, Dwight H. Perkins, Ross Garnaut), for most of those years(Cai Fang, Ligang Song, Liu Wei, Yang Yao and Justin Yifu Lin and Zhongkai Shen) or through periods as a senior World Bank official in China (David Dollar and Bert Hofman). Each looks at the history through a personal lens. Inevitably, there is some overlap in the matters covered. We think the different interpretations of similar issues enrich the whole. For example, on the most fundamental of historical questions, Chow presents reasons why China’s circumstances made reform inevitable in 1978, while Garnaut emphasises the role of human agency—the decisions taken by leaders at critical times that shaped subsequent developments.

Part two contains 11 chapters on reform and development relating to major economic issues, policy instruments or institutions. Each of the authors is an authority on the issues covered—Xiaolu Wang on macroeconomic development, Guonan Ma, Ivan Roberts and Gerard Kelly on growth and restructuring, Zhang Jun on price system reform, Fan Gang, Guangrong Ma and Xiaolu Wang on the process of marketisation,Christine Wong on the fiscal system, Cai Fang on demographic change, Yiping Huang and Xun Wang on banking reform, Yongding Yu on foreign exchange reform, Nicholas Lardy on private sector development, Ligang Song on the experience of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and Barry Naughton on the remaining agenda for SOE reform.

Part three contains four chapters on how the relationship between rural (at first mainly agricultural) and urban China has developed through the reform period, by scholars who are recognised for their work over several decades on the subject: Bob Gregory and Xin Meng on migration, Shouying Liu on land reform, Biliang Hu and Kunling Zhang on urbanisation and Jikun Huang and Scott Rozelle on agriculture.

Part four contains two chapters describing the most evident and perhaps most consequential changes from China’s new model of growth, adopted and partially implemented in the fourth decade of reform: ZhongXiang Zhang on energy, highlighting the transition to low-carbon technologies, and Jiahua Pan on climate change.

Part five presents five chapters on different aspects of China’s deepening interaction with the global economy over the past four decades: Peter Drysdale and Samuel Hardwick broadly on integration into the international economy, Kunwang Li and Wei Jiang on trade, Chunlai Chen on inbound investment and Bijun Wang and Kailin Gao on outbound investment, and Wing Thye Woo on the evolving China’s external economic disputes with the United States and possible solutions.

This book contains solid data and includes a lot of figures and tables. It is a good reference book for students who want to learn about China’s economic development. Here are selected figures and tables from the book.

China has contributed the most to the world poverty reduction in the past 4 decades.

China’s export has decreased since 2008.

Investment is still the largest driving force of economic growth.

Economic growth and rapid urbanization go hand in hand.

China has experienced the largest human migration in the past 40 years.