ABSTRACT
The interweaving of political and economic reform in Russia and China makes for an interesting contrast, helping to understand better the nature of the interaction between politics and economics in the process of development. In any event, changes of regime or of policy in the two giants have ended the cold war and have promised to remake the whole pattern of economic and political power, particularly on the Pacific Rim. The main changes in the world are subsumed under the heading "globalization." The technical revolution in communications has been an unprecedented stimulus to the formation of global markets. Political action can rapidly extinguish economic growth by centralizing decisionmaking better left to free market operation. In China, economic reform preceded political reform: The sudden injection of a much stronger measure of market activity certainly promoted economic growth. Rising incomes offer the prospect of the substitution by Japan and the Little Dragons of the Chinese market for the US market.
