ABSTRACT
Crowding as urban congestion has combined with rapidly rising labor and land costs to begin stripping away one of the main sources of China’s economic competitiveness. China has a dependent sector that rivals the ‘welfare state’ in Europe in terms of its exaggerated costs and the drag it places on the economy. China’s industrial enterprises include white elephants akin to the defunct projects of mammoth scale associated with the Soviet Union. Besides encouraging inefficient economic policies, corruption also exerts a corrosive influence on China’s political and social institutions. China’s present generation of rulers seems unable to recognize that unnecessarily extensive regulations and inappropriate rules add to the problem by providing irresistible incentives for corruption. As signs of social instability such as high and rising rates of crime as well as endemic corruption erupt out of China’s modernizing experience, the regime’s rigidity will render in incapable of accommodating the strains of change.
