ABSTRACT
Introduction The People’s Republic of China (PRC, hereafter ‘China’) has been significantly involved in implementing ‘Economic Reforms’ for nearly four decades now. During this period of transformation, its overall policies have shifted from time to time. These shifts have been associated with ideological debates, national and international conditions, Western Economic theoretical discussions and pressures from domestic interests groups and citizens, including ‘capitalist-versusworkers’ issues. This chapter specifically focuses on the impact of Western Economic theories on the Chinese Economic Reforms (gaige kaifeng) as introduced by Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) from the late 1970s – and up to the present. Generally speaking, Western Economic ideas began to circulate in China with the emergence of Classical Economic Theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the last two centuries, following the introduction of the ideas of Smith, Ricardo and Marx – amongst others – into China, Economics gradually became a major area for research, teaching and in turn of policy-formation for central and provincial governments (Zhang, 2015) (see the chapters by Trescott in this volume). As elsewhere, the emergence of ‘Economics’ as an independent object of study and of policy formation in the 1930s, distinct from the classical views of ‘Political Economy’, in which the focus was not distinct from broader considerations of social policy (Mitchell, 2008), set the stage for the development of Economics in China. Despite some beginnings before and anti-Japanese War and the Second World War, the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and particularly its adoption of Economic Reform in the late 1970s led to the rapid development of Economics as a ‘study-major’ at universities. Subsequently, research in the field developed rapidly and became more and more influential on the policy front. One might say that a new period of ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’ (baihua qifang) – as in the mid-1950s – has appeared in history once again. By the end of 1978, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy started to shift towards ‘Economic Reform and Openness’ (jingji gaige kaifang) as the central goals for national development. This new policy was sharply different
from the former emphases on ‘class-struggle’ and independent economic development – through cutting links with the major Western capitalist economies that characterized the Mao era (Zhu et al., 2010). With its prioritization of economic change over social relations and environmental stewardship, ‘Developing a Socialist Market Economy with Chinese Characteristics’ (zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi shichang jingji) became the new ‘slogan’ for achieving what has been dubbed ‘industrialization, informationalization, urbanization, marketization and internationalization/globalization’ (Zhang, 2015). By the year 2010, China had become the second largest economy in the world, with average GDP per capita of more than $4,000 (Li, 2013) and its size has since expanded further. The experience of China’s transformation since 1949 provided a good lesson. As Zhang has noted:
The journey of China’s revolution, reform and economic construction demonstrate that we could neither entirely copy the Soviet Planning Economic Model nor implement Western Economic Models. What we can do is to develop our own Economic model ‘with Chinese Characteristics . . .’
