ABSTRACT
When China started its reform and open door policy in 1978, its per capita GDP in PPP-based US dollars was only 9 per cent of the world average, and, as of 2003 after 25 years of reform, it reached about half of the world average (Lee 2008). Thirty years of economic success in China has attracted strong interest about the sources of its success. Diverse views from different perspectives have been proposed. The more traditional view attributes the reform success of China – another East Asian miracle – to policy changes that have maximized its comparative advantage in labour-intensive goods (Lin et al. 1996). Specifi c factors for China’s economic growth have also been analyzed from a variety of perspectives, such as the infl ux of private or foreign capital, education, and openness (Chen and Feng 2000; Lee 1996), fi nancial liberalization (Liu and Li 2001), new development policies to prioritize its coastal region (Berthélemy and Démurger 2000; Tian et al. 2004), and various structural changes (Phillips and Shen 2005; Kawakami 2004).
