ABSTRACT
This paper will show that China is doing well in terms of R&D/GDP and college enrollment ratios, as well as in the number of Global Fortune 500 companies. Therefore, the paper will argue that China’s growth is not likely to be short-lived, at least internally, although it has to deal with the limitations of Chinese companies in terms of in-house R&D capabilities. While this analysis will be covered in Section 3, the next section provides a more basic assessment of China’s economic performance in comparison with Korea. It will demonstrate that the early stage of China’s catch-up is more favorable than that of Korea in its own early stage of catch-up (in the 1960s). However, China’s performance after 30 years of catch-up seems to compare less favorably with Korea, at least in the two aspects of belated democratization and rising inequality. Section 5 contains a summary and concluding remarks.
