ABSTRACT

Analysts generally agree that, in the long term, the biggest challenge to American hegemony is not military, but rather China’s economic rise. This perception is spread in no small measure because Xi Jinping has – in the face of patent military inferiority – conducted himself much more boldly on the world stage than Hu Jintao. Meanwhile, China has also begun conjuring up an alternative vision for global leadership, now widely termed as the ‘China model’.

This book therefore offers a critical and comprehensive explanation of the China model and its origins. Using a range of case studies, covering varying historical and geographical approaches, it debates whether the Chinese experience in the last three decades of economic reform should be interpreted as an answer to the reigning hegemony of neoliberalism, or rather a further reinforcement of it. To answer these questions, it provides an investigation into what China may have learned from its East Asian neighbours’ earlier economic successes. It also examines how it is responding to and might even reconfigure the world political-economic system as it develops fresh and potentially more powerful regulatory capacities.

Providing a multi-dimensional analysis of the ‘China model’, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Economics, Economic Geography and Chinese Studies.

chapter 1|11 pages

Introduction

East Asia as an alternative modernity?

chapter 2|25 pages

Restoring Tang splendour?

A critical historical assessment of China’s new aspirational narrative of global leadership

chapter 3|21 pages

CPC elite perception of the US since the early 1990s

Zheng Bijian, Wang Huning and Liu Mingfu as test cases

chapter 4|24 pages

The ‘Singapore fever’ in China

Policy mobility and mutation

chapter 5|28 pages

The Chongqing vs. Guangdong ‘Models’ of economic development

Regional and historical perspectives on the dynamics of socioeconomic change in post-Mao China

chapter 6|27 pages

China

An East Asian alternative to neoliberalism?

chapter 7|6 pages

Conclusions