ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 elaborated the concept of sustainable development and laid down the theoretical framework for its pursuit. It accentuated the indispensability of strategic planning in revealing integrated social welfare for the long run, and setting prices for externalities and discount rate that reflect real intergenerational risks. As China is facing ever-stronger challenges from demographic transformation, rapid urbanization, climate change, and environmental deterioration, maintaining the current capital-intensive, export-led growth regime would only destroy total wealth and deepen social conflicts. Yet if China's strategic planning could succeed in synchronizing macro trends with welfare-enhancing structural changes under the framework of sustainability, challenges could well be translated into chances. Such is the dialectic Chinese concept of “danger-chance” (“wei ji”). In this chapter our main task is to demonstrate how such a transition is attainable, and how China's road map to sustainability could deploy.
