ABSTRACT
Since China entered the post-Mao Reform Era in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese economy has taken off as few economies have in the past. Merely a decade later, double-digit economic growth figures were taken as a matter of course, for since 1979 China has averaged a 10-percent per-year increase in its gross domestic product and per-capita output has been doubling every ten years. Once a Cold War—blockaded, self-reliant, iconoclastic economy and society, China has rapidly emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as an increasingly globally engaged society. Foreign investment in China soared to US $81.4 billion in 1994 from US $2.9 billion only a decade earlier. Earlier development policies based on import substitution shifted to export-led strategies led by the forces of international globalization. In China, the power equation between foreign anthropologists and the domestic variety may be more equal structurally than elsewhere and may help to obviate the problems of unbalanced collegial ties.
