Learning to Catch up in a Globalized World
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/5/2019, SPi 8 China Learning to Catch up in a Globalized World Justin Yifu Lin and Jun Zhang 8.1 Introduction Despite a recent slowdown, over the past forty years the Chinese economy has maintained an average annual growth rate of 9.5 per cent. No country or region has ever sustained such a long period of growth at such a high rate. Its per capita GDP increased from US$156 in 1978 to about US$8,640 in 2017. China has a population of nearly 1.4 billion, suggesting that in 2017 its total GDP stood at US$12 trillion, second only to that of the United States, and China’s share of the world economy has increased from 1.8 per cent in 1978 to around 15 per cent in 2017. Over the same period China’s foreign trade has maintained an average annual growth rate of 14.5 per cent in dollar terms. Again, no country has ever been able to move so successfully and so quickly from a closed economy to an open economy. In 2010, China’s exports overtook those of Germany and it became the world’s largest exporter. More than 95 per cent of its exports were manufactured products, making China a new manufacturing powerhouse after the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and Germany, which had succes- sively claimed the title since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. More importantly, the technological complexity of China’s manufactured exports has also increased steadily, narrowing the gap with developed economies dramat- ically. As a global manufacturing workshop, China has continued to move up the global value chain. With an increased proportion of value added to its manufac- tured exports, and its rapid technological progress, China is now transforming from a technology imitator to an innovator. Thanks to rapid economic development, China’s urbanization ratio has also been rising at a remarkable pace—from 17.9 per cent in 1978 to 58.5 per cent in 2017, equivalent to 1 percentage point every year. This means more than 10 million new urban residents every year. Through its rapid economic growth, China is also contributing greatly to the world’s poverty alleviation efforts. During the same period, more than 700 million people have been lifted over the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day, contributing to more than 70 per cent of the poverty reduction across the world. Justin Yifu Lin and Jun Zhang, China: Learning to Catch up in a Globalized World. In: How Nations Learn: Technological Learning, Industrial Policy, and Catch-up. Edited by Arkebe Oqubay and Kenichi Ohno, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198841760.003.0008 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/5/2019, SPi 150 These accomplishments are little short of miraculous. From the 1950s to the 1980s, China implemented a planned economy and adopted an import- substitution strategy, prioritizing heavy industries. It gave up its potential latecomer advantages and sought to catch up with developed economies through self-reliant industrialization. Nearly thirty years after the founding of the PRC, however, China was still a large poor country. In 1978, China’s per capita income did not even reach one-third that of sub-Saharan African countries, 82 per cent of its people lived in rural areas, and almost 84 per cent lived below the international poverty line. Prior to 1978, constant political movements almost crashed China’s economy. At the National Planning Conference in December 1977, vice premier of the State Council Li Xiannian stated that the loss of national income caused by the decade- long Cultural Revolution was about 500 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 80 per cent of the total value of capital construction investment in the thirty years since the founding of the PRC, and exceeds the total value of fixed assets in China during the same period.¹ While China’s economic success is widely attributed to its economic reform and opening-up policy, it might be better perceived as a learning process. As a latecomer, China has grasped the opportunities to learn both technology and institutions from early developers and has made full use of its advantages. China is without doubt the most successful learner of the past forty years. In this chapter, we will look at how China kicked off its learning journey forty years ago and why historically it stands out in the process of catch-up. We start with Deng Xiaoping and his vision of a development paradigm shift taking the form of quasi-natural experimentation; special economic zones were created in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and a pilot project began for processing low-end exports with incoming capital from Hong Kong and Macau. We then look at the development of the Yangtze River Delta, which accelerated China’s integration with the global economy and led to the establishment of joint ventures between foreign and Chinese firms and wholly foreign-owned enter- prises. Rapid accumulation of human capital and export processing in the Pearl River Delta benefited this region in the early years of reform and opening up, and the development of the Pudong New Area of Shanghai in 1990 was followed by a series of market-oriented reform policies and a package of FDI-friendly policies which brought China’s manufacturing sector into global production chains. China has successfully pushed the process of industrializing its agrarian econ- omy through technology learning and a comparative advantage-based catching- up approach. At the end of this chapter, following the New Structural Economics conceptual framework developed by Justin Lin, we hope to explain why China has ¹ From Sina Blog, 11 December 2013: http//: blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_64892f210101m0v7.html. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/5/2019, SPi - 151 become a successful learner over the past forty years and what lessons it can offer for late latecomers. 8.2 Kicking off the Change 8.2.1 A Starting Point 1976 was a bad year in China with the deaths of Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, and a devastating earthquake which claimed many lives. The year 1978, however, turned out to be rather unusual. At the age of 74, Deng Xiaoping had just returned to his leadership position after being purged three times due to political movements. Although not holding the highest position, thanks to his seniority and influence, Deng was recognized as the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and the state. Before 1978, China had shut itself off from the rest of the world for more than twenty years. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping encouraged the country’s leaders to make study trips abroad, and with thirteen leaders believed to have made twenty trips to foreign countries both in Europe and Asia, 1978 was later named ‘the year of foreign travel’. Deng himself made visits to Japan and Singapore in 1978 and was impressed by their technology advancement and high standard of living. In Japan, he and his wife took a ride on the Japanese Shinkansen high-speed train and visited Panasonic. He became deeply concerned about China’s backwardness and technology distance from Japan. He also showed great interest in how Singapore was utilizing foreign capital to develop its export manufacturing capability.² In April 1978, China’s National Planning Commission and Ministry of Foreign Trade also sent a delegation to Hong Kong and Macau. After returning to Beijing, the delegation submitted a report to the State Council entitled ‘Report on the Economy and Trade of Hong Kong and Macau’. The report recommended that two small towns, Baoan County (the predecessor of Shenzhen), bordering Hong Kong, and Zhuhai County, bordering Macau, be designated export-processing bases in order to strengthen economic and trade ties between the mainland and Hong Kong and Macau. Setting up export-processing zones in Zhuhai and Baoan would exploit the comparative advantages of Guangdong in cheaper land and low- cost labour force, combining with those of Hong Kong and Macao in provision of capital and technology. ² In a speech in October 1979, Deng Xiaoping said: I got some knowledge about how Singapore put foreign capital to use. When foreign investors set up factories in Singapore, Singapore can get multiple benefits: First, the state can get revenue from the 35 per cent of corporate tax; second, labourers can get income; third, it can boost the service industry, which can generate additional income ...I think studying the economic issues should focus on how to make full use of foreign capital. If we don’t use it, it would be a shame. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/5/2019, SPi 152 Vice premier of the State Council Gu Mu also paid a month-long visit to Europe with his team in May 1978, reporting to senior Party leaders on his return. In West Germany, the automation, modernization, and high efficiency greatly impressed the members of the delegation. They learnt that an open-pit coal mine with an annual output of fifty million tons of lignite in West Germany used only 2,000 workers, while in China to produce the same output needed 160,000 workers—eighty times more. In Bern, Switzerland, they were also shocked by a hydroelectric power station with only twelve employees managing an installed capacity of 25,000kW. They knew that in China, a 26,000kW hydropower station employed about three hundred people, implying labour productivity more than twenty times lower. Again, reported Gu and his team, France’s Marseilles-based Solmer Steel had only 7,000 workers to produce an annual output of 3.5 million tons of steel, while China’s Wuhan Iron and Steel (WISCO) employed 67,000 workers to produce an output of 2.3 million tons.