Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

By the mid-1990s, it became clear that China’s huge internal

market was becoming more and more attractive to foreign capital.

While only 10 per cent of the population may have possessed the

purchasing power of a nascent and growing middle class, 10 per

cent of more than a billion people constituted a huge internal

market. The competitive race was on to provide them with auto-

mobiles, mobile phones, DVDs, televisions, and washing

machines, as well as with shopping centres, highways, and ‘luxury’

homes. Monthly car production rose gradually from around

20,000 in 1993 to just over 50,000 in 2001, but thereafter leapt

upwards to nearly 250,000 monthly by mid-2004. A 

flood of for-

eign investment –– everything from Wal-Mart and McDonald’s to

computer chip production –– poured into China in anticipation of

rapid future internal market growth, in spite of institutional

uncertainties, the uncertainties of state policy, and the evident

dangers of overcapacity.

30

The heavy reliance on FDI makes China a special case, very

di

fferent from Japan or South Korea. Chinese capitalism is not

well integrated as a result. Inter-regional trade is rather weakly

developed, even though there have been massive investments in

new means of communication. Provinces such as Guangdong trade

far more with the outside world than they do with the rest of

China. Capital does not 

flow easily from one part of China to

another, in spite of a recent spate of merger activity and state-led

e

fforts to create regional alliances among different provinces.

31

Reliance on FDI will therefore diminish only to the extent that

resource allocation and capitalist interlinkages improve within

China itself.

32

China’s external trading relations have mutated over time, but

tải về 190.05 Kb.

Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn: