An interesting debate has been going on in the West since the Great Recession which embroiled the Western economies but which had a marginal effect on the Chinese economy. This starkly different effect of the Recession on the West and on China has drawn attention to the strength and resilience of the Chinese economy and spawned this debate. Two ideas on China can no longer be denied attention. Firstly, that despite the stated ideology, the capitalistic nature of the Chinese economy can no longer be denied. Secondly, the astonishing Chinese growth of last 3 decades is not merely an objective fact, but when examined in comparative terms it has hugely important strategic dimensions. Chinese economic power has quickly changed global power equations and the West cant believe that it has to grapple with a China which threatens to outstrip Western power levels. Many in the West still do not realize that things could be going out of hand.
The main issue which has sparked debates and discussions on this topic were:
China Does Capitalism Better Than America (video & transcripts)
For the motion: Orville Schell - Prof, UC, Berkley and Peter Schiff - CEO & chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital and TV contributor. Peter Schiff is a legend. He predicted-dissected the American mortgage bubble
with superb clarity long before it became a global crisis.
Against the motion: Ian Bremmer - founder and president of Eurasia Group, Teaching at Columbia University; Minxin Pei - Prof., Claremont Mckenna College
The Outcome - At the beginning of the night, 17 percent of the crowd at NYU’s
Skirball Center voted for China’s state-based capitalism, 50 percent
backed America’s market-based capitalism, and 33 percent were undecided.
Two hours later, the pro-China ranks had dwindled to 9 percent, 85
percent favored the United States, and 6 percent were undecided.
Debater Orville Schell's articles/interviews on the issue
This is a review by a Libertarian on the I2 debate mentioned above.
Other articles related to this topic are:
The U.S. Must Learn From China's State Capitalism to Beat It
Richard A. D'Aveni, Prof., of Strategy at Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College in The Atlantic.
Prof. Li has a Leftist orientation.
Book Reviews of Books on related topic
1. How China Became Capitalist by Economics Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase and Professor Ning Wang. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
i) http://www.american.com/archive/2012/november/how-china-became-capitalist
ii) http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305741012000938 Review by Yongshun Cai in The China Quarterly 2012
Luke McDonagh, Fellow LSE.
By Alberto Mingardi, CATO Institute (Liberal think tank)
