Chrystia Freeland: China's Economic Model Isn't the Answer for the U.S.
[Chrystia Freeland is global editor at large for Thomson Reuters. She is writing a book about the global super-elite.]
Forget the "Ground Zero mosque," Michelle Obama's Spanish holiday and even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When future historians look back to the summer of 2010, the event they are most likely to focus on is China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy....
So far, China's rise has mostly been about industrializing an incredibly poor, rural economy. Even today, China's $3,600 per capita GDP is roughly on par with those of El Salvador and Albania. We haven't seen whether centrally run China will be able to take the next step and compete at the cutting edge of technological and financial innovation. When South Korea went through the same transition in the 1980s, it also shifted to a much more democratic form of government and freer version of capitalism....
In fact, China is an object lesson in the threat that centralized, authoritarian states pose to revolutionary technological development. One of the big questions historians wrestle with is why China, which was on the brink of industrial revolution in the 14th century, then seemed to give up on radical technological change, ceding the initiative to Europe....
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Forget the "Ground Zero mosque," Michelle Obama's Spanish holiday and even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When future historians look back to the summer of 2010, the event they are most likely to focus on is China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy....
So far, China's rise has mostly been about industrializing an incredibly poor, rural economy. Even today, China's $3,600 per capita GDP is roughly on par with those of El Salvador and Albania. We haven't seen whether centrally run China will be able to take the next step and compete at the cutting edge of technological and financial innovation. When South Korea went through the same transition in the 1980s, it also shifted to a much more democratic form of government and freer version of capitalism....
In fact, China is an object lesson in the threat that centralized, authoritarian states pose to revolutionary technological development. One of the big questions historians wrestle with is why China, which was on the brink of industrial revolution in the 14th century, then seemed to give up on radical technological change, ceding the initiative to Europe....