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Opinion | A rising China will not become a global aggressor – it has too much to lose and enough space to transform
- While some fear that resurgent communist ideology will undo China’s gains and spark aggression towards other nations, this is unlikely because of how enmeshed China’s economy is with the West
- Seeing China as a system in transition allows for greater space for innovative responses, including to the question of Taiwan and Hong Kong
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Most of the time, China is seen in capitalist economies as a danger because of specific issues of ideology, defence, fears stemming from the US-China conflict and so on. But underlying even this is a fear of the supposed substance of the Chinese political economy – growing unduly fast, communist, militant and threatening, dampening of initiative, rejecting of progressive culture, yielding growth without either welfare or virtue.
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Yet, most people in the West would argue that the major goals of their own political economies are to create growth and reduce socioeconomic inequalities.
For more than a generation, China has maintained startling expansion and in the 1990s alone, according to the United Nations Human Development Report for 2003, lifted some 150 million of its people out of poverty, a number equivalent to half the size of the Chinese middle class or half the population of the entire United States. Both Europe and the US would love to boast the equivalent figures at their more exalted levels of income per head.
Those who argue that this performance could only occur because of the very low base from which the nation started in the 1970s should face the contrary point – historically, combined growth and progressive income redistribution has not occurred in any massive, low-income system. Brazil, for example, is not translating growth into welfare at anything like the Chinese rates.
Those who argue that Chinese higher incomes went to industrial cities at the expense of rural communities inland have a better point, but evidence from nearly all successful economies shows a similar effect at their earlier growth stages, mitigated when incomes flow back from workers in cities to farmsteads through family repatriations, and when equipment and infrastructure built in cities is used in the countryside.
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