Why people still like to talk about the “China Model”?

China’s economy is still growing rapidly, even with the high inflation rate and CPI. It has developed so independently and differently than any other country.

In China, many people are very proud of the country’s rise, they hold the view that China should stick to the path Deng Xiaoping pointed out 30 years ago, that is to open the market and let western investment into china to help its economic development. They believe that China’s rapid growth is due to its special development model, which they call the “China Model”.

Several years after Ramo brought about “Beijing Consensus”, today, anything connected with the “China model” can still spark heated argument in the global academic circle. China’s scholars have also paid much attention to this issue. At the time of the centennial celebration of the founding of the prestigious Tsinghua University, Tsinghua International Centre for Communication Studies (TICC) held a forum called “One Hundred Years of Tsinghua, A Century of the China Model in the Making” on April 20, 2011.

About 18 distinguished scholars and experts from home and aboard shared their ideas about the China Model, Their discussion mainly focused on three aspects: Is there a “China model?” If yes, what are its most striking features? And what development path should China follow in the years to come?

And we could add a fourth: Will the China model be copied by other countries and finally have the potential to challenge the dominant role of the United States?

In fact, no one knows where China is heading and how China’s economy will affect the world. No doubt, China’s rise has aroused fear in the Western countries that have dominated the world economy for hundreds of years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has become the country which has the potential to challenge and change the world economic order lead by the US. So the US has made its strategy simple and clear — make China’s economy collapse, like it did Japan’s.

You may still remember how Japan, which was then the world’s No. 1economic power, collapsed in the 1980s. It was the US strategy of depreciating the dollar against the Yen, which made Japan’s real estate prices and stock market soar rapidly, finally, there was an economic crisis  when people began dumping the  yen and selling stocks on a huge scale. Now, the US has started using the same strategy against China. China’s real estate prices are soaring higher and higher, and the US dollar is depreciating against the Yuan. The US hopes China’s economy will fail as soon as possible.

But it will not easy to be easy to defeat China in this way.

China’s economic system is not like that of Western countries, and definitely not like that of Japan. Nor too China’s political system and culture. Just as a prestigious Chinese scholar, He Xin, once said:  Only China has the potential to fight against the leading Western countries in all aspects — political, economic and cultural.

It is the uniqueness of China that makes China’s economic growth so hard to understand for Western countries. That is also why the Beijing consensus drew so much attention and why people like to talk about the China model.

Is there a China Model? Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has already given the answer, “China‘s development is not ‘a model’, he said at a press conference on March 14, 2011.

Peng Bo is now an intern of the April Media.  Write to Peng Bo at pb.bloomberg@gmail.com

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