Dwight H. Perkins

Rural Development in China.

The topics in this book deal primarily with more or less conventional attempts to measure what happened to agricultural production and the distribution of income, health, and education in the countryside. The approach is both historical and quantitative. Also, the book describes the many shifts and turns in Chinese agricultural policy, which can be explained without resort to political considerations. The book focuses on agricultural production, agricultural growth, institutional changes, income distribution, health care, and rural education. This study is not the definitive work in Chinas rural development experience. It is more a summary of what outsiders have learned about that experience in the past three decades.

There are at least three models of East Asian development

The World Bank study of the High Performing Asian Economies has gotten many of the basic lessons right. Central to this performance was the emphasis on the export of manufactures, the maintenance of macroeconomic stability, and a low level of inequality that, among other things, led to an emphasis on primary and secondary rather than tertiary education. But the study oversimplifies the lessons in important respects by trying to force three quite distinct models of development into a single format. The experience of laissez-faire Hong Kong, and to a lesser degree Singapore, is quite different from that of the interventionist states of Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and these in turn vary significantly from the resource-rich countries of Southeast Asia.

China's modern economy in historical perspective

Why did it take China more than a century after its defeat in the first Opium War to begin systematically acquiring the fruits of modern technology? To what extent did the rapid economic developments after 1949 depend on features unique to China and to Chinese history as well as on the socialist reorganization of society? These are the major questions examined in this collection of papers which challenges many previously accepted generalizations about the nature and extent of advances in Chinas economy during the twentieth century. The papers discuss the positive and negative effects of foreign imperialism on Chinese economic development, the adequacy of Chinas financial resources for major economic initiatives, the state of science and technology in late traditional China, the changing structure of national product and distribution of income, the cotton textile and small machine-building industries as examples of pre-1949 economic bases, the village-market town structure of rural China, the tradition of cooperative efforts in agriculture, and the influence of the Yenan period on the economic thinking of Chinas leaders.

Government as an Obstacle to Industrialization: The Case of Nineteenth-Century China

Few generalizations find wider acceptance among specialists onChina than that which holds that the Chinese Imperial Government was hostile to commerce and industry and that this hostility was a major element in the countrys failure to achieve modern economic growth. There is, of course, an important element of truth in this generalization, but analysis of the issues involved has generally suffered from a failure to make clear just what it was that the Chinese government in the nineteenth century should have done to promote development.

China's economic policy and performance

Few really new economic ideas or policies were put forward during the Cultural Revolution decade, 1966-76. Chinas economic strategy emphasizing machinery and steel was virtually a carbon copy of Stalins development strategy for Russia in the 1930s. Before turning to Chinas development strategy in the Cultural Revolution period, one must first deal with the argument that China had no coherent strategy in the period, because the country was in continual chaos. Politics, of course, was frequently chaotic, but the question here is whether politics regularly spilled over into the economy, causing work stoppages and worse. Chinas basic industrial development strategy was set in the 1st Five-Year Plan, of 1953-57. In terms of sectoral growth strategies, China had made a significant move in the direction of the strategy that had proved so successful among its East Asian neighbors.

Research on the Economy of the People's Republic of China: A Survey of the Field

For nearly two decades, study of the Chinese economy involved constructing pictures of broad macro trends from extremely limited data painstakingly obtained. Given the quantity and quality of data available, a majority of analysts came surprisingly close to the mark in explaining what happened. A few economists attempted to deny that any economic progress had occurred, while there were others who painted a picture approaching Utopia, but these were always in the minority. When China began to open up in the late 1970s and data were once again systematically published, there were some surprises, but much of that written before the opening remained valid. If economists did a reasonably good job of explaining what happened, however, they did much less well explaining why.

East Asian Economic Growth and its Implications for Regional Security

Rapid economic growth in East Asia is changing the nature of international relations in the region. In the economic sphere, mercantilist policies of promoting exports and limiting imports contributed to economic tensions between rapidly growing economies in the region and the regions major trading partner, the United States. These tensions over bilateral trade issues began between Japan and United States, moved on next to South Korea and Taiwan, and have now moved from there to China. In the security field, economic growth in China is leading to a major shift in the balance of power in the region. Chinas steadily increasing GDP is being accompanied by a comparable rise in its military expenditures despite the fact that China faces no obvious external threats at the present time. Chinas long term desire to be able to defend against any outside power probably means that this increase in defense expenditures will continue for the next decade or two. North Korea continues to be a threat to stability in the region but only because of its capacity to do enormous damage in one last suicidal attack. The one area where Chinas rising military expenditures could lead to major confrontation on terms very different from those that would occur today is Taiwan. This is a revised version of an essay titled “Economic Growth in Northeast Asia: Implications for Security” that was prepared for the conference Pursuing Security in a Dynamic Northeast Asia, convened by The National Bureau of Asian Research to mark the launch of the Kenneth B. and Anne H.H. Pyle Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Seattle, WA, November 17–18, 2006, and that was published in Asia Policy, no. 3 (January 2007): 42–47.

China: Converging to What?

Rather than looking at the entire East Asian region, this article studies one of its major economies--that of China--and questions where it is heading. After outlining the history of the Chinese economy over the past two decades, during which it moved toward an increasingly market-based economy, Perkins contends that the Chinese system is still not close enough to the Anglo-American model to comply with international standards as exemplified by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). China is instead closer to the South Korean and Japanese models, where the state plays a greater role in the economy. Yet even this similarity is limited, making Chinas economy unique among all others in the current international order. While China must continue to move toward an economy in accordance with international norms, the current situation requires an international organisation that will recognise Chinas advances rather than demand immediate compliance.

Summary: Why is reforming state owned enterprises so difficult?

Abstract There are two schools of thought on the reform of Chinese state enterprises that argue either that nothing can be done about their reform or that nothing needs to be done. The former argues that bureaucratic resistance will torpedo reform. The latter argues that state enterprises will disappear naturally as collective and private small firms out-compete them. Neither view is very realistic in the Chinese case. Ultimately China will have to successfully reform state-owned enterprises in order to achieve continued high growth. Reforming these enterprises is difficult, however, because so many different and interrelated changes must be made. For the external environment of state enterprises, there must be fundamental changes in financial markets, the tax system, the legal, regulatory and accounting framework, and the worker welfare system. Internal to the enterprise there must be the creation of some kind of property rights plus a revamping of the internal incentive structure of the enterprise.

Meeting basic needs in the People's Republic of China

Abstract China has done well in meeting the basic needs of the great majority of its people. In rural areas where three-quarters of the population live the income of the bottom 20% of the population was increased through redistribution by nearly 90% in the 1950s when compared with the 1930s. Surprisingly, the main redistribution was brought about by the comparatively conventional land reform of the early 1950s, not the cooperative and commune movements of the late 1950s. Communes, however, have played a central role in meeting such other basic needs as health care and the maintenance of full, if often not terribly productive, employment.