Trade Wars Are Class Wars: Part IV -- Four Phases of Chinese Economic Development - a podcast by After the End of History

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Thanks for listening,
Mario and Tom 

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Concluding our discussion of Pettis & Klein's Trade Wars Are Class Wars, we take a deeper look at the authors' economic history of China from the Deng reforms to the current period. What are we to make of their claim that China today faces three alternatives, each hugely consequential for the country's economic viability: growing debt, increasing unemployment or a shift to household consumption?

Other works under discussion include Isabella M. Weber's new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy,  to compare the market reform period in China to other, far less successful historical developments in Eastern Europe; Alexander Gerschenkron's Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective to explain how non-capitalist developing countries could overcome low productivity through state intervention; and finally, Maurice Meisner's Mao's China and After to help describe Deng Xiaoping's historical legacy, particularly as he relates to Pettis & Klein's argument for a return to the "spirit of '78." 

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“As China’s economy continues to slow, the central government in Beijing will necessarily forge a new relation with China’s various elite groups. New institutions will be created that will determine the nature of Chinese economic growth over the rest of the century. What that new relation and those new institutions will look like is anyone’s guess. The best outcome is that income shifts from the elite to ordinary households: this is the rebalancing that should in principle reduce China’s need to force its deficient domestic demand onto the rest of the world.” (Klein and Pettis, 2020) 

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