China's Supergrowth Likely To Run Five More Years

Credits: World Bank ׀ Enlarge

Brad DeLong (Dec 01, 2015) - China has hitherto kept growing and growing rapidly, even without anything a North Atlantic economic historian would see as the rule of law. It has had its own system of what we might call industrial neofeudalism. Instead of the king's judges enforcing property and contract rights, Chinese entrepreneurs have protection via their fealty to connection groups within the party that others do not wish to cross. Historically, the Hamiltonian strategy of moving farmers to factories and setting them to work using imported manufacturing technology is the only reliably successful development strategy because manufacturing technology is the only one that can be reliably imported. You buy the machines to make the products, you buy the blueprints for the products to be made and, with a few engineering coaches hired from abroad - and you are in business. 

Start of Second Sino-Japanese War 1937 + 51.6 Years =
Tiananmen Square US Color Revolution Attempt June 4, 1989
People's Republic of China established Oct 1, 1949 + 72 Years = 2021
Mao Zedong meets Richard Nixon Feb 21, 1972 + 51.6 Years = 2023
Deng Xiaoping starts economic reforms 1978 + 51.6 Years = 2029

But that requires that people outside your country buy your low-priced manufactures. And the world has reached a point at which demand for manufactured goods is no longer highly elastic [...] After the 2015 stock market crash, China is likely to have another five, maybe ten, years of very healthy growth. The party can redistribute income from the rich to the middle and the poor and from the coasts to the interior. Mammoth demand from an enriched urban middle class and peasantry can provide business for all of China's factories that otherwise would be selling into an export market with lower-than-expected demand elasticity. The interior can be brought up to the manufacturing productivity standards of the coast (see also HERE)