October 2024 | In our fifth webinar of this year’s “Staying in Dialogue with China” series, we spoke to Prof. YU Miaojie, President and University Chair Professor of Liaoning University, and Liberal-Art Chair Professor of Peking University, about China’s “economic globalization” as a fifth structural transition as per CMG’s conceptual framework of China’s political economy.
China in the 1980s embarked on a gradual and selective path of opening up its by then closed economy to the world – understanding that foreign investment and technologies were critical to the country’s catch-up development. In the years that followed, most notably after China acceded the WTO in 2001, the Chinese economy rapidly integrated with the world across trade and investment and started its climb in global value chains. At the same time, foreign investment flocked to China to make use of a skilled and comparatively cheap workforce, and in later days increasingly of a highly competitive and dynamic manufacturing and innovation ecosystem. A classic win-win situation.
Around 2015 (publication of “Made in China 2025”), and especially 2016 with the election of US-president Trump, however, the US and increasingly also the EU and other countries started pushing back against China’s export-oriented development model that had run large annual trade surpluses and become a significant economic player and competitor internationally in a number of industries. China, in turn, with the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) unveiled its ‘dual circulation’ strategy to respond to a more complex global environment – among others in an attempt to make its own economy less dependent on external inputs and strengthen its overall resilience.
To date, the global economic integration has brought great benefits to China, but amid an altered geoeconomic and geopolitical context, how will top-level policymaking evolve? What does Beijing mean with “high-level opening up”? What are policy and market trends for the continued “going out” of Chinese companies? What will Beijing do about the issue of “overcapacity” invoked by many Western governments, as well as its structurally large trade imbalance? In view of some new trade policy measures of the Third Plenum, will we see a stronger trade diversion targeting the Global South? What importance do policymakers still assign to FDI and is it in China’s interest to provide a better level playing field domestically? How is China’s financial integration with the world going to evolve? What role shall and can the RMB play in all this?
YU Miaojie is President of Liaoning University, University Chair Professor of Liaoning University, and Liberal-Art Chair Professor of Peking University.
He serves as an associate editor of Review of International Economics, China Economic Journal, and editorial member for around 10 prestigious international academic journals. He also serves as the executive editor of International Trade (in Chinese), the official journal of Ministry of Commerce of China.
Professor Yu’s research includes international trade, open economy, and Chinese economy development. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and 22 books both in English and Chinese, including prestigious peer-review academic journals such as The Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics and Journal of Development Economics. His book “China-US Trade War and Trade Talk” wins the 2021 China New Development Award of the Springer Press. He has been the only Chinese scholar who was awarded the British Royal Economic Society (RES) Prize.
He holds his Ph.D. in economics from University of California.
Check out the webinar transcript
Comentários