Is the “China Model” unique?

In 2005, Huang Yasheng, a Chinese economist at MIT, published his first Chinese book "Foreign Direct Investment in the Reform Era". Compared with this unpronounceable title, its English title is more direct and bold - "Selling China". My then "Economic Observer" column editor Fang Jun recommended this book to me in a timely manner. He knew that I was preparing to write a corporate history work about China's thirty years of reform and opening up. In his book, Huang Yasheng gives a unique perspective on observing China's economic growth. He conducted a comparative study on the performance of three types of enterprises with different ownerships - state-owned enterprises, multinational enterprises and private enterprises in China, and concluded that China's large introduction of foreign investment (FDI) is due to certain essential weaknesses in the Chinese economy; Because of this, foreign investors receive super-national treatment in the Chinese market; relatively speaking, the situation of private enterprises is much pitiful. The research data Huang Yasheng relied on ended around 1998, and he revealed certain characteristics of China's first two decades of reform and opening up. It is different from the development model of Western countries, and it is also very different from the rise stories of other countries in East Asia. In those years, as the scale of China's economy successively surpassed that of the United Kingdom and Germany, discussions on the "China Model" were in full swing, and Huang Yasheng was undoubtedly an active participant in it. Today, six years later, Huang Yasheng's second Chinese book was published. The title is "How Unique is the "Chinese Model"". In this book, this scholar who is elegant by nature but has some fierce words directly puts forward , "In my opinion, China's economic development model is not unique. China implements price liberalization and non-public ownership of enterprises. This is actually the model of a market economy, and China is also following the path of a market economy." In the global context In the research coordinates below, Huang Yasheng pointed out that in terms of successful experience, China's development is similar to that of East Asian countries. In terms of shortcomings, China's shortcomings can also be found in Latin American countries. Compared with a few years ago, Huang Yasheng jumped out of the scope of microeconomics and re-explored the "China Model" from a broader political and economic perspective. Almost as soon as Huang Yasheng's new book was released, another new book "China Shock" also had a red cover and became a hot topic in some circles. Its author is Zhang Weiwei, who served as Deng Xiaoping's English translator and is now a researcher at a foreign university. Zhang’s views contrast with Huang’s. In his view, China and the West are two completely different "civilized countries". China's economic development has its own unique path and model. Politically, the general trend of China's development is not to copy the Western political model, but to On the basis of global interaction, China is increasingly returning to China’s local political concepts, especially the concepts of “popular support” and “merit selection.” Under this premise, Zhang Weiwei believes, "I think China's ruling party is also a ruling group that has fulfilled its destiny. Its destiny is to restore the Chinese nation's status in the world and its status as a global power." Because of academic Due to their different backgrounds, it is difficult to make a clear comparative interpretation of Huang Yasheng’s and Zhang Weiwei’s views. However, after all, they both involve the “Chinese model” and their conclusions conflict with each other. This is a major event happening in China's theoretical circles: people have formed different camps on the question of whether there is a "China model." For a long time, Chinese theoretical circles tended to believe that "China's economic development has a unique development model." To this end, experts have invented many special terms, such as the Wenzhou model, the southern Jiangsu model, the Pearl River Delta model, as well as "incremental reform", "local government corporatism" and so on. Each of these terms has its own meaning, but no one denies that these development models were cultivated from China's unique policy environment. Their comprehensive refinement will likely describe a "China model" that is unique in the world.