Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Geremie Barme
Why does China still conduct military parades?
On Thursday, October 1st, Beijing hosted the sixtieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic. The Communist Party leadership has elevated the event into a state-religious holiday, of sorts, centered on a massive military parade –including five thousand soldiers arranged partly by height – followed by a civilians’ parade involving a hundred thousand citizens. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale
Last week China celebrated the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic and the installation of the Chinese Communist Party government. During the week we ran a number of essays reflecting on the impact of these events over the subsequent sixty years on China and around the world. In today’s feature Yiping Huang underlines the economic achievements of the past thirty years, wrought by the introduction of free markets in goods and services following thirty years of economic control and command. But the legacy of control and command, he reminds us, still limits the achievement of China’s full economic potential, through the distortions it continues to impose on the operation of the country’s factor markets – the markets for labour, capital, land and energy. Read more…
Author: Yiping Huang, Peking University and ANU
When Mao Zedong arrived in Beijing sixty years ago with his comrades from Yan-an, a remote town in Northwestern Shaan-xi province, he probably did not intend to ban free markets across the country. The socialist transformation began when Mao set his eyes on overtaking the United States. This was to be achieved, according to him, through the development of heavy industries, especially the steel industry.
The central planning system was established to maximize urban industrialization, but the development of urban industries required funding. Read more…
Author: Stanley Lubman, Berkeley
China has come a long way in creating a legal system—and has a long way to go if the avowed aim of ‘ruling the country by law’ is to be realized. At the same time, considering that legal development has really been carried out for only half of the time that has elapsed since the founding of the People’s Republic, the accomplishments are considerable.
What remains in doubt is the depth of the commitment of the current Chinese leadership to further develop key institutions, and whether Chinese society will be stable enough to nourish those institutions.
Author: William O’Chee, former Senator
For some time commentators have been discussing how the rise of China will change the Asia-Pacific region, but that may be less significant than how China’s involvement in the region, and the greater world, will change China.
China as a rising regional power will transform the politics, and also the economy, of the Asia-Pacific. But this region has actually been in post-colonial flux for some time. In fact, there may be an argument that the seeming stability of American hegemony has been but a passing interlude on the way to something else.
Author: Jerome A Cohen, NYU
In a bold reflection of their revolutionary zeal, when China’s Communists established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, they totally rejected the legal regime of their Kuomintang predecessors that had been at least nominally grounded in European law. Sun Yat-sen had been more practical when he established the Republic of China after the 1911 Revolution. His new government decided to use what it could from the previous regime and benefit from the considerable Western-influenced law reform effort that had been made by the Manchu (Qing) dynasty for more than a decade before its collapse. Even Lenin opted for as much legal continuity as possible between the Czarist government and its Bolshevik successor, preferring to add socialist flourishes to the impressive pre-1917 Russian law codes that had been imported from Western Europe half a century earlier, deleting as necessary rather than starting from scratch.
Author: Richard Rigby, ANU China Institute
There are many ways in which a relationship can be mutually beneficial – diplomatically, politically, commercially, educationally, economically. As someone who’s been involved in the Australia-China relationship in one way or another since the beginning of the 1970s, I’m struck by how one can now tick more and more items off, and add new one’s to the list.
The decision to establish relations in late 1972 with the election of the Whitlam government was clearly mutually beneficial, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it.
Author: Peter Drysdale
In a few days the People’s Republic of China celebrates is sixtieth anniversary. Over the coming week we have invited leaders and scholars inside and outside China to reflect on where China has come over the past sixty years and where it might be headed in the future. We begin the series with reflections by former Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, on the impact of Deng Xiaoping’s commitment to opening up on Australia and the rest of the world. He claims, rightly I believe, that, as China embarked upon its remarkable transformation, Australia developed an exceptional relationship with China, the strength of which has been remarked upon and valued not only because of the mutual benefits it has brought to both Australia and China but also by other powers as they sought to comprehend and manage China’s emerging role in the world. Read more…
Author: Bob Hawke, former Australian Prime Minister
Next week will see the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the ‘new China’, the People’s Republic of China. No country other than China has a greater reason to look back with gratification and satisfaction over those 60 years of the remarkable development of China, than Australia. We have been an extraordinary beneficiary of China’s economic growth.
If we look in detail over the 60 year history of the People’s Republic, it is inevitable we will zero in on 1978. That year saw the single most important decision taken by any national leader in the twentieth century. That was of course, the decision of Deng Xiaoping in late 1978, to open up China to the outside world and move China towards a market economy.