China's economic development and cultural renaissance in the multipolar growth world of the twenty-first century

Abstract

Based on Malinowski's definition of culture as an integral whole of artifacts, organizations, and values, this paper analyzes the possibility of China's rapid economic development leading to a revival of Chinese culture with ren (benevolence) as its core value. Emerging economies such as India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and Indonesia have their own unique cultural heritages. In the twenty-first century multipolar growth world, they are also likely to maintain their respective core values and become modern nations like the forerunning Western industrialized nations, Japan, and Korea. The twenty-first century is likely to be a time of all civilizations developing, prospering, and shining together.

Keywords:

• economic development
• China
• Ren

JEL codes:

• O53
• N01

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Francesca Yu Sang, Yan Wang, and Julia D. Barmeier for their help in preparing the English draft of the paper.

Notes

1. According to the study of Cipolla (1980) on European society during AD1000 to AD 1700, compared to China over the same period, Cipolla found that the West was essentially agrarian, poor, and underdeveloped, whereas China was industrialized, rich, and developed.

2. According to Maddison (2006), in PPP terms, the Chinese economy accounted for 33% of the world economy in 1820, 11% in 1900, and only 4.6% in 1950.

3. This view is similar to the cultural determinant of Max Weber. In his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1958) postulated that the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism are as a result of the Protestant Reformation, which formed the Protestant Ethic and broke down the control of the Roman Catholic Church. Until now, the view of ‘modernization preceded by westernization’ has remained quite popular among developed and developing countries (Huntington 1996).

4. In China Miracle, Lin, Cai, and Li (1994) forecasted that by 2030, China would surpass Germany, Japan, and the United States to become the largest economy in the world. At that time, few people believed us. But now this has become the mainstream consensus among many scholars and international think tanks. For new studies on China becoming the largest economy, see Subramanian (2011) and World Bank (2011). The latter also provides evidence on the coming of a multipolar growth world in the twenty-first century.

5. Malinowski's definition can be found in his Theory of Culture, translated by Fei Xiaotong.

6. The definition of culture with three integral components is a useful framework for analyzing China's social and political development after the Opium War. At the beginning, Chinese intellectuals only realized that China needed to upgrade its artifacts. That was why China engaged in a Foreign Affairs Movement to acquire Western weapons and machines while attempting to maintain the Chinese traditional system and values. After China's defeat in Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Chinese intellectuals recognized the backwardness of their country's organizations. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao advocated for a constitutional monarchy and Sun Yat-Sen led a revolution to establish China as a republic. After World War I, the humiliating Treaty of Versailles woke up Chinese intellectuals. They realized the importance of ideas and values and started the May Fourth New Culture Movement to advocate for democracy and science (Lin 2011a).

7. The difference between dominant culture and weak culture lies in economic base. Currently, many civilizations are concerned with American's cultural invasion. But only 100 years ago, the United States was considered a cultural desert. Over this time, the core value of American culture has not changed, but what has transformed the United States from a cultural ‘desert’ into a dominant culture is its advanced economic base. As the United States became the largest and most powerful economy, the American lifestyle and values also became popular globally. Similarly, the Western culture as a civilization was born from the Greek and Roman civilizations in the eighth and ninth century, but did not become the dominate culture until the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century when Western economic achievement started to exceed all other civilizations.

8. Some research findings show that, in the Ming Dynasty, Chang Zhi County in today's Shanxi Province produced about 700,000 sets of farm tools and exported them to Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and other neighboring countries. The capitalist system of employment relations had already emerged.

9. Another possible reason behind a powerful China before the eighteenth century was that China had maintained unity among its huge population, which created a larger market with a more intensive division of labor, and therefore higher productivity, as emphasized in The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (Lin 2007).

10. To borrow technology does not imply that China does not need indigenous R&D. In some industries and technological fields in which China has the cutting edge advantages, China needs its own R&D for further upgrading. In addition, China should adapt foreign technologies to fit Chinese conditions, which also requires R&D. Moreover, it is only through such follow-up adaptation that China will be able to develop and innovate its own technologies and industries, as it approaches the global technology frontier.

11. The per capita income data in this paragraph is taken from Angus Maddison's Historical Statistics of the World Economy: 1–2008 AD (http://www.ggdc.net/maddision/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_02-2010.xls).

12. Though this is an old Chinese saying, many psychological studies have found that one's value orientation formed before the age of seven is hard to change.

13. Currently, in addition to the Western civilization, there are several major civilizations in the world, including those of China, Japan, India, Islam, Orthodox, Latin America and Africa (Huntington 1996).