Produced as dossier for the text production course .
The political impact on the economy 4.
The impact of the World Trade Organisation accession 6.
VIII. Future Solutions 6.
IX. Conclusion 7.
X. Bibliography 8.
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I. Introduction.
In the mid-19th century a Lancashire mill-owner said that "if only the Chinese could be persuaded to lengthen their shirts by a foot, the cotton mills of Lancashire would run for ever."" (Lardy, 1998, p. 14) Therein lies the lure of China, with a quarter of the world's population surely the largest untapped market on earth.
In the 1990s, with Deng Xiaoping's proclamation "to get rich is glorious- ringing in their ears, western corporations, politicians and businessmen flocked to China with the promise of huge returns on their investments. Completely ignoring the fact that the Chinese economy was still in the tight grip of the communist bureaucratic central planners, the West poured hundreds of billions of dollars into joint ventures which never, ultimately, bore fruit. The facts that at least 900 million of the supposed 1.3 billion Chinese "consumers-to-be- are landless peasants with little disposable income made experts pessimistic about China's future. (Chang, 2002).
This dossier will first examine the economic history and the current situation and problems of China and will then explore whether China, with the capitalist Hu Jintao as the new leader and many economic reforms in the past, present and future, is on its way to claiming the title of the world's next economic super power.
II. The economic history of China.
China's success over the past two decades created a true economic miracle, the China miracle. " (Yu, 1999, p. 2) As testimony of this, China's gross domestic product has risen to seventh in the world, and its economy has grown at over nine percent over the last 20 years, the best growth performance in the world. .
There were four key turning points in economic policymaking from 1978 to 2002.