Course Description:

The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of patterns and issues in China’s economy over the past sixty years. The course examines two broad periods, strikingly different in their policies and outcomes: 1) the Maoist period, 1949-1979, characterized by a command economy, collectivization, and, ultimately, economic stagnation, and 2) the thirty years beginning with Deng’s 1979 shift to market socialism, a period of high growth rates and achievement of global economic power on the one hand, yet, on the other, of growing income inequality, urban poverty and environmental degradation. For all its unbalanced economic development, China 2009 is the world’s third largest economy and America’s biggest creditor. How it manages the current global economic crisis—as effectively as it did the 1998 Asian crisis or not—has enormous implications for America’s own future. The course aims to help students understand the China model of economic development and where China and the US might jointly provide global leadership on a host of economic issues as the 21st century unfolds. This course fulfills BALS non-Western requirement among others.