But that kind of growth has come to an end. And because of that, they have been able to produce cheap goods for the whole world and become the factory of the world. That defined the previous three decades of growth of moving people from rural areas to urban areas, equipping them with good tools and machines and capital. Can China keep increasing people's productivity in the future? Somebody who was working in a farm years ago is now working in a factory and is just producing more wealth. One reason you say that China's economy has grown so much over the past few decades is that the individual worker is way more productive. INSKEEP: You write something else that I hadn't thought about in quite this way before. Is it going to have the most cutting-edge technologies, the greatest military power? None of this is measured by the size of the Chinese economy. ![]() But is it going to be rich as the U.S.? Absolutely not. I think if China rose 1.5% faster than the U.S., then almost certainly, in 10, 15 years, the Chinese economy will be the largest in the world. There's a fundamental difference between the two. JIN: I don't know if this is a very meaningful concept because it could well be the largest economy simply because of its size, because of 1.3 billion people, not because it's rich. INSKEEP: Do you think China is certain to become the world's largest economy in the next decade or so? And hence, this is where our clashes come from. The Chinese foreign students who have traveled abroad - ultimately, most of them decide to come back and return home and bring their knowledge or carry out their innovation to create the relevant lifestyles in China. The Chinese are still Chinese after they joined the WTO. The thing that we have to accept is that even if there is economic convergence with globalization, there has not been so much convergence of values or systems, political systems, as we've seen. Isn't it really, though, a clash of values? They weren't willing to accept Chinese censorship. INSKEEP: You write that Google chose not to comply with regulatory restrictions, and so their business has been severely restricted in China. But if we actually look at the data in China, the foreign companies actually get more subsidies than domestic companies. And I'm not saying that there are no discriminations against foreign companies. Of course, there are information-related companies like Google and Facebook that has met with challenges, restrictions, outright bans, etc. Apple did super well, and it continues to thrive. Same thing with eBay, which it drove out. Amazon didn't do so well, not because of discrimination but because Alibaba is very powerful, and it caters to the Chinese tastes. If we take the automotive industry or the mobile phone industry, I'd say that in many of these at least consumer-oriented sectors, it's just about competition. JIN: There are lots of Western firms that have succeeded in all sectors, with the exception of the sensitive ones or the strategically important ones of the government, where there's restrictions on foreign investment. American business leaders complain of unfair competition in China. ![]() And when it's not, entrepreneurs often push it to change. But she maintains the state apparatus has often been very smart economically. Americans think about the overpowering bureaucracy of the Communist state, which is true. In fact, she argues that Americans get a lot of things subtly wrong. "The New China Playbook" offers a different perspective than many Western policymakers do about China. INSKEEP: She teaches now at the London School of Economics, and she has written a book about the economic development of her native country. INSKEEP: And you ended up going to college in the United States, as well, right? for high school as a Chinese exchange student when I was 14. KEYU JIN: I grew up in Beijing, but I chose to go to the U.S. The writer and scholar Keyu Jin has a foot in each of two worlds.
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