Inside Out | Four decades of Chinese capitalism show how trade and investments benefit everybody
Foreign enterprises added US$3 trillion to China’s economy since the country opened up to trade and investments, and helped create 210 million jobs, based on Mike Enright’s calculation. Donald Trump should take note, as should India, Indonesia and Vietnam.
Back in the early 1980s, China’s government-owned news agency, Xinhua, organised small exploratory tours into the Pearl River Delta for foreign journalists as the country began the process of opening its doors to the outside world. I joined many of them, and greatly regret that they abandoned the practice soon after.
The overriding memory, as we bumped along muddy roads past quaint and scruffy villages clustered around murky duck ponds and wallowing water buffalo – prettier to photograph than to live in, no doubt – was mile after mile of rice paddy and towering sugar cane fields.
In particular, I remember stopping off to explore a new bus-making venture. Under a high shed roof stood two wheel-less buses sitting on wooden blocks with workers hand-hammering panels of sheet metal. We were told by an apparently proud overseer that they could make six buses a year.
Over a period of 35 years, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) has grown 28-fold. Last year, China made over 24 million cars and 3.7 million commercial vehicles – about one third of total world production, and around six times the size of the US industry.
The story of this growth is a story of foreign investment, and a recent fascinating study by Mike Enright at Hong Kong University and funded by the Hinrich Foundation has tracked that change, and brought some rigorous and hard numbers to the role that foreign investment has played in that transformation.
