What does Beijing get right? It’s all about change, China watcher says
Author Hugh Peyman believes Deng Xiaoping’s approach will continue to serve the country well, and ‘as long as China keeps changing, it will find its way’
China’s economic boom over the past four decades has frequently drawn doomsday predictions about its growth machine running out of steam and the country ending up in Japanese-style stagnation, or worse – a Soviet-style collapse.
But the economy has continued to gallop ahead and defy those forecasts, at least up to now.
In his new book, veteran China watcher Hugh Peyman – who has spent the past 40 years in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai – explores the question of what China is getting right.
The answer, he says, is that China knows how to change.
“China ‘gets’ change, today’s West does not,” Peyman writes in China’s Change: the Greatest Show on Earth.
Drawing on his personal observations of the Chinese economy and society, and borrowing from ancient Chinese classics such as The I Ching, or Book of Changes – which dates back more than 2,000 years – Peyman concludes former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s gradualist and pragmatic approach of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” will continue to serve the country well.