Out of the Darkness

Abstract

China's rapid economic growth since 1978 has occurred precisely because it has not followed the strategy of parallel partial progression and financial liberalization advocated by Fan and Woo. However, China missed an historic opportunity to build welfare capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, choosing instead to dismantle its rural health care and educational systems and—as Philip Huang rightly argues—failing to secure workers' right in the burgeoning informal sector. In these respects, China's transition path has been far inferior to that of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nevertheless, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 has discredited Anglo-Saxon capitalism and presents a renewed opportunity for China to build a form of xiaokang socialism modeled on the Rheinish capitalism that was so successful in countries such as France, Germany, and Japan before 1989.