Teaching Comparative

Outside influences on policy decisions

The pressure on Chinese policy makers comes from sources that can't be put in jail or censored or ignored -- if China wants to create a market economy.

China Warms to New Credo: Business First

So far this week, the World Trade Organization has rebuffed China in an important case involving Chinese restrictions on imported books and movies. The Chinese government dropped explosive espionage charges against executives of a foreign mining giant, the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto, after a global corporate outcry. And on Thursday, the government said it had backed off another contentious plan to install censorship software on all new computers sold here.

Throughout its long economic boom, China has usually managed to separate its aggressive push into the global business arena from domestic politics, which remained tightly controlled by the Communist Party. But events this week raise the question of just how long it will be before the two meet.

In each of those matters, politics and business collided, and business won. Business does not always win, and when it does, as in these cases, the reasons are as often as not a matter of guesswork. But in at least some high-profile matters, China appears to be facing the reality that the outside business world can be freewheeling and defiant when its profits are threatened. And so China’s authoritarian system may also have to evolve in ways its top leaders may not readily endorse...

Increasingly, many experts say, Chinese officials appear to be aware that their actions have far broader ramifications than they might have had even a few years ago.

“Fifteen years ago, the mantra in China was, ‘We’re the victims of a system that’s stacked against us,’ ” said James V. Feinerman, an expert on Chinese law and policy at Georgetown University in Washington.

China’s entry into the world trading system, he said, is slowly helping to change the nation’s view of itself from that of an outsider to an insider with a stake in the global system’s success...

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Labels: China, economics, globalization, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:16 AM