China's Next Stage of Growth: Reassessing U.S. Policy toward China

ISSN： 1080-3920

Source： American Foreign Policy Interests, Vol.32, Iss.6, 2010-11, pp. : 347-362

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Abstract

After three decades of economic reforms and opening-up policies, China is entering a new stage of development. As a result of the third wave of globalization and the ongoing global crisis, the large emerging economies are catching up. China is now moving from industrial take-off to technological maturity. This transition has been the fastest in China's more prosperous coastal regions. It is driven by an investment-led national strategy reinforced by industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of a new middle class. Because of extraordinarily rapid growth, China is set to overtake the United States in terms of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the 2020s. In the most prosperous urban regions, prosperity levels will catch up with those of some European nations in the course of the 2010s. The basic framework of U.S. policy toward China was created amid the peak of the cold war. There is a case to be made that basic elements should be reassessed in light of China's next stage of growth and structural shifts in the global economy. That reassessment is vital especially in U.S.-Chinese economic relations because they hold the potential to facilitate global recovery—or constrain it.