China's Economic Rise and Its Global Implications

Catalog description

China’s meteoric rise from impoverished backwater to the world’s second biggest economy has been the most disruptive global economic event of the past three decades. China has enabled a profitable reorganization of international production chains and created the world’s largest emerging cohort of middle-class consumers. Competition from and outsourcing to China has also subjected advanced economies to enormous pressure, which is now expressed in a wave of political populism that threatens to undermine the elite consensus in favor of globalization. And China is trying to convert its economic strength into political power, through its ambitious Belt-and-Road international infrastructure initiative, and a more assertive foreign policy in Asia. Using a political-economic analytic framework, this course will provide a rigorous understanding of the causes of China’s economic rise, constraints on the rate and structure of future growth, the impact of it economic development on the advanced economies and its Asian neighbors, China’s probable role in global innovation and technological change, and the geopolitical challenges posed by a shifting power balance in the Asia Pacific.