The Economic Growth of Asia
The Economic Growth of AsiaWorld War 2 in the mid-90's drew a hard blow and left a serious
and lasting effect to many Asian countries. This however, did not
hamper the growth of countries such as China, Japan and Vietnam as
their government were taking serious steps to recover economically.
Thus, the global market cannot deny a place for these 'Asian Dragons',
because these countries are growing at a tremendous pace to the extent
of being capable in emerging as global market leaders.
China's capitalism and boom was born when their president, Deng
Xiaoping permitted the provinces to dismantle their communes and
collective farms. This led China to venture into free-market
economics, although they were still under the communist political
system. When President Deng announced that they needed Western money
and expertise, China flung their trade doors wide open and China went
on a capitalist drive without ever looking back. By mid 1960's, the
Chinese Revolution settled down to the job of ruling China. Its main
goal was essentially nationalist: a prosperous modern economy. While
there continued to exist substantially economic inequalities,
distribution of wealth was probably a bit more equal than in most
Western countries. ( Moise 171 ) While there were great variations in
income between different villages, and between different jobs in the
urban sector, the overall averages showed a clear pattern: the cities
were much richer than the countryside. Most capital investments were
going into urban industries. The urban workers, using considerable
amount of heavy machinery, had a much higher average level of
productivity compared to the rural workers. The natural consequences
was for the city people to arrange themselves an average income level
twice as high as that of the people in the countryside.
The most obvious way to attack this poverty problem was to
increase production, in all sectors of the economy. Though the easiest
way to increase production was to increase capital inputs, China could
only afford a limited amount of capital construction. In accordance to
this, China went on a construction binge. Whole factories were
purchased from abroad while others were built with local resources. By
1978, the frenzy for new projects reached a level that reminded some
people of the Great Leap Forward. In an effort to promote agricultural
production, the government released many of the restrictions on the
'spontaneous capitalist tendencies' of the peasantry. (173) In the
late 1980's, the government decided to expand the scope of private
marketing. Then the next step was to increase the amount land assigned
to the peasants. The peasants were now not responsible to the
government for the use they made to the private plots. They simply
could grow what the wished, for the sale to the government or to
private markets. This led to furious rebuilding and inflow of foreign
investments. All this enabled China to remake itself into Asian's hub
of finance, trade and culture....
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