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Enrique J Cordero

Prof. Rick Levitt

International Relations in The Post Cold War Era

Final Written Assignment

December 12, 2013

All aboard the prosperity train! But, who’s driving?

In 1978 the “paramount leader” of the PRC Den

Xiaoping unleashed a set of political and economic

philosophies called the “Four Modernizations”, mainly

oriented to strengthen and modernize China in the

fields of agriculture, industry, national defense and

science and technology. 1 These philosophies turned

into actions and behaviors that transcended China’s

borders (and its wall), sending into high gear what is

arguably today an unstoppable force, globalization (or economic interconnectedness

as some thought leaders would prefer to call it).  

The argument is not that the “Four Modernizations” policies and market-based

economic reforms in China were the origin of what we know today as globalization,

but they clearly marked China’s defection from the stagnant economic concepts of

soviet socialism to a foreign trade open market economy, thus becoming a major

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contributor to the speed and magnitude at which globalization evolved and

continues to evolve today.

The numbers speak for themselves, according to the UNCTADSTAT between 1948

and 1978 the total three-year growth value of global imports and exports for the

developed economies hardly exceeded the 2 trillion dollar mark, but between 1978

and 1987 the same indicator started to grow at a significantly faster pace reaching

~16 trillion dollars in 2008 before the financial crisis. This is an 800% rate of

increase for the same 30-year period. Developing and transition economies had a

very similar behavior as exhibited in the table below, but at a lesser scale.

Concurrently, on the domestic arena it is without doubt that China’s investment

and strategy pinned on the use of their land and labor endowments have generated

not only enormous benefits to their economy, going from $148 Billion GDP in 1978

to $8.2 Trillion GDP in 2012,2 but also unprecedented and unmatched results on

welfare by reducing the portion of their population living on less than $1.25/day

from 85% to 13.1% between 1981 and 2008, roughly 600 million people taken out of

China’s  “Four  Modernizations”  

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poverty (about 2 times the total population of the United States). In fact, this single

result is so impactful that excluding China from the statistics for that same period

the world’s reduction in poverty would be only around 10% versus a 20% reduction

when you factor in China’s numbers.3

Undoubtedly, in 30 years Xiaoping’s “Four Modernizations” propelled the world

economy to embrace probably the greatest influencing force since the

Enlightenment and the French Revolution, overshadowing the impact that the post

WW2 hegemons, the US and the Soviet Union, had in improving either the global

economy or its population’s welfare during the same time period between 1948 and

1978. However, we cannot ignore the role that the US has played as a major

consumer of Chinese products and services fueling the rise of China’s economy and

in and of itself representing the largest transfer of capital endowment between two

nations in the history of mankind.

This leaves several questions that deserve further exploration. Is globalization a

driven force or a driving force? In other words, can globalization be controlled,

modulated or affected by its actors? Or, has it become an operational code that

controls, modulates and affects how the world behaves today? If the answer is the

former, then who is driving the prosperity train? The US? Europe? China? Walmart

and the MNC’s? Because if the answer is the latter it is very clear that globalization

is in the driving seat. But, where?

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REFERENCES

                                                                                                               1 Wikipedia, Ebrey,  Patricia  Buckley.  "Four  Modernizations  Era".  A  Visual  Sourcebook  of  Chinese  Civilization.  University  of  Washington.  Archived  from  the  original  on  OCTOBER  7,  2010.  Retrieved  October  20,  2011.  

2  https://www.google.com/search?q=china+gdp&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

 3  Anup  Shah,  2010  http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-­‐around-­‐the-­‐world#WorldBanksPovertyEstimatesRevised