CIAO DATE: 11/2008
March 2004
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Professor Yu Keping is the Director of the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics (CCCPE) of Beijing University, a leading institution in the study of comparative political economy in the People’s Republic of China. He graciously accepted my invitation to join the Globalization and Autonomy research project as an expert adviser shortly after the project began in 2002. In this working paper, Professor Yu Keping speaks about the emergence and growth of debates and discussions of globalization in China. He notes that these debates have grown in significance as the People’s Republic has moved to open its economy and to ‘reform’ its internal economic structures. He discusses some of the different views of globalization found in the Chinese academy and adds that some scholars wish to confine the concept to economic developments. Others speak of the political and cultural globalizing processes and of their potential threat to Chinese political autonomy and cultural distinctiveness. In tracing the lines of these debates, Yu Keping moves then to examine the similarities and differences between them and intellectual discussions earlier in the 20th century focused on the relationship between Chinese cultural uniqueness and Westernization and between socialism and capitalism. He concludes that although there are some similarities between current debates on globalization and these earlier discussions, the globalization debates appear now to be superseding some of the binary oppositions in the earlier ones. Chinese scholars increasingly accept that China is in globalization, that this position offers the country some advantages, particularly in the economic realm, and that it poses some challenges. The challenges come both from the dominance of globalization by the developed countries and from devising policies that preserve these advantages, while defending and expanding Chinese economic, political and cultural autonomy.
Resource link: From the Discourse of "Sino-West" to "Globalization": Chinese Perspectives on Globalization [PDF] - 149K