22. December 2008 by admin.

Even many Western economists think China has discovered its own road to prosperity, dependent largely on state financing and control. They are quite wrong.

DECEMBER 2008 • Yasheng Huang

In This Article

• Exhibit: Entrepreneurial capitalism may be found in urban centers such as Beijing or Shanghai but also in more rural areas such as Wenzhou or Shenzhen.

• About the authors
• Letters to the editor

The credibility of American-style capitalism was among the earliest victims of the global financial crisis. With Lehman Brothers barely in its grave, pundits the world over rushed to perform the last rites for US economic ideals, including limited government, minimal regulation, and the free-market allocation of credit. In contemplating alternatives to the fallen American model, some looked to China, where markets are tightly regulated and financial institutions controlled by the state. In the aftermath of Wall Street’s meltdown, fretted Francis Fukuyama in Newsweek, China’s brand of state-led capitalism is “looking more and more attractive.” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius hailed the global advent of a Confucian-inspired “new interventionism”; invoking Richard Nixon’s backhanded tribute to John Maynard Keynes, Ignatius declared, “We are all Chinese now.”

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