From Foreign Policy, via A Glimpse of the World (link):
For China today, the questions on everybody’s lips are: Can the People’s Republic survive so much change? Can China’s performance sustain its pace? What steps are needed next? Minxin Pei addresses the first two of these three questions, and his answers are not flattering. Actual conditions on the ground in China, however, suggest there is little reason to be so pessimistic.
China’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth has now outperformed other Asian “miracle” economies. Last year’s economic census, conducted after several decades of improvement to China’s statistical system, presents a clearer picture of the country’s economic performance than was available a decade ago, when Western scholars “improved” official statistics by shaving them. China grew, on average, 10 percent a year during the past 15 years. World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data show that the best 15-year average performances for South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan never reached 10 percent. Furthermore, China’s growth potential is huge. Its per capita GDP is just 5 percent of the U.S. level. South Korea had roughly the same growth gap with the United States in the 1960s, and continued rapid growth is even more likely in China today than it was in Korea then, thanks to new technologies.
Can China continue this incredible pace? Five factors suggest it can.
