Other important policy initiatives have followed and are ongoing,
including the difficult task of breaking up large, inefficient
state-owned industries and reforming the banking system. But as
important as policy has been in this economic revolution,
China has
been aided by other, less-obvious factors. A vitally important one
has been the financial and business expertise the country has been
able to draw upon from legions of overseas Chinese, many of whom
fled the Communist regime, and others who are the ancestors of
people who emigrated during previous troubled times. In places like
Hong Kong and
Singapore,
Europe and the
United States, the Chinese
diaspora flourished. And when their homeland finally opened back up
to the outside, many were eager to both invest and provide
guidance.
Also important, and very much lacking in other formerly Communist
countries, was a remembrance of how to operate in a capitalist
economy. "This is a big difference between China and the Soviet
Union," Lampton says. "The revolution in
Russia was in 1917, and
so by the time you get to the fall of the
Soviet Union, in 1989,
you are into this revolution 70-plus years. Therefore, in Russia,
there wasn't really anybody left who remembered operating a market
economy. It had been wiped out." In China, on the other hand, where
Mao ruled for less than 30 years, the skills necessary to build
businesses and be entrepreneurial - not to mention to formulate
policies that encouraged these things - were not yet completely
eradicated.
As China continues to grow at such a fast clip, it also has been
helped by its citizens' somewhat remarkable (particularly in
comparison to most Americans) ability to stash away money they
earn. "They have a very high national savings rate," says Robert
Dunn, an economics professor at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C. "That, of course, enables them to invest a
tremendous amount in plant equipment and infrastructure and
whatever they need, because they've got a lot of savings."