.jpg)
Students' comments
(Un) Common Read: China's Economy
IDH2930, UF Honors Program
Course description
What drives China’s economic growth miracle within nearly 40 years and how China will go in the future after the phase of high-speed growth? Arthur Kroeber, in China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, provides the general readers as well as specialists with the clear, factual, updated, and balanced narratives of China’s economic structure. It starts with a thorough explanation of the uniqueness of China’s political economy during the economic transition and how it shaped China’s economic development. In the rest of his book, he probes into a series of question relevant to 12 aspects of economy, which includes rural to urban transition and agriculture development, industrialization and the rise of the export economy, urbanization infrastructure, enterprises system, fiscal system and local government, financial system, energy and the environment, demographics and the labor market, emerging consumer economy, inequality and corruption, the debate on growth model change, and the role of China’s growth and the world. Many discussions and controversial questions proposed in this book, such as “Is China’s economic success the result of cheating on global trade and investment rules?” “How should the U.S. respond to the rise of China?” “Is China trying to replace existing global institutions with new ones of its own creation?” etc., synchronize with the recent debates in medium, academia, and police-makings in China, the U.S., and the rest of the world. Arthur Kroeber’s professional experience in China, straightforward observations and insightful comments help readers who are not familiar with China or Economics to engage in exploring the relations between contemporary governance and economic development.
The purpose of this course is to confront students with what leads to China’s rise through a “jigsaw puzzle-solving approach” by reading, discussion, debate, survey, basic data analysis, presentation, and the final project of critical writing. This will open the door to understanding not only how China’s economy flexibly interacts with its political, fiscal, financial, social, law, and environmental structures but also what China’s growth and development pattern mean to the world in a critical way.
The course will follow a discussion format for the 13 chapters of the book. Apart from the first class in which the discussion is fully led by the instructor, each class will have two sessions. In the first session, one or two students will present their findings by searching for empirical evidence to support or refute at least one of Arthur Kroeber’s opinions in the previous chapter. In the second session, we will revisit some points in the previous class by discussing the students’ presentations and then discuss the questions proposed by the author in a new chapter.
Required reading
Kroeber, A. R. (2016). China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know? Oxford University Press.
Suggested readings
Lieberthal, K. (2003). Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform, 2nd edition, W. W. Norton & Company.
Lin, J. Y. (2012). New structural economics: A framework for rethinking development and policy, The World Bank.
Yang, X., Lewis, D. J., Roddy, S., & Moise, D. (2018). One Belt, One Road, One World: Where is US Business Connectivity? In: Zhang W., Alon I., Lattemann C. (Eds.) China's Belt and Road Initiative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham: Palgrave Studies of Internationalization in Emerging Markets.
(More interesting medium reports and papers for reference will be added after the spring course begins)