La Cina guarda ad Ovest

Abstract

This text analyses the main economical and social transformations that took place in China since the birth of PRC until today, with a certain focus on their development strategy known as Western Development Strategy. The intent of this research is to explain how various policies adopted in China during the years have influenced the creation of economical and social differences and whether this new strategy is really capable of creating a sustainable economic development. From its beginnings, the development strategy of PRC has been characterized by periodical changing of the economic model for the future. Setting these models of nation’s development strategy towards the east and west was conditioned with different both internal and external circumstances and changing government’s objectives every now and then. Their program had to consider both emphasis on economic efficiency and the political necessity for balanced development between regions. At different stages, different objectives prevailed. When the government focused on redressing past imbalances in the 1950s, it allocated most investment resources to the western region. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, increasing military and national security concerns made the government launch the third-front projects. From the mid-1980s, when maximization of economic growth became the primary goal, the central government pushed through the Coastal Development Strategy. From the mid-1990s, the confluence of widening regional disparities, mounting complaints from western leaders, increasing separatist activities and the perceived worsening security environment along China’s southeast coast has led the central leaders to reverse the development priority from fast growth of the coastal region to emphasis on a more balanced regional development strategy. This eventually resulted in the launching of the Western Development Strategy. Focusing on the construction of massive infrastructure projects, restoration of the ecological environment, restructuring of existing economic sectors and the development of science and technology, the Western Development Strategy has been envisioned as a plan to completely reinvent and modernize China. But the initiation of the program does not necessarily guarantee its success. Given the mammoth amount of investment capital required and the declining financial resources now under the central government’s control, it is questionable whether the government will be able to effectively promote balanced economic development in a market economy. Other government initiatives to attract foreign investment and promote regional cooperation also face tremendous challenges. Beside the economic analysis, this research tries to investigate the social transformations in different phases of the country’s policy and seeks to provide a framework both for estimating structures of Chinese inequality in successive epochs of revolution and reform and for perceiving the changing relationship between social movements and structures of inequality. Persistent inequality that, defined broadly in terms of income, wealth, life chances and basic needs entitlements, has resulted from three durable hierarchies—class, citizenship and location—whose mechanisms and intersection have been in flux across time and space in the past half-century. During the revolutionary and reform eras, the hierarchy of unequal citizenship as well as economic and political inequalities in the form of class and spatial hierarchies have given rise to distinctive patterns of popular resistance. In this research special attention is given to these three forms of hierarchy so the evolution of the class struggles could be understood more profoundly.