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LookingGlass by Glasshouse Forum No. 3/2009 (Autumn 2009)

A China Model? Understanding the Evolution of a “Socialist Market Economy”, Orion A. Lewis and Jessica C. Teets, 2009, 25 pp.

In February 2009, Glasshouse Forum convened leading academics from China and from the West to a China-West Intellectual Summit near Paris. It was manifest that the Chinese participants considered China well positioned to handle the global economic crisis. There was some uncertainty however over how to characterise the system in Kina and how one might theoretically describe the major changes that have taken place in recent decades. Representatives for the new Chinese Left underscored the socialistic element, but it is not easy to grasp what “socialist market economy” in fact means. How should one define the Chinese economic model? What are the differences and similarities in the state’s role in the market and welfare provision when compared to American liberal capitalism, the European social model and the Scandinavian welfare model?

There was no really satisfactory answer to these questions during the China-West Intellectual Summit, and Glasshouse Forum therefore asked the American political scientists Orion A. Lewis and Jessica C. Teets of Middlebury College to try to clarify matters in a comparative perspective, and to discuss the implications of the global economic crisis on China’s socialist market economy.

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Download A China Model? Understanding the Evolution of a "Socialist Market Economy", by Orion A. Lewis and Jessica C. Teets (September 2009)