- About the Lecture
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About the Lecture
Contrary to popular thinking, China owes its astonishing economic expansion not to far-sighted government policy but to hundreds of millions of entrepreneurial peasants. Yasheng Huang’s research reveals not only how small-scale rural businesses created China’s miracle but how that nation’s recovery from the global recession and righting the massive East-West trade imbalance depend on this same under-acknowledged sector.
Huang begins with questions, including why China produces so much relative to its own consumption. He shows graphs dramatically illustrating the rise of China’s GDP with a concurrent drop in domestic consumption. A nation that doesn’t consume what it produces must export. Huang has pounded away at the question of this drop in consumption. He rejects explanations pointing at a Chinese bent for thrift, and believes instead that households have become impoverished in the midst of the nation’s decades-long boom.
Huang’s research analyzed previously unexamined data to resolve this paradox and produce a novel thesis, detailing the rise and fall of rural entrepreneurship in China. In the 1980s, enabled by government liberalization, tens of millions of peasants began home-grown private businesses, from small-scale manufacturing to service delivery. They supplemented meager agricultural incomes, generating profits that they used to better their standards of living. The Chinese economy boomed. But in the 1990s, a new regime took over, taxing the grass-roots entrepreneurs and pouring money into infrastructure and state-run enterprises. Politicians imposed steep fees on education and healthcare, soaking the newly minted rural capitalists. GDP rose, but household incomes dipped, as hundreds of millions pinched pennies instead of generating profits. The Chinese made lots of things that they couldn’t buy. A global trade imbalance ballooned.
The recession has struck the rural Chinese especially painfully (they make up 70% of the nation’s population). More than 100 million who had migrated to cities for work have lost their jobs with the shutdown of factories, and there has been a “virtual collapse in non-farm business income growth,” says Huang. New Chinese policies have begun to attend to rural issues, such as abolishing rural taxation, reducing fees, and spurring microfinance. This should help increase household income. But in key areas like land reform, there’s only been talk. Huang believes a Chinese stimulus package aimed at reinvigorating the building boom won’t do nearly as much good for the economy as liberalization of social policies and attempts to unleash once again the productive energies of the rural poor.Related Videos
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- About the Speaker
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About the Speaker
Yasheng Huang
China Program Associate Professor in International Management, and Founder, China-India Lab, MIT Sloan
Yasheng Huang teaches political economy and international management. In addition to academic articles, Huang has published Inflation and Investment Controls in China(1996), FDI in China (1998), Selling China (2003), Financial Reform in China (2005, co-edited with Tony Saich and Edward Steinfeld), and most recently, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (2008). This book predicted and discusses in detail the current economic challenges facing China. It was selected by The Economist magazine as one of the best books published in 2008.
Huang is currently working on a book examining consumption and urbanization in China. In addition, using newly-available household survey data, he is writing papers on rural finance and wealth creation and urbanization in China.
Huang's China-India Lab aims to help indigenous entrepreneurs in China and India improve their management. He has received the National Fellowship at Stanford University and Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Fellowship. He is a member of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, a fellow at Center for Chinese Economic Research and Center for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University, a fellow at William Davidson Institute at Michigan Business School, a World Economic Forum Fellow, and a non-resident fellow for the OECD’s global development outlook project. - About the Host
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About the Host
MIT Sloan School of Management
The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.
MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.
A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”
Video Player
Global and Domestic Imbalances: Why Rural China is the Key
- Yasheng Huang
- June 6, 2009
- Running Time: 1:02:30
