By any measure, the economic ascent of China in the past two decades is the
most dramatic change in the capitalist world-economy of the late twentieth
and early twenty-fi rst centuries. Between 1985 and 2002, China’s economy grew
by an average of 9.65 per year and China’s exports increased from us$28 billion
in 1985 to us$325 billion in 2002. Analyses of this dramatic growth focus
on changes in government control of the Chinese economy, the availability of
tremendous numbers of low cost workers for export production by Japanese,
European, U.S. and other transnational corporations, the historical characteristics
of the Chinese economy and society, including China’s historical role as
the center of the world economy and the role of family business networks in
organizing production and trade, and the role of the Chinese government as a
developmental state.