The Butterfly Effect in China’s Economic Growth by Wei-Bin Zhang

Author:Wei-Bin Zhang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811598890
Publisher: Springer Singapore

The Beneficiary of Global Knowledge Stock

When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home, you will see how China will transform itself.

Deng Xiaoping

“Men make their own history”, Karl Marx (Dickson 1997: 1) writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Deng launched the economic reform from the condition left by Mao in the Confucian cultural soil. Chinese people began to accumulate wealth and knowledge with almost same conditions in terms of human capital and wealth among themselves with social order guaranteed by the party. It is a rare condition for market mechanisms to function so effectively.

No country, like China, has learned so much from the world in almost all fields only in the four decades. The world had created and accumulated huge knowledge and know-how stocks in mathematics, philosophy, history, believes, ideologies, ideas and thought, social sciences, natural sciences, technologies, literature, arts, sports, recipes, fashions, and the like by 1980. An important character of most of these stocks is “purely public” in the sense that they are both non-exclusive and non-rivalrous. A typical industry is TV programs. Almost all once most popular TV programs, in US, UK, Japan, and the four little tigers appeared in Chinese TV channels with mainland Chinese language and Chinese styles reformed by learning and imitation (subject to the Chinese government surveillance). Theories by, for instance, Newton, Adam Smith, are learned freely by millions of Chinese people. Some ideas or methods which might be learned and freely applied to China are not strictly public. A recipe in Singapore may become popular in China. This kind of imitation might not cause much moral concerns but might make owners of some restaurants in Singapore lose consumers. Much of knowledge in the world is obtainable either freely or through purchasing books and articles. Some countries might be pleased to allow other countries to learn their cultural knowledge and methods. Millions of Chinese students have travelled and studied in many cultures since the onset of the economic reform. Certain knowledge is publicly inaccessible or very costly. Public media reported cases that Chinese companies stole foreign companies’ techs. Picasso knows the art of artists: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” In high techs, sciences, and mathematics, like in arts, boundaries between creativity, imitation, learning, and stealing need experts to judge. In intellectual worlds, only most talented know what are going on within the field. Mediocre and masses judge according to the media and their own emotion and bias.

The seed is a main determinant of a plant. The soil may become futile if the same seed is repeatedly farmed in the same place over generations. Max Weber observes: “It is not true that good can only follow good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.” Traditional Confucian education systems turned out to be what Bertrand Russell says about education: “Men are born ignorant, not stupid.

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