E-Book, Englisch, 235 Seiten
E-Book, Englisch, 235 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78063-237-7
Verlag: Elsevier Reference Monographs
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Includes contributions from Australian and Chinese scholars and thus, brings together ideas and suggestions from a broad range of perspectivesAnalyses China's socio-economic challenges from a multi-dimensional focusA very useful reference in WTO issues in general and China in particular
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Chapter 2 Reform of China’s Economic System with WTO Accession and its Impact on Tertiary Education
Shi Yutian Changchun Taxation College, People’s Republic of China Yu Ping Jilin University, People’s Republic of China 1 INTRODUCTION
The year of 2008 is the 30-year anniversary of China’s economic reform. In the past three decades, its effort for World Trade Organization (WTO) membership and the final WTO accession played a crucial role in the process of the reform toward a market economy. China officially applied for the restoration of its GATT (predecessor of WTO) membership in July 1986, and became a member of WTO in October 2001. In 15 years of great effort for GATT/WTO membership, China fulfilled its transition from a centralized economy to a market economy. This thorough change in economic environment forms the background for us to study the changes in China’s tertiary education. This chapter will first review the main changes in China’s economic system with WTO accession, and then focus on its influence on tertiary education. The main objective is to assess “To what extent China’s tertiary education followed the main trend of the market oriented economic reform”. Section 2 includes a review of the functions of WTO accession in China’s reform toward a market economy. Section 3 lists some major reforms in China’s economic system and Section 4 analyses the changes in tertiary education with the major reforms in economic system as the background. The final section summarizes the findings. 2 WTO ACCESSION: ACCELERATOR OF CHINA’S MARKET-ORIENTED ECONOMIC REFORM
China started its economic reform in 1978, exactly thirty years ago. Locked in the ideology of the planned economy, no clear destination was determined for the reform in the1980s. The 1980s was a decade full of ideological breakthroughs in China about the functioning of the economic system which might be very difficult for foreign economists to understand. Briefly speaking, there had been a series of changes in terminology from “planned economy” to “planned economy as the primary means with market adjustment as the subsidiary ones” (1979-1984), to “planned commodity economy” (1984-1987), to “combination of planned economy and market adjustment” (1989-1992), until the concept of “socialist market economy” was formally put forward in 1992. Significantly, when China applied for restoring its GATT membership, it insisted to restore on the basis of “tariff concession”, which is a way of accession for a “market economy”, though at the time “a market economy in China” was still a forbidden zone ideologically. To some extent, it is the effort for GATT/WTO membership that first suggested China’s destination of the economic reform toward a market economy. Immediately prior to 1995 when WTO was officially formed, China implemented an extensive range of reforms of its economic system in order to become its member. It covers various important economic sectors, including property ownership structure, financial system, taxation policy, investment management, price formation mechanism, foreign trade system, exchange rate regime and income distribution system. The main objective of the reform was to improve the functioning of the market and to make it consistent with international practices. Though China failed to join WTO in 1995, the reforms greatly accelerated China’s transition towards a market economy. Since its WTO accession in 2001, China has shown a great concern for its market economy status, and is making all efforts to promote itself as an acceptable market economy to its main trading partners. A word which appears most frequently in Chinese media is “anti-dumping”. China was ranked the first of anti-dumping targets for more than 10 years continuously. Since 1995, the year WTO was formally established, there have been 707 anti-dumping cases against China’s exports, which is about one-seventh of the world total. Products produced in China are subject to anti-dumping measures at any moment because they are considered too cheap! This can be seen as the direct result of a trade war caused by the ever-increasing trade surplus of China. But an important factor is that China is not considered to be a market economy by its main trading partners including EU, the United States and Japan. For example, the EU had rejected the petitions of 13 Chinese shoemakers for grants of market economy status on account of non-compliance with international accounting standards, ignoring the fact that 98 per cent of Chinese shoemakers are private or joint ventures. The United States and Japan accounted for 47.6 per cent of China’s exports in 2007. While China is not seen as a market economy, importing countries can use the price–fixing standards of developing nations as a reference point in anti-dumping investigations of Chinese products. Fortunately, Australia has already admitted China’s full market economy status in April 2005. More recently, 77 out of the 151 WTO members have accepted China’s market economy status. Nevertheless, China will have to further improve its market functioning in accordance with WTO requirements. WTO regulations are an important momentum for the improvement of China’s market mechanism. 3 REVIEW OF MAJOR REFORMS TOWARD A MARKET ECONOMY
China started its First Five Year Plan in 1953, and adopted an economic system characterized by public ownership of resources and the use of central planning to coordinate economic activities. This system closely equates to a pure form of the command economy, as described in most economics textbooks. In the last three decades, especially in recent years, China has become more open to the outside world with WTO accession and changed into a market oriented economy successfully and steadily. 3.1 Reform of price determination mechanism
China started its economic reform with a price determination mechanism as the jumping-off point in March 1979. Under the planned economic system, China’s price management system was highly centralized. The prices of nearly all commodities were determined by the central government. Producers had no right to set prices. In 1978, 97 per cent of retailed commodities and almost 100 per cent of production inputs were subjected to government-set prices. At the first stage, from March 1979 to the end of 1983, the reform mainly focused on the adjustment of prices in order to improve the relative price structure under central planning. The reform was still not quite market-oriented. The second stage started from 1984. The main characteristics of this stage were a combination of price adjustments and price decentralization. While further adjusting the price structure under central planning, the prices of some categories of commodities were gradually decentralized. The third stage started in 1992, when the goal of a socialist market economy was finally established. The reform of price determination mechanism accelerated, both in extent and in depth. Price had finally been treated as an allocative mechanism for resources. By the end of 1992, commodities under direct government price control had dropped from 1,337 categories in 1978 to 43 categories, and by 2004, the figure had dropped to just 11 categories. Now, 96 per cent of commodities are subject to market adjustments. 3.2 Reform in the structure of ownership
The ownership of resources has long been considered as the dividing line of socialist and capitalist system. According to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China before 2004, “The basis of the socialist economic system of the People's Republic of China is socialist public ownership of the means of production, namely, ownership by the whole people and collective ownership by the working people… The state economy is the sector of socialist economy under ownership by the whole people; it is the leading force in the national economy.” Since the beginning of China’s economic reform in 1978, the reform of ownership structure remains the most sensitive issue and the most striking point. The reform of ownership started illegally in December 1978 by 18 farmers in a small village in Anhui Province who, taking the risk of being put in prison, divided the collectively owned agricultural land to households by signing a contract secretly. But their illegal behavior led to a sharp increase in output. Fortunately, their action coincided with the start of the economic reform period and was, later, officially extended to the whole country as the “contracted responsibility system” with remuneration linked to output, which started the reform of ownership structure in the agricultural sector. Before 1997, the reform of state-owned enterprises mainly focused on the reform of the operation mechanism. The ownership reform of state-owned enterprises developed relatively slowly. In 1997, after the 15th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China finally discarded the Soviet belief that the nature of socialism was determined by the absolute share of state owned economy, and the reform process accelerated further. In the 2004 Amendments, the following words were added to the Chinese Constitution: “The state permits the private sector of the economy to exist and...
