The Foreign Service Journal, May 2005

18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 5 F O C U S O N C H I N A C HINA ’ S E CONOMIC G ROWTH : S OURCE OF D ISORDER ? hina’s economic rise over the past quarter-century is widely acknowledged. Academics may quibble over just how fast the growth has been at different times but most estimates of China’s average annual growth of gross domestic product over this period range from 8 to 9 percent, a pace matching, if not exceeding, that of Japan and East Asia’s “four dragons” (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) from the 1960s through the 1980s. For a country the size of China, especially with its recent history as a command economy, this growth has indeed been remarkable. C B EIJING ’ S RAPID RISE HAS RAISED CONCERNS ABOUT THE RAMIFICATIONS FOR THE REGION AND THE REST OF THE WORLD . B Y R OBERT W ANG Jeff Moores