The Beaver the newspaper of the LSE Students' Union

Professor Danny Quah of the Department of Economics surprised some of his listeners with the content of his public lecture at the LSE last Tuesday.

His lecture, entitled “627 Million Chinese Brought Out of Poverty: Where Did it All Go Wrong?”, focused not on China’s growth itself, but the country’s foreign relations. It was the first lecture in an annual series hosted by the Confucius Institute of Business London, which is based at the School.

“There is a huge amount of bad press on China,” said Quah. “There is a fear that China is unbalancing and distorting the global economy…that it will upset the international political order. There is the view that something must be done – that the West must respond.”

This, he thinks, is the wrong approach: “When the world’s economic centre of gravity is located 10 time zones away from Washington DC, I suggest it is difficult for us to continue thinking about global policy as being Washington-centric. The world’s priorities must adjust.”

“It’s a dream that China, as it grows richer, will be able to teach the US a lesson.”
Quah said that those hostile to China’s growth often downplay its contribution to poverty reduction and its stabilising influence during past downturns: “If in 1981 the world community had been really concerned about poverty, it is China they should have been paying attention to. China has done amazing things for the lot of humanity, practically unnoticed.”
He went on to suggest that hostility to China was also due to the country’s poor presentation of itself to the world. He cited “Chinglish” as one example. That the maiden flight of China’s J-20 interceptor coincided with a visit of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, he argued, was a not a sign of defiance, but a serious coordination failure. He said that a similar failure had occurred during the Beijing Olympics, when its leaders’ plans to open the Great Firewall for journalists reporting on the Games were upset by local police.

“Such problems with internal and external communication” he said, “could constrain China’s future growth, whether it manages to overcome commonly cited problems such as inequality and gender imbalances.” He went on, noting that if the world were to take action against China, the result would be a “tragedy.”

He added: “The rise of China has not gone hand in hand with soft power. Let’s not forget the soft skills.”
In the question and answer session following his lecture, the chair, Nick Byrne of the LSE Language Centre, asked Quah what China had gotten right in its public and foreign relations.

Quah said that China’s leaders had shown they were able to learn quickly from mistakes. He gave the example of their response to the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the lessons learnt from their blunders during the winter storms earlier that year.
Responding to a question about Sino-African relations, he said that China had generated positive reactions in Africa because it approached countries as business partners.

Other questions concerned the nature of China’s growth; Quah was asked whether minorities and persecuted groups had benefited from growth, and whether males had benefited proportionately more than females.

He replied that the benefits of growth might not have been distributed proportionately between societal groups. He added that he hoped the Chinese authorities will become more liberal as their country grows richer.

Quah was also asked whether the inequality that has resulted from China’s growth goes against the ruling Communist Party’s ethos, and whether it will constrain future growth.

He replied that the aim of China’s leaders was to make China and its people rich, and that they saw inequality as inevitable. He went on to say that because inequality there is mostly rural-urban, it could be remedied in “one fell swoop” by “going West” – that is, attracting industry to poorer areas.

Responding to a question about the trustworthiness of China’s official statistics, Quah said that when researching, he tried to triangulate those with international measures, and had found poverty reduction and trade statistics to be especially reliable.
Other questions concerned China’s future. Quah was asked how the international community might try to stop China, and what it needed to do to prevent this.