A Study of Special Economic Zone Transformation and the China Model

Abstract

The background of the “altruistic” establishment of China’s traditional special economic zones determines that the special zones serve as “windows”, “experimental fields”, models and drivers, and they take up the historical mission of reducing the risks and costs of the national reform and opening up while paving the way for it. When the market-oriented reform of the special zones becomes the goal for national reforms, the traditional historical mission of the special economic zones will have basically been accomplished. This shows that the special zones have no longer mainly functioned as the windows for the opening up and the experimental fields for institutional reforms; instead, they have developed into a regional developmental model and have constituted a pole for the economic growth of this region. New special zones were established and special policies relating to them were set up to further aggregate the factors, promote the economic development of the new special zones, give rise to polarization and produce diffusion effects, which has become a new regional developmental model. The economic reform was mainly driven and put into practice by the special economic zones, thus the special zone mode developed by the traditional special zones and the new special zone developmental path is the foundation and core of the China Model.