The Expansion of Marine Culture and the Rise of China

Abstract

With the development of human society and the progress of science and technology, land resources are increasingly exhausted, people’s understanding of the ocean is becoming more and more profound, and the concept of marine culture is gradually becoming popular. The rise of China also benefits from the expansion of marine culture, that is to say, the rapid economic growth since China’s reform and opening-up policy cannot be separated from the factors of marine culture. In other words, as a stable system form, marine culture has had a lasting and profound effect on China’s economic growth. This paper holds that China’s opening-up to the outside world starts from the southern coast, and is gradually promoted from the regions to the industries through language evolution that official languages with marine cultural ideas bring changes in folk languages, thereby making the generation of public policy discourse represented by marine culture-oriented political reports of the Party Congress. By establishing an analytical framework of culture-linguistics-institution-economic growth, this paper constructs static and dynamic panel data models that match economic growth, and incorporates the expansion of marine culture into an economic system in three dimensions. And it abstracts a variable from the expansion of marine culture to measure, and introduces it into an econometric model. Then it uses OLS and GMM empirical analysis methods to estimate the impact of the expansion of marine culture on the rise of China. It shows that opening-up to the outside world has raised the status of marine culture, brought about full expansion of marine culture, changed the whole social language ecology, facilitated a new system of public policy, promoted the change of the socialist market economic system with Chinese characteristics, and improved the economic growth of China through the gradient and level effects, so as to realize the rise of China. The econometric model also shows that, after controlling the related variables, the expansion of marine culture has significantly positive effects on economic growth, and the static and dynamic test results are consistent. The robust test also supports this conclusion, indicating that the conclusion of this paper is reliable. Of course, the expansion of marine culture may also produce some negative effects. To this end, we should strive for countermeasures appropriate to the national conditions: to resist the western maritime cultural hegemony and build marine culture with Chinese characteristics so as to make it an inexhaustible driving force for economic growth. We should cultivate the spirit of Chinese marine culture, foster its cohesive force and stimulating function, promote the continuous innovation of ocean culture, construct Chinese-style ocean discourse, and enhance the soft power of Chinese marine culture. This paper attempts to go deep into the cultural level, try to connect marine culture with economic growth, discuss the internal logic of China’s rapid economic growth, and discuss the path dependence of China’s rise from a new perspective. It hopes that in the new era of the ocean century, China will quickly realize the dream of a powerful maritime power and push forward all-round construction of the Belt and Road Initiative.