The Role of China’s Financial Institutions in China’s Economic Development

Abstract

Hu Angang, Director of the Center for Chinese Studies and Professor at the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, is a prescient scholar with a record of influencing public policy. With China in 2020, Hu shares his version of China’s future with Brookings’s ongoing Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series. That vision of China by 2020 is of a powerful and peaceful China, a stakeholder and contributor in world affairs. China in 2020 includes a caveat in the introduction by Cheng Li acknowledging that Hu’s argument is more of an ideal based upon “well-intended aspirations” (xix) and readers “are not so naive as to confuse promises with reality” (xxxvii). By establishing upfront that 2020 is an ideal, Dr. Li in this way neutralizes the peaceful rise skeptics and allows Hu to share his version of a prosperous China with a wider audience that can include the skeptics. However, even if China’s foreign policy and relations with its neighbors are dismissed as potential variables for a less rosy future, as they are in 2020, “ideas” and optimism in Hu’s idealism are represented with a soulless materialistic vision of China that removes human creativity and free will from what amounts to a 2020 dystopia. This critique focuses on two unaddressed elements in 2020 that are of direct concern to the two questions: Will China be a superpower and if so what kind will she be? The answer to the first question depends in part on an immediate practical, or political, matter at hand. The answer to the subsequent question depends on how one approaches the answer to a profound but less practical question of the role of an individual in civilization. Specifically and respectively, the practical matter