Two centuries ago, China and India combined to produce 50 percent of the world's gross domestic product. After 200 years of political and economic turbulence-including ongoing, rapid economic development since the 1980s-China has returned to prominence, with the second-ranked GDP globally and a 9 percent share of the worldwide total.
The Chinese are well aware of their standing, too, says Dr. George Lehman, the Howard Raid professor of business at Bluffton University, who saw change in China firsthand for two weeks in June.
Beaten down at times in the past, the Chinese are "enjoying having things look differently now," Lehman says, adding that the current bustling development is aimed at helping regain national pride.
"What intrigues me with this is the pace of change," says Lehman, who shared his observations from the summer study tour with a campus audience Nov. 19.
His colloquium address doubled as the annual Howard Raid lecture, honoring the contributions of the late professor of economics and business at Bluffton.
China is "a country that's absolutely committed to growing fast," according to Lehman, one of eight members of a delegation that represented the university on the tour. Led by Dr. Karen Klassen Harder, professor of business, the group visited manufacturers with ties to northwest Ohio, as well as a hospital, a university, a farm and several tourist sites.
"Things are just developing incredibly fast everywhere you go," Lehman said, citing booming construction, especially in "stunningly impressive" large cities. The new is rapidly replacing the old-which, with no historic preservation, just goes away, he pointed out-and huge public-works projects are symbols of economic stimulus in China's government-run system.
In one of those projects, a tunnel is being built to reroute river water from the southern part of the country to the dry, Beijing area in the north.
"The Chinese are not afraid of large engineering projects," noted Lehman, also director of Bluffton's graduate programs in business and chair of its business studies division.
Such infrastructure projects were among the first economic development steps taken in the 1980s, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Deng was a pragmatist who believed results were more important than ideology, Lehman explained.
His leadership also produced legitimate rights for business owners-who previously couldn't be members of the Communist Party-and revitalization of small agriculture, which had been decimated by Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" in the late 1950s, Lehman said.
The government regulated foreign direct investment in the '80s-requiring Chinese to have majority ownership-then reduced those restrictions in the 1990s. Since 2000, foreign investment has surged, he said, adding that being a "major player" to attract investment is among the reasons for the country's rapid growth.
At the same time foreign investment was expanding in the '90s, China was eliminating old socialist factories while maintaining profitable government-owned industries, namely mineral extraction, distribution of electric power and tobacco.
Thirty million people were laid off as a result of the factory closings but absorbed into the economy because of growth elsewhere, Lehman said. In addition, 300 million people migrated from rural areas to cities, creating available workers for industry and need for more building projects, the land sales for which helped finance the government, he explained.
But the future of those migrant workers is also among the issues with which China must deal eventually. It faces the potential for a housing bubble burst, not unlike what has happened in the United States, and the certainty-with its one-child policy-of an aging population, he maintained.
There are restless ethnic populations, particularly in the west, and regional imbalances, with more prosperity in the east. The country is losing agricultural productivity, as more people move to the growing cities, as well as jobs to low-wage neighbors, especially Vietnam.
Pervasive political corruption also remains an issue, Lehman said, as does an educational system geared toward an all-important senior exam rather than a learning process; pollution that causes deterioration of buildings-some of whose construction quality seems questionable to begin with-and health problems; and conflict between well-being and economic goals for a government that provides both health care and cigarettes.
Broader questions include the natural human search for meaning beyond money-"How do you suppress that forever?" Lehman asked-and the inevitability of a leveling off in growth. "That can't go on forever at the level it is now," he noted.
He offered no prediction for the country's future, but said "it's going to be fun to watch it the next 10 years."
The Bluffton delegation that visited China last summer was the second from the university to see the country. Both study tours-the first was in 2008-were facilitated by Mennonite Partners in China and its director, Myrrl Byler.
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