Is China Growing Too Fast? -- The View from the Greater Pearl River Delta
P. Richard Bohr
Professor of History & Director of Asian Studies
College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's University

Twenty-five years ago, Deng Xiaoping initiated China's shift from Maoist central planning to market capitalism in a risky effort to lift one-fifth of humanity out of poverty.  Now a member of the World Trade Organization, China is the world's third-largest trading partner and its fastest-growing economy in aggregate terms, its recent annual GDP growth of 7-9% far surpassing the world average of 1.2%.  Deng's reforms began in the Greater Pearl River Delta (GPRD), a fertile rice basket-turned-garden of industry linking Hong Kong and Macau with the alluvial plains of Guangzhou, ancient capital of South China.  From there, the GPRD fans out to encompass a Pan Pearl River Delta of nine contiguous provinces. 

Since the seventeenth century, the GPRD linked global trade, Western technology, and Christian missions with China's vast interior.  Between 1650 (when the Manchu dynasty conquered China) and 1850, China's population tripled to half a billion people.  By 1900, Macau and Hong Kong were well-established European colonies, and two dozen coastal and inland treaty ports had been ceded to the West as the result of a series of "Opium Wars."  Nationalist fervor precipitated by the emperors' inability to halt the resultant "collapse of the old order the impact of the West" reverberated through South China, giving rise to a world-wide diaspora of "overseas Chinese," anti-dynastic insurrections, Sun Yat-sen's 1911 Revolution, Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China, and Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution. 

In the early 1980's, Deng Xiaoping and his economic reformers adopted the export-led economic development strategy of Japan and Asia's "Four Dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) by transforming the region's former treaty ports into Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to integrate Chinese labor and raw materials with global markets and foreign investment from a "Greater China" of Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and 51 million overseas Chinese with a capital pool of $2 trillion.  Is it any wonder that the world should refer to this driver of China's economy as Asia's "Fifth Dragon"?

The results astonish.  Constituting only 0.5 percent of China’s land mass, the GPRD generates 34 percent of the country's exports, 30 percent of its foreign direct investment, and 19 per cent of its GDP.  Already designated the "manufacturer to the world," the GPRD is a model of rapid economic development already being replicated in Central China's Yangzi River Delta around Shanghai and the Beijing-Tianjin corridor in the north.

While they realize that China as an indispensable U.S. business partner, few American policy makers are aware of the profound social, cultural, and political consequences of the PRD's lightening-speed economic surge.  For this reason, ASIANetwork, a consortium of 165 U.S. liberal arts colleges with Asian Studies programs, and the Hong Kong-America Center, outreach arm of Hong Kong and South China universities, secured funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays program to sponsor a month-long faculty development seminar in the GPRD for professors in various disciplines from sixteen American colleges and universities during June and July 2005.  I was pleased to have led the delegation.

Our itinerary through South China's Guangdong and neighboring Fujian provinces dramatized the scope and pace of the GPRD's transition from rice paddies to urban manufacturing.  We attended presentations by professors, government officials, city and regional planners, "red capitalist" entrepreneurs, factory managers, and U.S. diplomats as well as American Chamber of Commerce officers.  We talked with migrant workers, cab drivers, and shopkeepers and toured gleaming cityscapes, shopping malls, factories, public facilities, universities, museums, art galleries, and temples.  Our encounters revealed a remarkable optimism about the PRD's march to prosperity, including the rapid growth of a middle class, a consumer culture, greater access to higher education, and a civil society.  We were struck by the movement of millions of rural Chinese into the GPRD megalopolis -- the largest migration in human history -- and the activism on behalf of workers rights and migrant education being provided by a growing number of NGO's.  We also witnessed the importance of South China's growing access to Southeast Asia and to India, an emerging economic axis now dubbed "Chindia."  Our visit also revealed the monumental management and governance challenges of demographic pressures, intensifying pollution, regional inefficiencies, and an ever-intensifying gap between rich and poor.

The essays in these policy briefswere written by participants in the Fulbright-Hays study tour and address our delegation's five working themes regarding the consequences of the GPRD's rapid economic growth: 1) the development of new business enterprises and their interaction with international and domestic markets; 2) the impact of economic growth on Chinese society, especially women migrant laborers from other parts of the country; 3) the impact of economic growth on traditional Chinese "high culture" and popular culture; 4) the roles of government at national, provincial, county, and local levels in fostering social and economic development; and 5) the development of regional planning strategies and the impact on the environment of rapid economic development. 

The following essays consider the policy implications of our traveling seminar's principal question: "Is China Growing Too Fast?"  In the end, they are a snap shot of last summer's GPRD and a glimpse into the broader China which this vibrant region is transforming into an economic superpower of the twenty-first century -- the  "Asian Century."