从长时段看中国市场经济

China's Market Economy in the Long Run

以中国为中心的东亚地区,在至少长达2000年的历史时期内都处于世界发展前沿。早在明代和清代早期,中国就已成功地建起了以自己为中心的市场经济,以及一个和平的地区性国际关系体系。然而,从鸦片战争以后直到第二次世界大战结束,中国及其周边地区遭遇了百余年之久的剧烈衰退。衰退的根源在于此前500年间欧洲和东亚地区国际体系动态的根本差异,后者在外向型欧洲体系的全球化趋势下表现出了其脆弱性。东亚地区在第二次世界大战后的快速复苏始于美国在该地区建立的军国主义体制,这种体制为以日本为首的争取劳动力资源的投资"滚雪球"过程的出现创造了条件,并最终成为地区性经济整合与扩张的强有力机制。中国现在是最强大的吸引东亚地区内外争取劳动力资源的投资之地。古老的以中国为中心的地区体系的两个遗产,在把这种投资热潮转变成国民经济扩张引擎方面发挥了关键作用:一个是海外华人,另一个是高质量且低成本的农村劳动大众。前者使中国高效地重新整合了地区性及全球性经济体系,后者则是中国从其市场为基础的发展传统继承而来的。

The East Asian region,with China at its center,had been in the forefront of world development for at least two thousand years.Ming and early Qing China successfully created a self-centered market economy and a comparatively peaceful regional system of interstate relations.However,China and the surrounding region suffered a century-long deeply felt eclipse.It can be traced to a fundamental difference between the dynamics of the European and East Asian interstate systems during the preceding five hundred years.The East Asian system made the entire region vulnerable to the inevitable clash with the globalizing tendencies of the extroverted European system.The quick recovery of the region after the Second World War was initiated by the peculiar militaristic regime that the United States established in East Asia.This regime created the conditions for the emergence of a Japanese-led snowballing process of labor-seeking investment that eventually became a powerful mechanism of regional economic integration and expansion.As China became the most powerful attractor of labor-seeking investment from the region and beyond,two legacies of the old China-centered regional system have played an especially crucial role in turning the oncoming rush of labor-seeking investment into an engine of national economic expansion.One is the overseas Chinese diaspora,which provided the PRC with a highly effective instrument of reintegration in the regional and global economies.The other is the high quality and low cost of the rural laboring masses that China inherited from its robust tradition of market-based development.