Abstract
China’s opening up since 1978 has been a historical process of continuous expansion and deepening. In the course of this process, Chinese policymakers and the mass of the people have gradually deepened their understanding of reform and opening up, and China’s relations with the world, especially its role in the world, have been constantly adjusted. At the beginning of reform and opening-up, China adapted to and was integrated into the international economic system; it then became engaged in the participation and improvement of that system, and then became an advocate and leader in the reform of the international system. Moreover, in practice, an incremental series of coherent open economic policies and theories with Chinese characteristics that facilitate an open economy have come into being. Under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping Theory of reform and opening up, China’s practice of opening up to the outside world is not only a good fit with China’s traditional trade theory, the Huainanzi/Sima Qian Theorem, from which people benefit by exchanging their surplus goods for those that they lack, but also is explicable in terms of modern economic trade theories. With the entry of socialism with Chinese characteristics into the new era and profound changes in the international environment, China still needs to open further to lead and promote mutual and shared openness for all countries in the world, so as to create good international conditions for promoting the construction of a shared future for mankind and building a world of lasting peace, universal security, common prosperity, openness, inclusiveness, cleanliness and beauty.
In the course of writing this article, I have benefited greatly from the help of Dr. Zhongzheng Jia and Weijiang Feng from the Institute of World Economy and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I owe them heartfelt thanks.
Translated by Xiaoxing Qiu from Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition), 2018, no. 11.
Revised by Sally Borthwick.
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Notes
- 1.
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1993), pp. 64, 367.
- 2.
Kaname (1994), pp. 93–108.
- 3.
Party Central Committee Literature Research Office (2004), p. 1295.
- 4.
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1993), p. 127.
- 5.
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1993), pp. 96, 104.
- 6.
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1993), pp. 135, 237.
- 7.
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1993), p. 3.
- 8.
Selected Works of Hu Jintao (2016), p. 139.
- 9.
Xi (2014), pp. 114, 347, 335.
- 10.
Xi (2017), pp. 197–200.
- 11.
Xiaoping (2004), p. 238.
- 12.
Hu (1986), p. 22.
- 13.
Central Party Literature Research Office (1996), p. 349.
- 14.
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1993), p. 373.
- 15.
Selected Works of Jiang Zemin (2006), p. 228.
- 16.
Central Party Literature Research Office (2008), p. 638.
- 17.
Communist Party of China Central Committee, Publicity Department (2018), pp. 298–307.
- 18.
Institutional non-neutrality means that the same institutions mean different things to different people; that is, under the same system, different people or groups often get different things. Those individuals or groups who have benefited from the established system or may benefit from some future institutional arrangement will undoubtedly do their best to maintain or strive for it. See Zhang (1994).
- 19.
Lieberthal (2010), pp. 262–263.
- 20.
Selected Works of Marx and Engels (2012), p. 709.
- 21.
Pei and Liu (2018).
- 22.
Sima (1959), p. 3262.
- 23.
Gu (2009), p. 179.
- 24.
Adam Smith believed that all countries benefit from the international division of labor. If one country uses less labor to produce wine and another uses less labor to produce wool, each should specialize in producing the products that cost it less labor and then exchange them for those of its trading partner. This allows both to save labor, increasing labor productivity and mutual benefit. See Smith (2009), p. 331.
- 25.
Ricardo (2011), pp. 64–77.
- 26.
Marx (2004), p. 265.
- 27.
Ohlin, Interregional Trade and International Trade, p. 6.
- 28.
Schumpeter (1991), pp. 73–74.
- 29.
See Olsen (2005), p. 10.
- 30.
Zhang and Feng (2017), pp. 89–121.
- 31.
Zhang et al. (2017), p. 11.
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Zhang, Y. (2021). China’s Opening-Up: Idea, Process and Logic. In: Reform, Opening-up and China's Changing Role in Global Governance. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6025-9_4
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