The Rise of Guangdong

Abstract

In the eyes of many observers Guangdong has been the cutting edge of China’s economic reform process and its rise as an exporter and new dragon economy has become synonymous with China’s emergence as a potential economic superpower. In many ways China’s ‘export miracle’ could more properly have been called ‘Guangdong’s export miracle’. Guangdong, to quote one famous observer, Ezra Vogel, had always seemed ‘one step ahead in China’ as it responded to the opportunities created by the reform process. Despite its relative backwardness when economic reform was announced in 1978, by the late 1980s it had firmly established itself as China’s leader in export-oriented industrialization and controlled more than 30 per cent of China’ foreign trade. It was also a measure of the dominant position that Guangdong had established in China’s export performance that when for the first time in a decade its rate of export growth fell below that of China as a whole in 1995 (10.8 per cent as against 22.9 per cent) that the province was instantly seen as being in serious difficulties and its reign as China’s leading economic province as on the wane. While we would not want to deny that Guangdong faces some severe difficulties and overcoming these may not be remediable even by substantial adjustments in its industrial and trade policies, it is important to put these difficulties in perspective.