Are There New Resources to Continue China’s Export Boom?

Abstract

While Guangdong’s rise to the position of China’s leading economic province and the leader in export-oriented industrialization came about a result of a ‘big bang’ in which economic reform was introduced rapidly and essentially on an experimental basis by the political leaders in Beijing, the process of economic change has proceeded much more sedately and incrementally in the regions which made up China’s industrial heartland before 1979. The benefits and upheavals which had accrued to and transformed Guangdong and Fujian since the early 1980s but which had rapidly accelerated after 1985 only began to have a widespread impact in much of the rest of coastal China after 1991 and have still to reach the bulk of the interior. The result is that the challenges to Guangdong’s pre-eminent position in China’s ‘export miracle’ are much less dramatic than those which originally propelled Guangdong into the forefront of China’s export-oriented industrialization and ‘opening to the world’. It is rather that Guangdong’s disproportionate share of China’s exports is likely to be gradually whittled away by a combination of growing exports from other sources, the increasing spread of foreign capital along the whole of the eastern seaboard using China as a production base for export and the changing direction of China’s trade towards Northeast Asia rather than the rise of a single province as challenger.