Introduction

Abstract

The rise of industrialized China and her resurgence as an economic powerhouse is a transformative event in the history of the world economy. However, there now appears to be an emergent consensus that the Chinese economy is facing a turning point, that is to say, another transition after the thirty years of successful transition to the market economy from the command economy. The nature of this new transition may be understood within a new conceptual and analytical framework that unifies development economics and demography in a long-term perspective (for example, Hansen and Prescott 2002; Galor 2011; Aoki 2012). After a rather long transition out of the Malthusian state (1911-the late 1940s) and then the phase of government-mediated initial industrialization (the early 1950s-the late 1970s), the era of high growth ensued, driven by favorable demographic factors such as demographic dividend (Bloom and Williamson 1998) and massive domestic migration of labor from the rural agricultural sector to the industrial sector.