Embracing the Washington Consensus: Beijing’s “Seamless” Developmental Strategy

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Abstract

　　　China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (hereinafter WTO) saw a surge of interests on the efforts made by the country and its consequences for international economy. However, earlier studies often begin with the premise that China found it beneficial to embrace the Washington Consensus that underlies the WTO. In other words, it is necessary to understand why and how China came to embrace the concept as a rational state in the first place.
　　　The theory and hypotheses of this paper is that, because economic power is an essential means for state survival, China was driven by the need to pursue economic power. In doing so, it is also fundamental that the Chinese academics and policy-makers had interpreted economic deregulation, as in the Washington Consensus, to be conducive to their accumulation of economic power on a state level. As it is the Chinese Communist Party (hereinafter CCP) that essentially make decisions on both international negotiation and domestic developmental strategies, the same statehood designs of the CCP should explain them simultaneously.
　　　In order to test the hypotheses, this paper adopts a mixed-methods approach, where (i) I collect Chinese newspaper articles and academic journals to verify that China supported economic deregulation as conducive to the accumulation of economic power. Secondly, (ii) I collect information on both Chinese UN draft resolutions and domestic developmental statements to make sure that they correlate with regards to when they began to call for economic deregulation. As it was during the Deng Xiaoping era that China opened up its economy, the temporal scope of this paper is during the Deng era.
　　　In sum, this paper shows the seamless nature of developmental strategies of China, where domestic politics run on only a fixed range of inputs from the CCP members and not from the divergent economic lobbyists. Whether the policies take place in international regimes or within domestic politics, China is driven by its pursuit of economic power.

Author

• Tomoko Takahashi, Kyoto University