Beyond Growth - World Finance

Author: Zhao Xiao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: I remember that when Japanese scholar Daisaku Ikeda had a dialogue with Toynbee, he once mentioned that he would like to live in a historical period of China's Tang Dynasty. But thanks to the Creator, he allowed me to grow up in the current era of China. This is also an era in which I would like to be born. This era has transformation, growth, twists, and hopes, with one prominent feature being the rapid economic growth. I have mentioned in many speeches that growth did not always exist and is certainly not a matter of course. In fact, the history of human economic growth has only been a brief two hundred years. It is closely linked with concepts such as the market economy, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the West. Even after the world entered the era of economic growth, China was still long excluded from human growth. From 1900 to 1950, China's GDP per capita actually dropped by 40%! China's true growth only occurred in the two decades that just passed. The Chinese have successfully created a growth record unprecedented in the world, known as the miracle of China's economic growth. I am delighted that such a miracle has emerged, and I believe it is a true miracle that combines concepts such as institutional innovation and technological progress.