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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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If you can understand Mandarin Chinese, this 3 hour debate between Justin Lin Yifu (neoclassical) and Zhang Weiying (Austrian school) from 2016 - widely popularized as China’s Keynes vs Hayek Great Debate - is everything you need to know about China’s industrial policy for the past decade.
Many prominent economists also voice their views quite openly. You just have to read the economy/finance section of Chinese newspapers to keep up.
Thanks! Seems like a good motivator for me to learn Chinese
. Are more Marxist voices less prominent in these debates?
There are no Marxist voices in the mainstream today. All the distinguished Marxist economists have long been banished to the humanities and social science departments long ago. They do write books, sometimes articles/blogs on the internet, and newspaper columns, but they have very little influence on policymaking. The mainstream is full on dominated by Western economists these days.
If you actually listen to the debate, both sides are openly making fun of the Mao era central planners for being inefficient lol.
Also FYI the correct term for Marxist economics in China is “political economy” (政治经济学). Nobody uses the word Marxist economics. Similarly, neoclassical economics is called “Western economics” (西方经济学). If you don’t know the correct terminology in Chinese, it can be very difficult to search for the relevant information you want.
Serious question, asking in good faith here as a non-mandarin speaking westerner:
If mainstream, policy-guiding economics is so overwhelmingly western (neoclassical), why is China on such a wildly different economic trajectory compared to the contradictory hellscape of the west? Is it the applications of these horribly unmarxist economics? Is it the remnants of mao-era policies? I’m very ignorant on this, but i’d love to learn more
I can't adequately answer the positive side of this question, but on the negative side it's worth noting that a lot of western economic policy, especially in the US, is notoriously bad and out of step with Keynesianism and its relatives, with the whole thing being steered by financiers who don't actually care about the generally economy running well.
On the positive side, I am way less qualified than our Mandarin-speaking friend, but I think a lot of what China gets right is either similar to what you also see the more rational capitalist states get right, or it is politically capable of doing things those other states can't because of the necessity of the state maintaining a degree of control over private power for national sovereignty reasons. I don't think it has much to do with Mao other than China being sovereign in the first place. It's really more of a nationalist thing than anything.
You’re comparing two different things.
Western neoliberal countries have been infested with finance capitalists that want to maximize rentier profit. These countries, especially America, have had enough dealing with trade unions in the 20th century so they chose to de-industrialize to crush the workers movements at home, while allowing the rentier class (finance, insurance, real estate) to flourish. Using their “high income” status and favorable exchange rate, they extract surplus from the Global South to maintain an elevated living standards for its population. In both America and Europe, some critical industries were still retained although they are increasingly hollowed out by private equities etc.
The developing world is different. In the 1980s and 1990s, they sent their best students to attend Western universities to learn their economics, who returned to hold important policymaking positions and introducing neoclassical economics to their countries. China’s policy since joining the WTO in 2001 has been, for the most part, a perfect adherence to the IMF export-led growth strategy. China’s budget deficit almost never went above 3%, except for one year during Covid and I think they are going to increase to 4% this year due to the deflation issue.
This has been possible because China has been able to leverage its huge labor pool to undercut all the other exporting countries and dominate the export sector, selling cheap goods for Western consumers to enjoy in exchange for foreign currencies. It is the huge surplus of these foreign currencies that allowed China to keep its budget deficit to 3% of its GDP. This is precisely what the IMF intended - developing countries should send cheap goods to the high income countries, and only then, can they use those revenues to invest in their own countries. It is designed to benefit Western imperialist countries. There is nothing that says you have to accumulate a trillion dollar trade surplus each year, since you are utilizing precious labor and resources to send goods to other “wealthier” countries. You should export to earn enough foreign currencies to import essential goods and commodities and services, but the accumulation of trade surplus is the prescription of the IMF.