Is China's rise our downfall? | Jagdish Bhagwati | Big Think

Is China's rise our downfall?

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China in a flat world.

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Jagdish Bhagwati:

One of the most influential trade theorists of his generation, Jagdish Bhagwati is a professor of economics at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1991-1993 Bhagwati was an Economic Policy Advisor to Arthur Dunkel, the Director of GATT. For the World Trade Organization, he has been an External Advisor to the WTO and has served on the Expert Group on the Future of the WTO appointed by the Director General. Bhagwati has been a Special Advisor to the UN on Globalization. He was also on the Advisory Committee to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the NEPAD process in Africa, and a member of the Eminent Persons Group under the chairmanship of President Fernando Henrique Cartoso on the future of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Bhagwati is the recipient of several prizes and honorary degrees, including Gold and Silver Stars from Japan's Order of the Rising Sun and the Padma Vibhushan from the government of India. The author and/or editor of over fifty volumes and over three hundred articles, Bhagwati's articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement. He founded the Journal of International Economics in 1971 and another journal, Economics & Politics, in 1989.

His most recent books are In Defense of Globalization (2004) and Free Trade Today (2002); his early books, particularly India: Planning for Industrialization (1970) and India (1975) opened the doors for current economic reform in India; on these reforms he was advisor to India's Finance Minister, now Prime Minister.

Bhagwati has delivered lectures at many top educational institutions and appeared on television shows including the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour, the Charlie Rose Show and Bloomberg. He is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, on the board of the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch, Asia and on the Council of the Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency. The recipient of many awards, among them the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, the Bernhard Harms Prize, the Kenan Prize, the John R. Commons Award, the Freedom Prize and the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, he has been awarded honorary degrees from several universities.

Jagdish Bhagwati graduated from Cambridge University in 1956 and continued his studies at MIT and Oxford. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, the Delhi School of Economics, and MIT.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jagdish Bhagwati: I don’t think so.

China I think is a big problematic area right now for itself in the sense that its capitalist economics is okay; but its communist politics is a big question mark. A lot of its growth is export oriented. When you run a communist system with lack of human rights in all sorts of areas, you become immediately vulnerable to people saying, “This is not kosher.”

Because it’s a communist system, it exaggerates the occurrence of things, like we have seen recently, namely __________ of all possible safety and other requirements. Because there is no countervailing power in the system at all.

There are four elements of a democracy which really help countries like India, and whose absence really hurts China in things like environment damage, safety conditions, all of the things which really are necessary for good governance and growth.

One, to have NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] who take up your cause when something is going on.

Two, you could have opposition parties who can also bring things simply because they ____________.

Three, an independent judiciary.

And fourth, an independent media. They don’t have anything like that. So anytime any dissent occurs, which is beginning to happen in China, they just take to the streets.

And how it’s going to develop is very, very problematic.

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