When: 17.30 pm – 18.45 pm Wednesday 19 May 2021 (via Zoom)
Registration in advance is essential for this event: Registration link.
For enquiries please email: china-centre@unimelb.edu.au
About the event (see the attached promotion flyer for further details)
In spite of its economic success, China may face greater economic uncertainty today than at any time since Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening strategy in the 1980s. Not only is China’s pace of economic growth slowing, but the slowdown is structural and not merely cyclical. Also, importantly, the slowdown has similar aspects to troubled transitions which other emerging economies failed to navigate in the past.
Among the economic challenges facing Xi Jinping: reforming the state-owned enterprise system and reducing its debt burden, extracting greater productivity gains even as the pace of economic growth slows, shifting from capital-intensive to consumption-led growth, and managing the demographic transition to a far older population (by 2050, one in three people in China will be over 60). China will also need to develop and open markets for higher-value, higher-tech exports, free up the private sector, and become more technologically innovative and self-reliant in the face of deteriorating economic relations with advanced economies such as the United States.
In short, China faces a number of significant economic challenges—some long-standing in nature, others arising more recently—which demand attention if the country is to continue ascending the developmental ladder, become a high-income country, and achieve “national rejuvenation” in the next three decades, while also maintaining the political legitimacy and dominance of the Chinese Communist Party.
Drawing from research for his forthcoming book on China’s foreign policy under Xi Jinping, Dr Gill will consider these economic challenges, the strategies in place to address them, and how they are inextricably linked—for better and for worse—with the country’s foreign relations.
Presenter
Dr. Bates Gill has a 30-year global career as an institution-builder, policy advisor, consultant, board director, and scholar, with a particular focus on Asian and Chinese affairs.
He is Professor of Asia-Pacific Security Studies at Macquarie University, Senior Associate Fellow with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, London), and the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence with the Asia Society Australia.
He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eight books including Asia’s New Multilateralism, Rising Star: China’s New Security Diplomacy and China Matters: Getting it Right for Australia. His next book, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, is on China’s foreign policy under Xi Jinping.