Managing the “Post Miracle” Economy in China: Crisis of Growth Model and Policy Responses

Combining some theoretical perspectives of economic development stages, a capital accumulation regime with Chinese characteristics and a techno-economic paradigm, this paper tries to explain how the Chinese growth miracle reached the edge of crisis after 2008. It argues that for 30 years, the ‘visible hand’ managing the Chinese economy has progressively shifted from local governments’ initiatives and experiments to central government’s macro policy supplemented with industrial economics tools. This brought China’s growth from the factor-driven to the investment-driven stage, and progressively decoupled the financial system from China’s local, dominant, accumulation regime, directing finance into a technological accumulation regime. The Chinese central government attempts three macroeconomic approaches with which to readdress the growth pattern: rebalancing; supply-side reform; and innovation-driven development. The Belt and Road Initiative is an attempt to domestically recouple backward to coastal provinces, trade and investment to economic diversification, and to upgrade provinces. The current Chinese growth model is composed of different capital accumulation regimes: export, domestic infrastructure investment, financial market liberalisation, e-commerce platform economy, all based on the manufacturing economy built up over the last 40 years. China needs upgrading its manufacturing economy to an innovation level and build a new capital accumulation regime based upon it.