Understanting China's Economic Performance

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978 : the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. The convergence school holds that China's successes are the consequences of its institutions being allowed to converge with those of non-socialist market economies, and that China's economic structure at the start of reforms is a major explanation fot the rapid growth.