Empowering China’s Poor

Much of China’s current economic success can be attributed to the rediscovery in the late 1970s that private ownership and open trade are pre-requisites to sustainable wealth creation. Subsequent reforms have enabled millions of Chinese entrepreneurs to mobilise and invest capital in their businesses, creating unprecedented prosperity and employment.

But as Chinese labour costs rise, its comparative advantage as a location for manufacturing is declining. Already Chinese companies are outsourcing production to Vietnam and other countries. Meanwhile, the rural poor – many of them dispossessed and disenfranchised – are becoming increasingly restless. There is talk of trouble brewing.

Please join International Policy Network for a lunchtime discussion, with one of the country’s leading experts on property rights and local democracy, on the prospects for empowering China’s poor.

Prof Xingyuan Feng

Xingyuan Feng is Associate Professor at the Rural Development Institute (RDI) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is also a co-founder and Vice President of the Cathay Institute for Public Affairs, a think tank in Beijing, Editor-in-chief of a new book series in China, Theory of Order and Economics, and a Member of the Editorial Board of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development.

Prof Feng is the author of several books, including Rural Enterprise Finance and Informal Rural Organizational Innovations in China and European Constitution Making: Implications for China. He has also published dozens of newspaper and journal articles in China and abroad.