YouSaid · the spoken record

Yasheng Huang

lines on the record: 58
first: 2023-03-08
most recent: 2023-03-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of Chinese economy entails implications about the future prospects of the country, right? Whether or not you can sustain this level of economic growth purely on the basis of massive investments.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wouldn't say it's the biggest, but one of them is that they look at the Chinese R&D spending and they look at, for example, some of the impressive technological progress the country has made. And then they drew the conclusion that Chinese economy is driven by projectivity and innovations. And in fact, studies show that the total factor productivity contributions to the GDP have been declining in the last decade and even more. So as China has begun to invest more in R&D, the economic contributions coming from technology, coming from productivity have been actually declining. So in the economic sense, it's not a productivity driven economy. It is an overwhelmingly investment driven economy. And I think that's one of the biggest misunderstandings.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a losing sector relative to the other sectors of the economy. And that gets a deeper issue about essentially the power of the government vis- ⁇-vis the household, the power of the corporate sector vis- ⁇-vis the household. That's a bigger political economy question rather than a narrow fiscal issue.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now the experts are not wrong, but the problem is that the low consumption to GDP is a symptom. It is not a cause of the imbalances of the Chinese economy. The bigger issue, I believe, is the fact that the household income share of the GDP is very low. So you have to save a fixed proportion of your household income when the household income relative to GDP is low and at some point was declining, the consumption out of the mathematical necessity is accounting for smaller and smaller share of the GDP. So the issue is really the household income. So if you look at the government and the corporate sector and the household, the household sector as a proportion to the GDP was never high and during certain periods in Chinese history.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was the overall lack of economic development, right? And the lack of physical capacity was a part of that. But the bigger picture is by our own data, the Chinese state in 19th century, China was no longer inventive. It forgot the inventions that it was able to make many many centuries before it didn't have a naval power as it used to have back in the Song Dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, there was a famous event, the Seven Voyages, where the Chinese ships were able to travel to Africa, to Arabia. And China relinquished all that naval power by 19th century.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know the number, but if you go to the economic historian's work on Qing Dynasty, their rough estimate is that China had a much smaller state in terms of the physical capacity as compared with Europe during that comparable period of time. But here, I think, and to some extent we struggle with the same issue today, if you look at the tax revenue relative to GDP, even China today is not an excessively high ratio. But if you look at the ownership role of the state, it has a big state sector. It has a big influence over the private sector. So I would argue that Chinese state in the 19th century did not derive all its power from taxation. It had the power to appoint officials. It had the power to control the private sector, control the merchants. So that kind of administrative power was quite substantial.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kind of administrative capacity to tax the population, it didn't develop the institutionalized support for public services, even though the state did provide some public services comparable to what was available in Europe. And it was not able to, for example, have a pauper RMA. That's why Chinese history was full of northern nomadic tribes taking over the country. So it was not that professionalized in the modern sense of the word. So it was underdeveloped in that sense.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so you could say that it depends on your definition of development. In one definition, you can say it was overdeveloped in the sense that you essentially only have this state and you don't really have private economy. You didn't have a real meaningful society. You didn't have an independent intellectual class in Telegenzia in the Russian word. And you didn't have organized religion. So all you had was the state and there were pockets of the society. The state was not able to reach, that's true. But where the state was able to reach, it was all domineering, right? So in that sense, the Chinese state was overdeveloped. I think it was probably underdeveloped in the sense that in part because of this dominance of the state, it didn't really develop.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source