The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Scott M. Moore ̶ director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost and lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future” (Oxford 2022) – is the 342nd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Identify China’s development dilemmas.
One of the points I make in the book is that China is increasingly exposed to ecological and technological risk at the very time it is navigating a perilous phase of economic development, namely the transition to high-income country status. This makes these risks, including climate risk, all the more alarming to China’s leaders, and is part of the reason that cooperation with Beijing on global challenges is so difficult. Historically, many countries see falling or plateauing growth as they move up the income ladder, and it is also worth noting that this transition is often – though not always – associated with political reform and liberalization.
For China, navigating this transition also means dealing with the effects of COVID-19, growing restrictions on foreign investment and technology transfer, growing global political risk, local government debt, an over-leveraged property sector, and a demographic crunch that will force it to rely on continued productivity enhancements. What it all adds up to is a daunting, and alarming, set of development dilemmas that will increasingly challenge Beijing in the years to come. This challenge frames Beijing’s approach to shared global challenges like climate change ..
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