ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of what is conventionally known as China’s economic reform in 1978, mainstream Western economists have been puzzled by the sustainability of China’s economic performances. They gauge the mix of China’s achievements, discrepancies, inequalities, and acute social tensions against a specific model of social institutions dubbed universal – the model of economic liberalism. This model has become more and more influential intellectually with the monetarist counter-revolution in the 1970s and has become hegemonic since the rise of the rational expectations school, which proclaimed the efficient market theory urbi et orbi. Economic liberalism has risen to prominence politically in the Anglo-Saxon world with Reagan’s and Thatcher’s counter-revolution in the 1980s.
