China's economic size will match that of the U.S. by 2035 and double it in total GDP by midcentury, concludes Albert Keidel in presenting his new policy brief, China's Economic Rise—Fact and Fiction.
Keidel and a panel of leading experts on China's economy and military discuss the success and substantiality of China's economic rise and addressed the U.S. and global implications of China's long-term economic growth.
Keidel is joined by Stephen Voth with the U.S. government, Gregory Foster of National Defense University, and Harry Harding of George Washington University. Carnegie's Michael Swaine moderates the discussion- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Bio
Gregory Foster
Gregory D. Foster is Professor of Political Science at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, Washington, D.C., where he previously has served as George C. Marshall Professor and J. Carlton Ward Distinguished Professor and Director of Research. He also is Executive Director of the Defense Environmental Forum, a joint venture between the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Installations & Environment) and the President of the National Defense University.
During his tenure at the Industrial College, he has served as director of the Elements of National Power course, the Values, Ethics, and Leadership program, the New Faculty Development program, and the Environment Industry Study group, while also teaching executive-level courses in political science, ethics, mobilization, national power, environmental security, social issues and national security, and strategic brainstorming.
A West Point graduate and former regular army officer, Mr. Foster holds a doctorate in public administration from The George Washington University. He has held adjunct faculty appointments at The Johns Hopkins University and The American University, where he has taught graduate courses in business ethics, management science, and public management. He has published widely in the areas of national security affairs, civil-military relations, ethics, public management, and futures research. His publications include The Strategic Dimension of Military Manpower (Ballinger, 1987) and Paradoxes of Power: The Military Establishment in the Eighties (Indiana University Press, 1983).
Prior to joining the faculty of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Mr. Foster served as the first director of the National Defense University's Command and Control Research Program. Before that, he held a number of research management posts in the private sector, including Director of Research and Manager of Washington Operations for the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Director of the Center for Security and Policy Studies, Science Applications, Inc.
Dr. Harry Harding
Director of Research and Analysis, Eurasia Group
Harry Harding is a leading China specialist in the United States. He has advised several US Presidents on developments in the PRC; before the Tiananmen Square demonstrations he was brought to Camp David for informal discussions with the first Bush administration. He has written roughly 10 books, including the seminal "China's Second Revolution," regularly cited by Chinese officials as influencing their present 5-year plan.
Dr. Harding served on the political science faculties of Swarthmore College (1970-1971) and Stanford University (1971-1983) and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He then became Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution (1983-1994), and, later, Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, a post he held for more than 10 years in total ( January 1995 - June 30, 2005).
Dr. Harding is widely credited for making the Elliott School an internationally competitive graduate program. Upon his retirement from that post, Harding accepted a University Professorship at the School. On August 1, 2005, Harding joined Eurasia Group, a global political risk consultancy, as the firm's Director of Research and Analysis.
Albert Keidel
Albert Keidel joined the Carnegie Endowment in September 2004, after serving as acting director and deputy director for the Office of East Asian Nations at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. His work at the Endowment focuses on issues relating to China's economic system reforms, macroeconomy, regional development, and poverty reduction strategy.
Before joining Treasury in 2001, he covered economic trends, system reforms, poverty, and country risk as a senior economist in the World Bank office in Beijing. Keidel has worked in China, Japan, and Korea and taught graduate economics courses on China, Japan, and development.
Michael Swaine
Michael Swaine came to the Carnegie Endowment after 12 years at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in Chinese security and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations.
One of the most prominent U.S. analysts in Chinese security studies, he is the author of more than 10 monographs on security policy in the region. At RAND, he was a senior political scientist in international studies and also research director of the RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy.
He was appointed as the first recipient of the RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy Chair in Northeast Asian Security in recognition of the exceptional contributions he has made in his field.
Prior to joining RAND in 1989, Swaine was a consultant with a private sector firm; a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California at Berkeley; and a research associate at Harvard University. He attended the Taipei and Tokyo Inter-University Centers for Language Study, administered by Stanford University, for training in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.
Stephen Voth
Stephen Voth is a former CIA Agent with the U.S. government.
Keidel is a China apologist and proudly wears it on his sleeve. The guy obviously will never say one thing negative about China. I cannot believe anyone in US policy circles even listens to him. Presumably he is of the kind that believes in superiority of technocracy, hence when it comes to China he's a kid in the candy store.
Keidel represents everything that is wrong with economists in ivory towers. He starts with a conclusion and builds his facts around what he wants to believe; reality be damned. It wouldn't be a problem when he stays in his little academic silo but it becomes an issue if he starts influencing policy.
Then again maybe he is actually a double agent. If he can get the Chinese policy makers to listen to him then US economic superiority remains secure.
People are nowadays so easily getting unhealthily euphoric about China. As an ethnic Chinese and having lived on both sides of the Pacific in my 49 years of life I am able to tell you a lot of fundamental factors that I found people like Albert Keidel are not able to visualize and gain insight into. To me, the fact that he has been around with things of China’s and “working side by side with Chinese economists” does not actually warrant much for the kind of projections that he is willing to cast.
Just the year before Enron collapsed (2001), Alan Greenspan was happily receiving Enron’s Distinguished Public Service Award from the Mastermind of Enron’s defrauding schemes - Ken Lay (who himself has got a PhD in economics). That is, “seniority” class economist like Greenspan could not see what he needed to see from things like Enron. There are all sorts of economists – the good, the not-so-good,... etc.
The comment last posted by Maria, about "a New Chinese Century" is to me something really overblown. It’s not that I don’t want to see there to be a thing like this (for I am an ethnic Chinese who speak and read the Chinese language, so for sure I am not one of those China-bashing stereotype), I simply find euphoric projections of this kind unfounded. And, if you read Chinese you will be able to access a lot of things that you are not able to see if you do not have access to the language.
The first thing that put me off about Albert Keidel's projections is that he would be the first economist that I have ever seen to talk about a projection for the next 100 years. I have known none of any reputable economist who is under any circumstance willing to talk about things that's more distant than even ten year down the road. One of my old professors, who was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy and a committee member that awards the Nobel Prize in economics (and he also specializes in economic history, like Douglass North), would be very suspicious of the merit in anyone who will be inclined to make a projection for anything longer than even 15 years into the future.
For sure Stephen Voth's comments are to me much more plausible.
And I can tell you this; there are a lot of things going on now in China that resemble what was with Enron in the late 1990s. And, just to start with, China remain is now a place where auditing practices are nothing more than shambles. And judicial inefficacy is reassuring that the cookie-cutter kind of accounting practices as a norm in China will only go on. (this wording is borrowed from what Noble Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz had once dubbed that some economists in the international circles are perpetuating a “cookie-cutter” kind of economics)
What I see is that the essential issue of “information asymmetry” is totally ignored by those who painted a rosy picture for things that’s China.
The general trend in China's development is very clear and demanding for all of us. I think that we will have a New Chinese Century, not the one some other thaught would be the case...
member. 
