'What is China's Dream?' Hu Angang Imagines China in 2020 as the First Internationally Embedded Superpower

Abstract

HU Angang, one of this generation’s most influential academic thinkers, has applied his considerable analytic skills to theorize the future of China in his most recent book, China in 2020: A New Type of Superpower. The book represents an effort to add authoritative Chinese voices to the Western debates about China, written to observe China as an insider, to understand China as a researcher, to forecast China’s future as a participant in its evolution, and as a scholar of the era following Deng Xiaoping, to help construct China. This review will consider HU’s analysis from two perspectives. The first focuses on the contextual perspective of the historical development and future path of the People’s Republic of China. The second focuses on the theoretical perspective, analyzing the framework within which strong state influences will be structured increasingly in this century. This review is divided into three broad sections. Part A of this review starts with a short assessment of the framing context within which it was produced for Western audiences. Part B then turns to the heart of Hu Angang’s work. Critical attention will be placed on the theoretical framework developed in the bookend chapters. Part C then considers the bulk of Hu’s analysis — the way that framework informs the opportunities and challenges in economics, population management, environmental, organizational and other key respects. To understand those challenges for China, one must also to understand the challenges for the proper practice and development of the Chinese Communist Party within China as well as on the international stage. Hu suggests here the contours of a seamless merger of domestic and internal policies grounded in China’s substantive political norms, now harmonized with global internationalism.

Keywords: China,economic development, Communist Party, population policy, environment, sustainability, reform

JEL Classification: E11, I30, K33, O11, O53, P33, Z10