1) In 1978, China adopted Den Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" policies which opened China's economy and contributed greatly to increased globalization and trade. 2) Between 1978 and 2008, global imports and exports grew 800% and China's GDP increased from $148 billion to $8.2 trillion. 3) China's economic reforms and integration into the global economy helped lift over 600 million Chinese people out of poverty and led to unprecedented growth.

1. Cordero 1
Enrique J Cordero
Prof. Rick Levitt
International Relations in The Post Cold War Era
Final Written Assignment
December 12, 2013
All aboard the prosperity train! But, who’s driving?
In 1978 the “paramount leader” of the PRC Den
Xiaoping unleashed a set of political and economic
philosophies called the “Four Modernizations”, mainly
oriented to strengthen and modernize China in the
fields of agriculture, industry, national defense and
science and technology. 1 These philosophies turned
into actions and behaviors that transcended China’s
borders (and its wall), sending into high gear what is
arguably today an unstoppable force, globalization (or economic interconnectedness
as some thought leaders would prefer to call it).
The argument is not that the “Four Modernizations” policies and market-based
economic reforms in China were the origin of what we know today as globalization,
but they clearly marked China’s defection from the stagnant economic concepts of
soviet socialism to a foreign trade open market economy, thus becoming a major

2. Cordero 2
contributor to the speed and magnitude at which globalization evolved and
continues to evolve today.
The numbers speak for themselves, according to the UNCTADSTAT between 1948
and 1978 the total three-year growth value of global imports and exports for the
developed economies hardly exceeded the 2 trillion dollar mark, but between 1978
and 1987 the same indicator started to grow at a significantly faster pace reaching
~16 trillion dollars in 2008 before the financial crisis. This is an 800% rate of
increase for the same 30-year period. Developing and transition economies had a
very similar behavior as exhibited in the table below, but at a lesser scale.
Concurrently, on the domestic arena it is without doubt that China’s investment
and strategy pinned on the use of their land and labor endowments have generated
not only enormous benefits to their economy, going from $148 Billion GDP in 1978
to $8.2 Trillion GDP in 2012,2 but also unprecedented and unmatched results on
welfare by reducing the portion of their population living on less than $1.25/day
from 85% to 13.1% between 1981 and 2008, roughly 600 million people taken out of
China’s
“Four
Modernizations”

3. Cordero 3
poverty (about 2 times the total population of the United States). In fact, this single
result is so impactful that excluding China from the statistics for that same period
the world’s reduction in poverty would be only around 10% versus a 20% reduction
when you factor in China’s numbers.3
Undoubtedly, in 30 years Xiaoping’s “Four Modernizations” propelled the world
economy to embrace probably the greatest influencing force since the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, overshadowing the impact that the post
WW2 hegemons, the US and the Soviet Union, had in improving either the global
economy or its population’s welfare during the same time period between 1948 and
1978. However, we cannot ignore the role that the US has played as a major
consumer of Chinese products and services fueling the rise of China’s economy and
in and of itself representing the largest transfer of capital endowment between two
nations in the history of mankind.
This leaves several questions that deserve further exploration. Is globalization a
driven force or a driving force? In other words, can globalization be controlled,
modulated or affected by its actors? Or, has it become an operational code that
controls, modulates and affects how the world behaves today? If the answer is the
former, then who is driving the prosperity train? The US? Europe? China? Walmart
and the MNC’s? Because if the answer is the latter it is very clear that globalization
is in the driving seat. But, where?

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REFERENCES
1 Wikipedia, Ebrey,
Patricia
Buckley.
"Four
Modernizations
Era".
A
Visual
Sourcebook
of
Chinese
Civilization.
University
of
Washington.
Archived
from
the
original
on
OCTOBER
7,
2010.
Retrieved
October
20,
2011.
2
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+gdp&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-
8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
3
Anup
Shah,
2010
http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-­‐around-­‐the-­‐
world#WorldBanksPovertyEstimatesRevised