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The phrase ‘New Normal’ captures the ongoing shift in the pattern and drivers of China’s economic growth. China’s new growth rate is both slower and imposing difficult structural change. These new economic conditions are challenging yet offer opportunities for China and its economic partners. Reforms must be deepened but also make growth more inclusive and environmentally sustainable, over this decade and beyond. This year’s Update offers both global context and domestic insight into this challenging new phase of China’s domestic economic transformation. How are policymakers elevating migrant workers concurrent with increasing consumption? Is China’s government spending enough on education and R&D to ensure it can achieve its aspirations to ascend the global manufacturing value chain and avoid the middle-income trap? Are energy market reforms reducing or increasing the price of gas and electricity in China? What are the consequences of China’s financial reforms and expanding Renminbi trading for foreign banks? What does China’s new growth model mean for the international resources economy and for Africa? Do SOEs face market conditions and are they dominating China’s fast-rising outbound investment? What is China’s strategy for navigating fragmented international trade policy negotiations?

Where the last three decades of the 20th century witnessed a China rising on to the global economic stage, the first three decades of the 21st century are almost certain to bring with them the completion of that rise, not only in economic, but also political and geopolitical terms. China’s integration into the global economy has brought one-fifth of the global population into the world trading system, which has increased global market potential and integration to an unprecedented level. The increased scale and depth of international specialisation propelled by an enlarged world market has offered new opportunities to boost world production, trade and consumption; with the potential for increasing the welfare of all the countries involved. However, China’s integration into the global economy has forced a worldwide reallocation of economic activities. This has increased various kinds of friction in China’s trading and political relations with others, as well as generating several globally significant externalities. Finding ways to accommodate China’s rise in a way that ensures the future stability and prosperity of the world economy and polity is probably the most important task facing the world community in the first half of the 21st century. The book delves into these issues to reflect upon the wide range of opportunities and challenges that have emerged in the context of a rising China.

Economic policy; Commercial policy; Industrialization; Economic conditions; China

In the past, foreign shocks arrived to national economies mainly through trade channels, and transmissions of such shocks took time to come into effect. However, after capital globalization, shocks spread to markets almost immediately. Despite the increasing macroeconomic dangers that the situation generated at emerging markets in the South, nobody at the North was ready to acknowledge the pro-cyclicality of the financial system and the inner weakness of “decontrolled” financial innovations because they were enjoying from the “great moderation.” Monetary policy was primarily centered on price stability objectives, without considering the mounting credit and asset price booms being generated by market liquidity and the problems generated by this glut. Mainstream economists, in turn, were not majorly attracted in integrating financial factors in their models. External pressures on emerging market economies (EMEs) were not eliminated after 2008, but even increased as international capital