The economic base of China is shifting, although it is shifting more slowly than in other parts of Asia or the First World. But China, for so many years an agricultural nation, is becoming increasingly a high-tech one as its current leaders attempt to "leap-frog" over some of the economic steps that other nations have had to make in shifting to the post-industrial world. This paper examines the key elements of the high-tech sector of the economy in China as well as looking at some of the opportunities and problems that such high-tech expansion may pose for the country.
To some extent the increasing integration of the Chinese economy of high-tech products reflects the push by the Chinese government and Chinese workers to create the kinds of products that will be most desirable on the world market in the 21st century. That is, to some extent this shift reflects internal factors. But to some extent it also reflects the degree to which globalization is affected China as well as every other nation. Although China remains more politically as well as economically isolated (or self-sufficient, depending upon one's perspective) from the world system than do other large nations, it too is increasingly being drawn into the cross-border economic connections that define globalization, which is (to put it in the simplest terms) a realignment of power between political organizations and economic ones.
In considering the nature of high-tech economic development in China, it is important to understand the fundamental social shifts that occur in the lives of people when they move from making a living off the land to working in an industrialized and now (at least to some extent) a post-industrialized economy.
At one level, we may consider the shift from agrarian to industrial society a simple substitution of one form of economic behavior for another, hanging up the hat of the farmer to put on the hat of the factory worker. But there was in fact ...