The global conditions of China's economic development: How does globalisation affect China in the context of Kornai's Frankenstein metaphor?

Abstract

Abstract The objective of this study is to identify how globalisation influences China and how China affects globalisation in the context of János Kornai's Frankenstein metaphor. Kornai (2019) felt moral responsibility for unwillingly contributing with his advice in the 1980s to the birth of a modern version of Frankenstein, the Monster which his creators could not control. A crucial guiding principle of this paper is how the US and the advanced democratic economies can respond to Kornai's dilemma and reconcile the diverging requirements of economic interests with national security priorities. There is a research gap in the systematic mapping of the external economic environment on China's development. The primary conclusion of this paper is that China is less dependent on the rest of the world than the world on China. As the de-risking concept suggests, trade restrictions and domestic industrial policy measures focused on a narrow range of strategic sectors should be combined with unlimited trade and cooperation in the remaining non-strategic sectors. This study's conceptual and methodological framework can be used to analyse the relationship between advanced democratic economies and autocratic regimes in Kornai's Frankenstein dilemma.