China Task Force Meeting, Manchester 2006

This task force is a global joint undertaking between Columbia University (including the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, the Committee on Global Thought, the East Asia Center, and the Law School), China (including Tsinghua University, Peking University, and the Development Research Forum), and the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute.

China is entering a critical phase in its move to a market economy, in which it will establish the basic institutional foundations of a market economy, including legal frameworks that will govern property rights, competition, corporate governance, intellectual property, bankruptcy, contracts, etc. There is, of course, more than one form of market economy - the Scandinavian model differs from the Anglo-American, the Japanese, and the Continental European models, and by the same token, there are marked differences in legal structures. China has committed itself to developing a market economy with its own distinctive characteristics. Ongoing debates and discussions, and discussions over the next few years, will have a major effect in determining the kind of market economy into which China will evolve.

This provides a unique opportunity to think about the differences in institutional arrangements and their consequences - and what would normally be an academic exercise could turn out to have enormous impact for a quarter of the world's population.

The project entails papers describing the major issues and trade-offs in each of the areas of focus and global experiences; the development of courses/curriculum based on these global perspectives which would be piloted at Columbia and at Tsinghua and Peking Universities; and a presentation of the results to policy makers in China. The task force might ultimately put out a book, a compilation of papers and commentaries that would be published in Chinese and in English, in one of the series of books which Oxford University Press and Columbia University Press are publishing for the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. A final stage of the project would reflect on the role of differences in perspectives, history, and circumstances in shaping views on these critical institutional/policy issues.