The Chinese Birdcage

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. The Chinese Birdcage

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 1-9

3. Western Triumphalism

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 11-20

4. China as the World’s Factory

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 21-32

5. Housing Bubbles Across the Western Hemisphere

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 33-53

6. The Global Financial Crisis

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 55-74

7. The Economic Fallout

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 75-87

8. Unlimited Supplies of Labor

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 89-97

9. China’s Economic Development

   • Heleen Mees

   Pages 99-114

10. Corporate Cash Piles and Falling Interest Rates

    • Heleen Mees

    Pages 115-131

11. The Shortfall in Demand

    • Heleen Mees

    Pages 133-162

12. Piketty Reconsidered

    • Heleen Mees

    Pages 163-173

13. What Lies Ahead?

    • Heleen Mees

    Pages 175-189

14. Back Matter

    Pages 191-197

    PDF

This book vividly describes how China’s rise in the early 2000s led to rising profits and declining labor income everywhere, ultimately resulting in the global financial crisis. Under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘reform and opening up’ in the 1980s, China quickly became the world’s factory floor...but powerful political leaders envisioned a world in which the market economy would be trapped within the confines of a planned economy. With China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001, almost a billion people joined the global workforce, driving down the real wages of blue- and white-collar workers in the US and Europe while also lowering interest rates, which fueled housing bubbles and destabilized the financial sector. This book explores China’s significant influence on western economies by focusing on the links between the labor market, corporate profits, and interest rates, using Arthur Lewis's framework for economic growth with unlimited supplies of labor to argue that by2010 the world economy – and political situations – had been set back almost one hundred years. 

• capitalist surplus
• global economy
• financial crisis
• Piketty
• Arthur Lewis
• Asia
• China
• economics
• international economics
• regions
• WTO

• Brooklyn, USA

  Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees was Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. She is a columnist for the Dutch daily De Volkskrant and she writes opinion articles for various international publications including Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, Project Syndicate, and NRC Handelsblad.

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