The Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989 was a defining moment in Chinese history, widely interpreted as a sign of China’s impending doom. It has proven to be anything but. China is the world’s most rapidly changing society. The Communists are still in power – but with capitalists in its ranks. Chinese farmers oppose the harsh policies of corrupt local government – but use cell phones to report state violence to foreign journalists. Since Tiananmen, China’s annual GDP has averaged 9% and it’s in everyone’s interests to keep the nation’s economic expansion going, writes Donald H. Straszheim , a longtime China watcher and expert on the Chinese economy.
Donald H. Straszheim is vice chairman of Roth Capital Partners in Los Angeles, where he has been spearheading the company’s China initiatives since 2006. A longtime China specialist, he is a visiting scholar at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is former global chief economist at Merrill Lynch and previously served as president of the Milken Institute. This article initially appeared in Forbes.com and has been reproduced here with the author’s permission.
