China Daily, March 29, 2021.
Tony Andreani is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Paris VIII. Rémy Herrera is an economist and researcher at the Center d’Économie de la Sorbonne. Zhiming Long is a professor of economics at the School of Marxism at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, China was seen by many Western capitalists as a “new El Dorado.” Since it became more open to international trade (starting in the early 2000s especially) and was admitted to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, China was supposed to become a huge market accessible to investors from industrialized countries, where their multinational firms could sell a good part of their chronic overproduction. In addition, with its enormous pool of labor, both highly educated and relatively inexpensive, it was to see its role confined to that of a “workshop of the world,” which allowed it, more than any other economy in the South, to supply the countries of the North with low-cost goods on a massive scale.