the Beijing Consensus

This book is a short study on China's international economic stance for the Foreign Policy Centre by Joshua Cooper Ramo. It was one of the many many things about that which I've read over the last month for an essay (hence why this blog has been largely postless in that time, I've been doing mostly course reading, and rarely do I actually finish an entire book for that. I've also been playing borderline-obsessive amounts of Fallout 4, and it was the whole Christmas-and-such debacle a few weeks ago, but I digress). I can't really be bothered to write a proper post about it. The 'Beijing Consensus' is the informal state of affairs by which China, through diplomatic and resource-acquisitive and sheer-we've-got-a-massive-economy means, is increasingly building up an international norm of self-determination among smaller developing states, i.e. helping them ignore/bypass the Washington Consensus (the formal state of affairs by which the USA, through diplomatic and military and resource-acquisitive and sheer-we've-got-a-massive-economy means, spent most of the 20th-century increasingly building up an international norm of America-determination among smaller developing states, i.e. helping them doing whatever America wanted/needed them to do). Ramo, as you'd hope a policy researcher would've, has done his homework, and this book, though slim, is chock-full of economic statistics and nuggetty facts demonstrating that the Washington Consensus was pretty regressive but is bit-by-bit getting replaced in many continents by the Beijing Consensus, which also comes across as a much less parochial structure. Good on you China, I guess. Anyway, this'd make interesting reading to anyone who likes big-picture international politics or economics or relations or whatever; I especially recommend it if you're writing an essay about China's place in the modern global economy.

Don't tell the Foreign Policy Centre but I've uploaded this into my Drive so anyone with the link below can read it for free. It was probably elsewhere on the internet already. Google Docs can't hack .pdf's though apparently, so it screwed up the formatting a little bit, but it's still a rather interesting read: here.