[econ11]

RE: "...a bigger contributor to the massive improvement in (purely economic) standard-of-living for most Chinese"

Hong Kong's prosperity influenced China to transform into a freer economic system. The roads, schools, and other infrastructure built from China's centrally-planned economy would've been much more affordably built with a higher and growing GDP; instead, doing those projects shifted much-needed resources during its Great Famine and many other periods of starvation into unnecessary and ultimately lethal projects that caused the deaths of a lot of people.

[shaddi]

Once again, I don't dispute that; we're in full agreement. My key point is that the effects of liberalism that lead to growth in Hong Kong did not lead directly to growth in rural China; as nice as that would be, there were other forces at play that caused that. Another way of putting this is to say that the effect of the communist government was to constrain growth around Hong Kong, and infrastructure development occurred in rural areas despite that.

The motivation behind "charter cities" is exactly that such a direct effect from liberalization would occur, whereas that doesn't necessarily follow and certainly not well-illustrated by the article's example. It is just one point in a broader criticism of the whole concept: such cities may provide an example, but they don't solve the (IMHO, harder) problem of affecting change in the non-charter city areas, which will still face broader structural obstacles. The existence of a Hong Kong is not a sufficient condition for broad societal change, though it is certainly a helpful one, if not exactly necessary.

I'm happy to continue this discussion via email, no need to take up more of this thread.