Maria Fernanda Sikorski interviews Xiaoyang Tang in Phenomenal World:
Maria Sikorski: Outside observers have characterized the Chinese development by contrasting it to the “Washington Consensus.” However, in your writing—including your 2021 book—you challenge the notion of a singular “Beijing consensus” by introducing the idea of coevolutionary pragmatism. What does this concept tell us about China’s own history of development, and its approach to other developing nations?
Xiaoyang Tang: The Washington Consensus adopted a strict logic of causal mechanisms and attempted to generalize them—it stipulates static variables that should lead to specific results. It identifies a cause-and-effect relationship between factors such as the free market and economic growth.
The Chinese experience suggests that viewing economic development through this analysis is overly simplistic—and that culture, existing economic institutions, historical economic institutions, style of educational system, form of government, and so on, all must move together in a country’s modernization process.
I find that the concept of coevolutionary pragmatism best explains this multidimensional and interactive relationship. The form of government is not a determinant factor in economic growth; it is correlated to it. For the economy to grow, the form of government must fit its current economic conditions, and it must adapt as the economy grows. In this type of multidimensional relationship, there is no fixed model for either the government or the economic structure that leads to development. Instead, you have a pragmatic view on how to adjust different factors operating inside a broader system to seek a better functioning relationship between all of them at each stage of development. In contrast to the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, the search for the right combination of variables will be dynamic across national contexts and across time.
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