To What Extent Did China Open Its Economic System to the Rest of the World after Beijing 2008?

For much of her long history, China has always been closed to herself; only recently, in the last 40 years, it began to open its doors to the rest of the world. The 2008 Beijing Olympics may symbolise the culmination of China’s opening. In particular, the fantastic opening ceremony allowed all the world to get to know, live, the brand-new “Middle Kingdom” (Mangan and Hong, 2011). China is called Zhōngguó in Mandarin which literally means Middle “Zhōng” and Kingdom “Guó” (Sun and Lancaster, 2013). In this essay, it will be argued that China opened to the rest of the world, and how the 2008 Olympic Games marked a turning point on the process from a huge country of rice fields to world’s second economy. The response of the PRC to the economic globalisation will be analysed throw the growth of the international trade, the tourism’s reaction the Olympics Games, the economic agreements that China signed and the importance of foreign investments.

Since the end of the last century, China has moved from being largely closed to become one of the global major players (OECD, 2010). Although, some people argue that Chinese economic policy is still focused only on the interior interests of the nation. For example, Chinese people can’t have access to most of the western online facilities because, since the government strictly censors every kind of news or thoughts that could affect the popular belief (Xu and Albert, 2017). However, China is has been attempting to rise in the global scenery for many decades. China’s first try to open up to the world happened in 1979 when the government started to send large numbers of students abroad (Sun and Lancaster, 2013). However, the “Middle Kingdom” began to remove its economic barriers only in 2001 when joined the World Trade Organization after 15 years of negotiations (Mrudula and Raju, 2006). Since that moment China achieved to become the second world’s largest economy, being a strong competitor of the global economic leader: the United States of America (Keith, 2005). It is the first example of a developing country that succeeds to become a world power. As speed and scale, the Chinese economic transformation and rise in the global scenery are historically unprecedented (Sun and Lancaster, 2013). This is confirmed by an average GDP’s annual growth of 13% in the first decade of this

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