How is China an Example of INTENSIVE economic growth.?

Question

Russia is an example of EXTENSIVE economic growth because they placed more factors into production, more human capital, more machinery, more land, causing capital deepening, but ultimatley failing, in part b/c they had no more people to put into production, this caused TFP stagnation and ultimatley the stop of economic growth in 1989, and then the collapse of the SU two years later. How is china the opposite example and an example of INTENSIVE growth.

Would the answer be that they reorganized and put in policy into play in order to increase production rather than put more capital into play. They had intensive growth because most growth was from TFP. Policy would be the Household Reform Act and the Managment Reform Act. THe HRA being one of the most important factors as it allowed people to keep their land for 15 years (no ownership) and then once they sold their quota of agricultural produce to the government at below market prices they were allowed to sell anything else that they produced on the market at market prices and this increased production. Also alot of production was diverted from agriculture to industy, agriculture went from 70% of total production to 50% .

Is that about right?

Answer 1

Yes, that is correct. Russia really had nothing, so they had to change what they were doing to a great extent to get production running.

China already had all of the tools and the trained labor force so their economic growth has been intensive.