Can China Avert Crisis?
I F THE East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 sparked One Great Debate, it was a debate over" Asian" versus "Western" capitalism. Or, more precisely, it sparked a debate about whether the root cause of the crisis was a failure of Asian capitalism or a failure of Western capitalism (Dean 2000a, 2000b). Western economists were prone to vacillate, and the most influential of them changed his mindmidcrisis (Krugman 1998a, b; 1999). Had practicing the evil arts of Asian capitalism been sufficient to trigger a crisis, China should have been Asia's leading candidate for Armageddon. But China survived, while the East