Introduction: The quest for a balanced economic growth and social development: Ideas and practices promoting social cohesion in Greater China

In the last few years, governments in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have tried to promote social harmony through adopting various measures to help those people who have been socially marginalized throughout the period of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 to better adapt to the rapidly changing socioeconomic environment. Unlike the precrisis period that governments and people of these societies had enjoyed a very steady economic growth, as what the World Bank called it as an “East Asia miracle”, nowadays citizens living in these economics confront unpredictable economic growth, widening gap between the rich and the poor, growing unemployment, reduction in wages and immense pressures for enhancing their global competitiveness by cutting production costs in an increasingly globalizing economy context. To strike for a balance between economic growth and social development, these governments have begun to review their economic development policies, adopting new strategies to promote economic growth with considerations given to enhancing social harmony this chapter attempts to set the context for the present volume, with particular reference to examine the notions of social cohesion and social harmony in the context of three Chinese societies, namely, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 World Scientific Publishing.