Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review

China's transformation from the world's economic periphery into its nucleus has been labelled as an example of either the horror of globalization, or of its success. The enormous growth pace of the Chinese economic and political potential had become an important challenge to the status quo of the international system. The author of the article, having employed the basic statements of the political economy and official statistical data as well as institutional assessments, is developing the idea that China's comeback to the world's dynamic economy after a number of decades of autonomy has been determined by the ability of the country's political and business elite to choose priorities so as to liberate the market forces, use the surplus of the world capital and its regular movement to the places where marginal profit is the highest, and, at the same time, expediently manipulate the Sino-centric attitudes of the nation. However, it starts to be obvious that the national bureaucracy that is prone to yielding to the dictatorship of the defensive economic nationalism and is striving at unproportionally high benefits for itself may lose the main stimulant of the economic growth, i.e. foreign investment.