The Beijing Consensus (also sometimes called the China Model or Chinese Economic Model) is the political and especially economic policies of the People's Republic of China that began after the death of Mao Zedong and the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping (1976) and are thought to have contributed to China's eightfold growth in gross national product over two decades. The phrase "Beijing Consensus" was coined by Joshua Cooper Ramo to pose China's economic development model as an alternative — especially for developing countries — to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies promoted by the IMF, World Bank and U.S. Treasury. In 2016, Ramo stated in an interview with The Diplomat that "The idea of the Beijing Consensus is less that every nation will follow China’s development model, but that it legitimizes the notion of particularity as opposed to the universality of a Washington model."
The term has been described variously as the pragmatic use of innovation and experimentation in the service of "equitable, peaceful high-quality growth", and "defense of national borders and interests" (by Ramo); the use of "stable, if repressive, politics and high-speed economic growth". Others maintain that "it seems" there is "no consensus as to what it stands for" other than being an alternative to the neoliberal Washington Consensus; and that the term "is applied to anything that happens in Beijing, regardless of whether or not it has to do with a 'Chinese Model of Development,' or even with the People's Republic of China (PRC) per se." This fluidity has been described as an "ultra-pragmatic" approach to policy.
The term's birth into the mainstream political lexicon was in 2004 when the United Kingdom's Foreign Policy Centre published a paper by Joshua Cooper Ramo titled The Beijing Consensus. In this paper, he laid out three broad guidelines for economic development. Ramo was a former senior editor and foreign editor of Time magazine and later a partner at Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.