Ni Hao #7: China's rapid development
The first word to use when answering a phone in China is Wei? hello. To ask if someone is available say: Qing wen…zai ma? Could you please tell me if…is available? In China the receiver of the call does not identify him/herself immediately, like is the custom in our culture. In this series of articles we bring you highlights from our correspondent who studied Chinese in Beijing and Xi’an. This seventh segment is about the rapid development of China in the past few years.
Anyone who traveled to China recently or who has visited China several times, can only be impressed with the rapid development of infrastructure, high rises, high speed trains, airports, dams, power plants etc. Last year was my seventh trip to China. A lot has changed in China in the past twenty years.
I recall that twenty years ago there were still a lot of bicycles in Beijing. Two years ago I saw old bicycles piled up on corners of streets. Instead of bicycles, cars now race on wide boulevards along Tiananmen Square; there are three lane highways with plenty of trucks between major cities.
The center of Beijing itself has completely changed: there are highrise office- and apartment buildings, shops with world brand names, shopping streets (like Wangfujing) with big crowds of people (who do not give the impression that they still save a lot).
Some people nostalgically think back of he old “hutongs” of Beijing where people lived in small houses with no plumbing, no electricity. In the center of Beijing those “hutongs” are all gone; some have been replaced by hutong style renovated luxury hotels.
How did all of this come about? The policy of opening China, introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, has quadrupled the size of the Chinese economy. Over the last three decades, with an annual average rate of economic growth of 10 percent, China has produced the most successful and unprecedented economic revolution in world history.
According to Wang Huiyao "[China] has changed the quality of life and lifestyles of one quarter of the people in the world". M. Hudson wrote "China has build up the world's most modern infrastructure and fastest growth in living standards [for the most populated country of the world]".
The Chinese economy currently produces about $ 5.9 trillion per year in terms of GDP. This is larger than the economy of Japan, which used to be the second largest economy of the world. The US economy is close to $ 14.7 trillion in GDP (i.e. at current exchange rates), still two and half times bigger than the Chinese economy.
Although China has become the second largest economy in the world, it still lags the US in terms of per capita income by a wide margin ($ 4,800 versus $ 47,300, respectively). Hence the US per capital income is about ten times bigger than China's per capita income. It is difficult to see how China even in the next twenty years could overtake the US in terms of per capita GDP.
Robert Fogel, a Nobel price laureate in economics, forecasts, that in 30 years China's share of the Global GDP will represent 40 %, compared to 14 % for the US and 5 % for Europe. The assumptions underlying his forecast could not be verified, but even if these projections are way off the shift would be astonishing.
In spite of the rapid development of China, 150 million Chinese continue to live on less than one dollar a day. There is growing income equality in China, environmental degradation and political corruption. Over ten million people have no access to electricity; water scarcity prevails in a large number of cities as well as in the northern and western parts. China has many problems some of which will be highlighted in the next segment in this series.
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