Mapping China's Progress

Tom Fowdy

The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was recently concluded with the election of new leadership in Beijing. With a membership of 96 million people, China's ruling Communist Party is one of the largest parties on Earth. The 20th CPC National Congress served as an instrument of unity, evaluation, accountability, and consensus building. This poses the question, what has China achieved under its rule in the past decade since its 18th Congress in 2012? 

China's economic transformation in the past 10 years has been significant. Since 2012, China's GDP has more than doubled, from $8.5 trillion to $17.7 trillion in 2021, becoming the world's second-largest. As GDP has grown, its GDP per capita has also doubled from around $6,000 to $12,000 per person. In conjunction with this rapid economic growth, China has expended significant resources on ensuring the benefits of growth are shared throughout society as a whole, which is reflected in its campaign to alleviate extreme poverty, a goal that was reached at the end of 2020. 

A World Bank study states: "China has accounted for almost 75 per cent of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. In 2021, China declared that it has eradicated extreme poverty according to the national poverty threshold, lifting 770 million people out of poverty since 1978, and that it has built a 'moderately prosperous society in all respects.' Manuela V. Ferro, the World Bank's vice president for East Asia and Pacific, has said that China's poverty reduction is "a story of persistent growth through economic transformation." 

This has also involved relocating 9.6 million from the most impoverished areas, including moving 832 counties out of poverty altogether, with quality of life and living also growing in tandem. In 2021, China's average life expectancy was 75.1 years, and it is now 78.2 years. China's development has also been characterised by the rapid development of infrastructure, connecting a country that is enormous in size and opening new opportunities. 

The assembly of the Belt and Road Initiative overseas has created an entire high-speed rail network on an unprecedented scale which now links 75 per cent of cities with a population over half a million and has been increasing at roughly 3,700 km per year. Measuring 37,900 km at the start of 2022, it is expected to reach 70,000 km by 2035. China's infrastructure expansion has been unprecedented across the board, also in terms of airports, highways, metros, and renewable energy transportation. 

Beyond individual quality of life, the past decade has also seen China increasingly position itself as one of the world's technological and scientific powerhouses. Research and development spending in the country has almost doubled, from $300 billion in 2012 to a record $564 billion in 2020, according to the most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. These advances in China's scientific development and research environment have seen the country make progress across a wide range of technologies, including in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics, aviation, supercomputing, and quantum computing, among other areas. 

In addition, China landed on Mars for the first time and also became the first country to land on the dark side of the Moon and the third country to have retrieved material from the lunar surface. In the past 10 years, China's education sector has also witnessed remarkable progress, with seven Chinese universities being ranked amongst the world's top 100 universities. China's achievements throughout the past decade have been both tangible and formidable. It is yet another stage in the transformation of a nation that was once an impoverished and agrarian country. 

www.china.org.cn