China’s miracles

This week, China has been celebrating its foundation day as the People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1, 1949.

Comparing Pakistan and China at their births in his book, ‘A Shattered Dream: Understanding Pakistan’s Underdevelopment’, Ghulam Kibria asserts that “with an effective administration, judiciary, and other state organs intact and in operation, along with modem technology, Pakistan could not be anything other than viable. China [and South Korea], were left in chaos by civil wars and lawlessness. There was no question of an effective administration, much less a judiciary. There were neither roads nor railways intact”.

Today, China is an economic goliath and technological heavyweight as the country has witnessed miraculous prosperity in the span of a few decades, particularly since the economic reforms spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping and relatively consistent policies pursued by his successors. In his book ‘China 1949–2019: From Poverty to World Power’, Professor Urio argues that “after one century of humiliations [1839-1949], the recovery of China started already during the Mao era. However, it is especially thanks to Deng that China’s long march towards prosperity and world power gained momentum”. Unlike many other countries, regime changes in China did not trigger policy discontinuity; and Deng’s economic reforms were pursued by his successors, albeit with some tweaks.

In her latest book ‘Upstart: How China Became a Great Power’, Oriana Skylar Mastro has remarked that “in 2000, China’s economy was a mere 3 percent of global GDP, less than that of France. Fewer than 7 percent of Chinese had cell phone subscriptions in 2000, and the number of internet users was below 2 percent of the population”.

However, as they say, it’s all history now. A decade later, “China’s economy surpassed Japan’s to become the second largest in the world, and it has since become larger than the Japanese, Indian, and German economies combined”. It merits a mention here that between 2008 and 2018, China’s GDP rose four-fold from $4.6 trillion to $18 trillion.

Through political stability coupled with policy consistency and continuous learning, unlearning and relearning, China offers serious lessons to many countries regarding its miraculous efforts in lifting about 800 million people out of extreme poverty during the last four decades. According to Yang, “between 1978 and 2018, China’s economy managed to grow at an annual rate of 9.44 percent. As a result, in real terms the Chinese economy in 2018 was thirty-seven times as large as it was in 1978”. In his autobiography ‘A Promised Land’, President Obama asserts that based on “export-driven, state-managed form of capitalism, no nation in history had developed faster or moved more people out of abject poverty” than what China has achieved. The former US president also affirmed that he believes “China’s success at lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty to be a towering human achievement”.

While credit goes to all Chinese leaders for transforming China, President Xi Jinping and his ‘project of the century’ – the Belt and Road Initiative – has truly transformed China to expand its economic footprints in every region of the world. Since its launch in 2013, Beijing has funded and implemented infrastructure projects across the globe. Overall, in the current century, China has implemented about “20,985 projects across 165 low- and middle-income countries financed with grants and loans worth $1.34 trillion”, and the pace and scale has gained huge impetus following the BRI.

In her book, ‘The World According to China’, Elizabeth Economy has stated that Chinese technology has also made its footprints globally as “Alibaba, Huawei, Xiaomi, Tencent, and now ByteDance, with its winning social media platform TikTok, are becoming known throughout the world’s capitals in much the same way as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook once did”. According to Professor Nye, “of the seven giant global companies in the age of Artificial Intelligence (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), nearly half are Chinese”.

In his book, ‘The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future’, Hillman states that Beijing’s “grandest ambitions run underground, underseas, and through the airwaves”. The author asserts that “in just a decade, China has graduated from being dependent on foreign companies for subsea cables to controlling the world’s fourth major provider of these systems and laying enough cable to circle the earth”.

China is the largest trading partner of 140 countries and regions, and it has signed 21 free trade agreements with 28 countries and regions, including many of the BRI countries, while the US is a major trading partner of 56 countries. Being the largest trading nation where trade contributes about 40 per cent to its GDP and a global manufacturing hub, “seven of the world’s top ten container ports too are Chinese – Shanghai the largest – and China normally accounts for over 40 percent of the world’s container shipments”. Similarly, it has the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the world’s leading national expressway network, and the world’s best high-speed rail system and the country is the world’s largest user of robots.

One area where China has gained unmatched expertise is the construction of large-scale infrastructure. The country has established motorways and railways overseas and has continued expanding rail network within the country. According to one report, China had only 118 km long highspeed rail (HSR) network in 2008 but the by the end of 2023, the country had 45,000 km long HSR network, longer than the combined HSR system in the rest of the world. The same report further adds that in 2023 alone, China added 2,500 km highspeed lines to its ever-expanding modern (HSR) network. China’s HSR connects 33 out of the 34 provinces, making it the world’s longest and most extensively used network. The HSR network consists of 8 vertical (North-South) and 8 horizontal (East-West) lines. Carrying nearly 2 billion people annually, “the system has a safety record rivalling that of the world’s safest airlines”.

At the same time, it must be emphasized, as per Qizhou Hu and Siyuan Qu, in their book ‘A Brief History of High-Speed Rail’, that “the development of China’s HSR is from scratch, and China has also changed from a seeker to a front-runner. The scale and speed of construction are at the forefront of the world”. In the infrastructure-building field, China has emerged a world leader by implementing numerous monumental projects at home and overseas as out of the 20 largest construction contractors, 14 are Chinese, while 6 are from the EU and there is none from the US.

In their riveting research on the export and expansion of Chinese HSR in several South-East Asian countries, Professor David Lampton, Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik argue in their book, ‘Rivers of iron: railroads and Chinese power in Southeast Asia’, that “HSR may become to China what the Boeing Company has been to America in terms of both its pervasive influence in the domestic economy and as an export producer”.

While China celebrates its foundation day, numerous countries in the Global South expect to reap the dividends of Chinese progress and prosperity as Beijing has been financing and executing numerous projects in diverse areas. However, developing countries including Pakistan must also learn some lessons from China by putting their own houses and nations in order.

The writer teaches at the University of Malakand. He can be reached at: muradali.uom@gmail.com