Learning from the Complex Chinese Story...
Wishing a Happy Birthday to People's Republic of China....
National Day, officially the National Day of the People's Republic of China, is a public holiday in China celebrated annually on 1 October as the national day of the People's Republic of China, commemorating Mao Zedong's formal proclamation of the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949.
We must consider China’s experiences, not as a single linear story but multiple instances, happening parallelly (often perpendicularly) from 1949 onwards.
All things said and done, the PRC has lifted 850 million people out of poverty in the past 70 years.
On average, China has been able to double the size of its economy in real terms every eight years.
In 1949, the average life expectancy was 35 years and has now doubled to 75.87.
An Adaptive Chinese Bureaucracy
The Chinese bureaucracy is often arbitrary and rigid. But, it has also proved adaptive to changes in technology. Chinese efficiency is praised because the system does accommodate change. While it may never grow to be one that is people-friendly, it has proved flexible enough to allow projects to be successfully conceptualised and implemented.
Scholars like Yuen Yuen Ang point out how bureaucratic reforms from the 1980s onwards have focused accountability and competition among street-level public agents and elites.
And this highly franchised and corporatised system is one that has fuelled the Chinese economy to unprecedented heights.
An important but related lesson in that respect is how China has converted its state-owned enterprises (SOE) into robust organisations. Since 1993, China has reformed its SOEs from being bloated, inefficient and outdated organisations to ones that can compete on the international stage.
In contrast, companies with Indian state backing have performed abysmally and continue to remain non-performing assets. While the hand of the state is not going to assume a greater role in companies in India, the Chinese experience could still provide valuable lessons in terms of the management of Indian Public enterprises.
China and India both set out five-year plans when they first became modern nation-states. China’s centrally planned economy allowed it to heavily invest in infrastructure and not face the challenges of land acquisition that come with a democracy. Since the 1990s, it also allowed foreign and private investment to diversify its sources.
In terms of allocation, the government did not focus on fringe areas alone, but comprehensively divided the share of projects to both urban and rural areas. Infrastructure spending also drove up economic growth, and was used to attract further investment in other areas.
Opportunity Cost of Development
About 700 million people in China have pulled themselves out of poverty in the last seventy years.
But what has been the opportunity cost of this development?
The last lesson is one that intrinsically involves the societal variable.
If the Chinese experiences teach us anything, it is that policies do not take place in a vacuum but affect society and often cause externalities that can be problematic.
Statistics from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution point to a demographic disaster.
Consider the impact on Chinese society – the impact of a “lost generation” for example that was denied access to education.
The strengthening of patriarchal and paternalistic cultures has led to narrowing in the space for people to live fulfilling lives.
Public Trust and Legitimacy of the government is unclear, despite the Party’s rhetoric.
The biggest toll could possibly lie in answers about satisfaction of life and mental health of Chinese citizens, both of which have declined since the 1990s.
The legitimacy of the CCP comes not from Chinese nationalism but from its economic success.
India is a democracy – and a messy one at that.
If we ever aspire to be a superpower, we will not only need innovative thinking but to avoid mistakes that other large countries have made.
It will only be in our interests to understand the Chinese project, if not to learn from its successes then at least, to learn from its mistakes.
Adapted from Hamsini Hariharan’s 2019 piece on
https://thewire.in/world/india-china-lessons-70th-anniversary
What lessons can we learn from China’s rapid growth?
China is a challenging country to define.
The dominant narrative across much of the world is of China as a rising hegemon, the next great superpower, a global economic powerhouse.
But while it is true that China has experienced an astonishing transformation in its economic and geopolitical status over the past 30 years, this one-sided view of China fails to capture the complexity of the country and how it got to where it is today.
Rather than talk about “one China” as a single entity, I would like to explore three different Chinas that I see today. I hope this will give a fuller picture of how we can understand the country and its potential as a partner in global health and development.
First, there’s China, the major global power.
Over the past 30 years China has built up the world’s second largest economy, tipped to overtake the US within the next decade. Back in the early 1980s, China’s GDP per capita was lower than India’s; by 2000, it was already twice that of India’s and the gap continues to widen.
China’s astonishing growth over the past 30 years, driven in large part by the government’s focus on agricultural development, is unprecedented in its scale and persistence; even as its economy slows, China can still boast growth that most other countries can only dream of.
The country’s leadership is relying on R&D to play an important part in helping China to transition to a service-based economy, placing innovation at the center of its plan for Chinese development over the next five years.
Chinese R&D spending currently accounts for an impressive 15% of the world’s total and this is only likely to increase.
Second, we have China, the developing country.
Given the prevailing focus on its rapid economic rise, it is easy to forget that poverty remains one of its greatest challenges. Seventy million Chinese people still live in extreme poverty (compared with 300 million in India, 100 million in Nigeria, and 25 million in Ethiopia), struggling to survive, often in appalling conditions.
While China’s economic success over the past decades has indeed been remarkable, the sheer size of its population means that, in terms of GDP per capita, it still ranks only 83rd in the world.
What’s more, it suffers from dangerous levels of income inequality, with a Gini coefficient of 0.462.
The vast majority of China’s poor live in rural areas, which have benefited much less from the growth driven by the powerhouse cities of the east and where people still rely heavily on agriculture and subsistence farming.
Agriculture remains a key pillar of the Chinese economy; 35% of the world’s farms are in China (compared to 9% in sub-Saharan Africa) and, even today, 50% of the population remains in the rural agricultural sector.
Rural poverty is further compounded by China’s enormous health burden; the country has the world’s third largest TB epidemic, for example, and more than a million Chinese people die every year as a result of smoking.
Third, there’s China, the development partner.
With a truly remarkable track record, China is undoubtedly a world-leader in poverty reduction and improving health outcomes and there is a lot the rest of the world can learn from its experience.
Last year the world celebrated the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and set out new targets to reach by 2030. The first of the MDGs, to halve global poverty within 15 years, was realized several years before the 2015 deadline, a spectacular achievement.
But China would be justified in claiming considerable credit for this success; an astonishing 439 million of the approximately one billion people lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990 were Chinese. In 2015, the UNDP calculated that China had contributed 76% of all global poverty reduction to date.
China also led the world in achieving other MDGs, with the world’s fastest rate of decline in both maternal and child mortality. By 2013, China’s maternal mortality rate was even lower than that of the US. China has waged a successful campaign against malaria, largely without any external assistance, reducing case numbers from 24 million in 1970 to just 57 cases of local transmission in 2014. It is on its way to total elimination of malaria by 2020. Learning from China’s unprecedented successes could be hugely valuable to other developing countries facing similar challenges, especially as the world moves towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
As China continues to take a more active role on the global stage, it is in an ideal position to partner more closely with other developing countries and share the lessons it has learned from its own experience.
Adapted from a 2016 piece from Yinuo Li Yinuo at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/what-lessons-can-we-learn-from-china-s-rapid-growth/