China has been the global economic miracle of the last half century. In fifty years it has gone from being a poor country closed to the outside world to being the second largest power on the planet, it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and has taken advantage of globalization to become an indispensable player in the world economy.
However, the government's crackdown on the relentless outbreaks of the coronavirus has fueled growing frustration among its population and slowed its economic growth. In addition, President Xi Jinping, whom the Communist Party (CCP) ratifies this Sunday for his third term, has been ruthless against dissent and has repressed the Hong Kong and Xinjiang regions with a heavy hand.
With eyes on the graph, there are no words to describe China's economic growth. Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012 when the country had already established itself as a great world power after more than two decades of economic development. All in all, its zero covid policy is harming the country's economy to the point that the World Bank has lowered GDP growth forecasts for 2022 to 2.8%, a drop in contrast to the 8.1% registered in 2021, and two points less than what the entity set in April.
Unlike the United States, where private consumption is the main engine of its economy; China's power is based on industry, which represents 40.5% of its GDP, and on services (51.6%), as estimated in 2017 by the CIA World Factbook.
China's population reached 1.412 million people in 2020, but its growth rate in the past two decades has slowed to the lowest since the one-child policy was imposed 40 years ago. The decrease in births highlights the serious aging problem facing the country, whose median age is around 38 years, the oldest, along with the United States, of the five most populous countries in the world.
Although China continues to be the country with the most inhabitants in the world, it will be so for a short time. In 2024, India, which is hot on its heels and is constantly growing, will overtake the Asian giant, which, in turn, will have lost 53 million inhabitants by 2050, according to Population Stat estimates.
Since the 2000s, it has also been a strategic military actor closely watched by the United States. China is leading a discreet but continuous expansion in the Asia-Pacific area. All in all, Washington almost triples Beijing's military spending in 2020 and Russia multiplies its nuclear warheads by 18.
In the 1980s, China became the factory of the world, the country that concentrated most of the manufacturing industry. It is the leading exporting economy and one of the world's largest consumers of raw materials (from soybeans from Argentina and Brazil) to Russian gas or German and Japanese cars. As for its trade relations with the United States, the Asian giant exports twice as much as it imports.
Six of the ten largest Chinese companies in the country are banks, four of which are state-owned. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is also the world's largest bank by market capitalization. They only manage to break the banking monopoly, the financial services and insurance company Pink An, the oil company PetroChina, also state-owned; the technology multinational Tencent and the mobile phone operator China Mobile.
China pollutes more than the United States and Europe (including Russia) combined. But just as continued lockdowns have crippled the country's economy, they have also helped reduce its carbon dioxide emissions over the past year, to a record 8% drop in the second quarter of 2022, the largest in a decade. according to a study published in Carbon Brief, a British digital media specialized in climate policy. Xi Jingping said a year ago that he intended to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
Although when Xi Jinping came to power he was often presented as a leader close to the people, which earned him the nickname "Uncle Xi" (Xi Dada, in Chinese), the reality is that a decade later the Chinese president has shown a eagerness to accumulate power reminiscent of the times of Mao Zedong.
