Chinese consumers enjoy their time in a shopping mall of Zhengzhou. (PHOTO: VCG)

To an extent that few Americans genuinely appreciate, global growth has been powered by the Chinese miracle for almost half a century now. According to World Bank data, between 2008 and 2021 — as the world’s per capita GDP grew by 30 percent and China’s by 263 percent — China accounted for more than 40 percent of all global growth. If you excluded China from the data, global GDP over that period would have grown not by 51 percent but by 33 percent, and per capita growth would shrink to 12 percent from 30 percent.

The effect of China’s rise is even more remarkable at the lower end of the income spectrum, where 800 million Chinese were lifted out of global poverty in recent decades.

Of course, you can’t just cut China out of economic history and treat what remains as a natural counterfactual; this is what globalization means. But globalization also means you can’t reduce China’s contribution to the global economy over those years to the matter of its own GDP — because through its boom China reshaped the world’s markets, becoming a natural commercial and financial hub, infrastructure leader, universal trade partner and demand sponge, soaking up much of what Asia and the world as a whole had to offer up or make. And while some thriving countries have succeeded by replicating China’s pattern of development powered by manufacturing and urbanization.

The economic fate of the next few decades hangs on the speed and scale of the world’s green transition, whose shape is not yet known. The Chinese advantage in green technology is large. The country’s green sectors could still find themselves thriving in a green new world.

But the big question remains an open one: If the energy transition now represents the world’s most obvious investment opportunity, can a shift away from austerity in the developed world actually take the place, and do the job, of a 40-year Chinese boom?

—David Wallace-Wells, 24-08-2023, The New York Times.