position: EnglishChannel  > Insight> What Can Replace China as a Global Economic Engine? 

What Can Replace China as a Global Economic Engine? 

Source: Science and Technology Daily | 2023-08-28 16:30:12 | Author: David Wallace-Wells


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. 

Editor:龚茜

Top News

Jointly Protecting People's Rights in Digital Era

​Emerging technologies like AI, big data and the Internet of Things are rapidly reshaping the world in this era of digital intelligence. However, they are also bringing challenges to human rights, which makes joint efforts essential. Science and Technology Daily spoke with international experts on these issues against the backdrop of the 2025 China-Europe Seminar on Human Rights hosted by the China Society for Human Rights Studies and Cátedra China Foundation in Madrid, Spain, on June 25 on the theme "Human Rights in the Era of Digital Intelligence."

First Human Clinical Trial of Invasive BCI in China

A major breakthrough in neurotechnology has been achieved with the successful completion of China's first-in-human clinical trial of an invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) system. With that China becomes the second country in the world to reach the clinical stage in this field.

抱歉,您使用的浏览器版本过低或开启了浏览器兼容模式,这会影响您正常浏览本网页

您可以进行以下操作:

1.将浏览器切换回极速模式

2.点击下面图标升级或更换您的浏览器

3.暂不升级,继续浏览

继续浏览