Things You Think You Know About China: Myth or Reality?
China seems to be a hot topic at all times, across boundaries and industries. But do we get all our facts straight? What do we really know about China? And how do we know what we know is true? This is no empty rhetoric: China has made striking progress in many areas and we need to bust the myths and misconceptions we have about this giant country which cautiously but continually expands its influence, under an authoritarian yet effective leadership of Jinping Xi.
Here is a reality check based on publicly available data.
So you say: “China is and will continue to be the most populous country in the world.”
Reality check: TRUE for 2018, FALSE for 2024 and beyond.
The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said that currently China with 1.41 billion inhabitants and India with 1.34 billion remain the two most populous countries, comprising 19 and 18 per cent of the total global population. Around 2024, the population of India is expected to surpass that of China.
So you say: “China is still a poor country.”
Reality check: PARTIALLY TRUE.
Since China began its market reforms in the late 1970s, it has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty, slashing the rate from nearly 90% in 1981 to under 2% (see the orange line above), as measured by the World Bank’s latest spending benchmark. China accounted for about half the drop of world wide extreme poverty between 1990 and 2005.
Yet China remains a developing country because its per capita income is still a fraction of that in advanced countries (compare the blue line representing World’s advanced economies and green line representing China) and its market reforms are incomplete.
End of 2017, during a speech marking the beginning of his second five-year term as party leader, Mr. Xi described eradicating poverty by 2020 as one of his chief priorities, vowing to “leave no one behind in the march toward common prosperity.” According to New York Times, this doesn’t really sound realistic and “Xi Jinping is now a prisoner of expectations, his problem is not the fears of Chinese people but the hopes of Chinese people.”
The bottom line: China has come long way from an underdeveloped into an emerging economy, beating Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. But it has long way to go — both in terms of quantity and quality of life — before it makes the Great Leap Forward to take its place as one of the rich countries of the world. China’s modest per-person income simply means that the country has plenty of room to grow.
So you say: “US is world’s largest economy.”
Reality check: FALSE if measured in PPP terms.
US is world’s largest economy in terms of Gross domestic product (GDP) at market exchange rates, and China is now the world’s second largest economy in GDP, having fallen behind from the late 19th Century onward as several industrial revolutions compounded in the Western world. But China began an unprecedented economic catch-up in 1978. By the most measures, China has passed the U.S. and is pulling away, according to Bloomberg. It’s has been among the world’s fastest growing economies, with real annual GDP growth averaging 9.5% through 2017,a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” China has become the world’s largest economy (on a purchasing power parity basis), manufacturer, merchandise trader, and holder of foreign exchange reserves.
This doesn’t mean China’s population is the world’s richest — far from it, as explained above. And according to an argument in FP published in January 2018, China’s war on poverty cold hurt the poor most.
So you say: “Social media is completely blocked in China.”
Reality check: FALSE, they have their own local social media.
China is the world’s largest social network market. Due to the Great Firewall of China, as the Chinese government’s internet censorship project is commonly called (or “Networked Authoritarianism”), Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, the leading international social-media players, are all blocked in China, instead they’re replaced by other ones which the government can monitor.
So what social media platforms are Chinese people able to use?
WECHAT instead of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp
It may be hard for people outside of China to grasp just how influential WeChat has become there. “For all intents and purposes WeChat is your phone, and to a far greater extent in China than anywhere else, your phone is everything,” wrote Ben Thompson, analyst and founder of the blog Stratechery. “There is nothing in any other country that is comparable: not WhatsApp, not Facebook.”
Now WeChat is poised to become China’s electronic ID system, state-run Xinhua reported in December. WeChat will issue virtual ID cards, which individuals would use in lieu of physical state-issued ID cards. Since WeChat requires users to register with their real names per government policy, it’s not a stretch to imagine that one day, WeChat may fully replace state IDs. Harvard Business School professor of management Willy Shih, who co-authored a case study on WeChat, calls the transition to an electronic ID system a “predictable evolution.”
WEIBO instead of Twitter
Twitter has been blocked in China since it was partly blamed for helping to organize a protest in 2009. That’s when Weibo was set up instead and it basically does the same job — you have 140 characters to get your thoughts out. Due to worries about censorship and culture, people usually don’t talk about politics but post personal topics.
BAIDU instead of GOOGLE
Baidu is the Google of China.
The Chinese government ensures that Baidu will have a near monopoly on the internet search space for years to come.
Baidu is growing rapidly and should continue to do so as more people and more people begin using the internet in China.
Baidu also has Reddit-style forums called Baidu Tieba and a Wikipedia-style online encyclopaedia. And like Google, it’s investing a lot into AI and self-driving cars.
Tencent Video, iQiYi and YOUKU instead of YOUTUBE
These platforms are already recognized as the most preferred combination of video streaming providers by mainland subscribers.
So you say: “China has one-child policy.”
Reality check: FALSE since late 2015
You can grow your GDP consistently, but you cannot guarantee a richer average citizen if your country’s population is growing even faster. The Chinese government introduced its one-child policy in 1979, and over the next 20 years the fertility rate dropped from 2.7 births per woman to 1.4. This resulted in the Chinese population growing 38 percent between 1980–2013. (Compare that to India’s 84 percent in the same time period). While the one-child policy was in place in China, from 1979 to 2015, the government forced many women to have abortions or undergo other invasive birth-control procedures.
Then, in late 2015, China eased the policy to move toward greater reproductive freedom, to counter an aging population and a shrinking labor force which might undermine the results of years of double-digit growth rates, and threaten the political legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.). Most married couples are encouraged to have two children. C.C.P. hoped that the new policy would bring three million additional births a year through 2020 and add more than 30 million workers to the labor force by 2050. But there has been no sustained baby boom. Births increased by 7.9% in 2016 according to China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission. Figures released in January show that the country’s birthrate fell by 3.5 percent in 2017 compared with the previous year. According to official statistics, the number of children born to parents who already had one child did rise in 2017, but the number of first-child births dropped.
Demographers had described the decision taken in 2015 to allow all families to have two children as “too little, too late” in the fight against a rapidly ageing population.
The one-child policy exacerbated a preference for boys over girls that led to baby girls being discarded, and a dramatic modern-day gender imbalance. Moreover, according to University of British Columbia, China’s two-child policy may exacerbate gender inequality, a claim that was also supported by a recent article on Feminist Webforum on Chinese social media arguing that the one-child policy has greatly benefited the status of women in Chinese society, and that the shift to a so-called two-child policy is a setback for women’s rights in China.
So you say: “China is not a leader in tech”
Reality check: FALSE in many key areas (quoting Forbes)
Chinese President Xi Jinping has made developing his country’s technological capabilities a key priority, not only to wean China from its dependence on foreign technology but also to turn it into a leader in innovation. And sure enough, China is gaining ground on its rivals in the tech realm. The country has chalked up an array of impressive achievements over the past few years, including its developments in hypersonic missiles, human gene editing trials and quantum satellites. China aims to become a global leader in electric and driverless cars within 10 years. It is also on track to become a leading Artificial Intelligence developer.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a three-year development plan for AI, part of a larger initiative launched in July 2017 that includes specific goals for such technologies as artificial neural network processing chips, intelligent robots, automated vehicles, intelligent medical diagnosis, intelligent drones and machine translation.
Of $15.2 billion invested in AI startups globally in 2017, 48 percent went to China and just 38 percent to America. So says a new report from CB Insights about the state of AI. Earlier this year, the Chinese government announced that it will spend 13.8 billion yuan (US$2.1 billion) on an AI industrial park — the first major investment in its plan to become a world leader in the field by 2030.
According to The Economist, Silicon Valley may not hold onto its global superiority for much longer, in the light of Chinese tech stack up.
China is also taking the lead in the global race to perfect gene therapies. Scientists have genetically engineered the cells of at least 86 cancer and HIV patients in the country using Crispr-Cas9 technology (first in human) since 2015, the Wall Street Journal reports. Although no formal scientific papers have been written about these experiments, as of the end of February 2018, there were nine registered clinical studies testing CRISPR-edited cells to treat various cancers and HIV infection in China, vs. only one study in the U.S., wrote Goldman analyst Salveen Richter and her team in a research note. All of the studies were initiated / sponsored by top-tier public hospitals across China, and >80 patients were reported as being treated by these investigational genome medicines. (Let’s also keep in mind that Nature Biotechnology published in 2016 its note of editorial concern after attempts by three independent groups to reproduce a Chinese group’s research results failed.)
China’s serious growth in the past few decades propelled it to become an industrial powerhouse, but that has caused dangerous levels of pollution. The country still relies on coal to meet part of its massive energy needs, however their energy portfolio is rapidly expanding beyond fossil fuels as they embrace a variety of renewable resources, such as hydro, wind, solar, bioenergy, and other renewables. China is now an unstoppable force in the realm of renewable energy. A new report released by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) delves deep into the country’s efforts to lead the world in laying an international foundation for renewable energy generation. The report states that in 2017, China’s total investment in clean-energy projects represented more than $44 billion in investment — a significant growth from 2016’s $32 billion.
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Ezgi Tasdemir, PhD is a Novartis Oncology employee. This article is created by Ezgi Tasdemir. All the views, analysis, and perspectives are fully independent and belong to the author only, they do not represent the views or opinions of Novartis or any other company or organization. The author does not receive any funding or support from Novartis or any other pharmaceutical/non-pharmaceutical company for this blog.
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