China's Economic Advance Gives Hope to the Developing World

CHINA’S economic progress since the commencement of its reform and opening up in 1978 gives hope to every developing nation that if China can do it, so can we.

- OLUSEGUN OBASANJO

A 2019 report by Switzerland-based financial services company Credit Suisse Group said that China was this century’s champion in wealth creation and the figures it cites are truly amazing. Having successfully cushioned the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, unlike so many other nations, China has seen total household wealth rise from US $3.7 trillion in 2000 to US $63.8 trillion in 2018, an exponential 17-fold increment. China’s transformation from a largely agricultural society into a technologically advanced economy — the world’s second largest — has lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and created a large middle class that is ascending even higher to upper-middle-class status.

On my many trips to China over the past decades I have learned about China’s development and have seen for myself how China has emerged economically so dramatically.

According to the China Power Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in 2000, China’s middle class amounted to 39.1 million people (just 3.1 percent of its population), but by 2020 this number had soared to more than 400 million. China has even overtaken the United States as the country with the highest number of residents in the top 10 percent of the world’s wealth according to Credit Suisse Group’s 2019 Global Wealth Report. China, of course, has gone far beyond just creating wealth: Using the World Bank indicator of extreme poverty of people living on less than US $1.9 a day, global poverty has declined from 36 percent of the global population (1.9 billion people) in 1990 to about 8.7 percent (669 million people) in 2018. China, however, was responsible for over 60 percent of this decrease.