Experts: China still developing country
US effort to strip nation’s status in international organizations derided as political move
Do glittering skyscrapers, extensive high-speed train networks, and a sizable economy, among other accomplishments, suffice to make China a developed country?
A panel of global experts tracking the country’s development said an overall economic boom is usually an unreliable gauge.
This is especially true for a country as populous and expansive as China because general prosperity can mask regional imbalances and urban-rural inequality, they said.
“China is still very much a developing country,” said Wu Haitao, a researcher of poverty issues at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, Hubei province.
“The gross data in many cases do not reflect real problems, and a country’s real strength is often reflected by the level of balanced economic development,” he said.
Ashwani Muthoo, director-general of the New Development Bank’s Independent Evaluation Office, lauded China’s “incredible” progress over the past decades but noted that more work needs to be done in several areas, especially in addressing ruralurban inequality.
Siddharth Chatterjee, the United Nations resident coordinator in China, said the country, with its 1.4 billion population and a large territory, is still very much an upper-middle income country by the World Bank’s standards.
“While it’s done very well in ending poverty, there’s still parts of China that need to progress along with the UN family,” he said.
The development experts made the remarks in response to the recent legislative effort by members of the United States House of Representatives to strip China of its developing nation status.
The legislation, “Ending China’s Developing Nation Status Act”, was passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 8, and would require the Secretary of State to pursue changing China’s status as a developing nation in international organizations.
On June 9, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin slammed US legislation aimed at ending China’s status as a developing nation, saying it is an attempt to contain China’s development.
Chinese media said the move is politically charged.
A commentary published by People’s Daily on April 12 said that China’s achievements are recognized worldwide and it is known as the “top student” among developing economies. “However, it is far from being a ‘graduate’ and still faces formidable challenges and difficulties,” it said.
There is no universal consensus as to what makes a developing or developed country. For example, the World Trade Organization allows countries to self-declare whether they are developing countries.
However, there are some economic benchmarks employed by international organizations to decide a country’s development status, and China still lags behind developed countries in most of these.
For example, China’s per capita GDP last year was $12,741, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That is around one-fifth of the average level in developed economies, and 16.6 percent of that in the US.
China is also a developing country by the World Bank’s standards.
The organization divides economies into four income groups — low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income — based on gross national income per capita. Highincome countries, with a per capita GNI above $13,205, are commonly considered developed countries.
The latest GNI per capita for China, $11,880 in 2021, however, is below the threshold.
China is also considered a developing country based on the United Nations Human Development Index. It ranks 79th globally, as compared with 21st for the US.
Despite rapid gains in rural earnings due to stepped-up antipoverty efforts over the past decade, official data showed that the average rural disposable income — which was about 20,000 yuan ($2,806) per capita last year — was still just half the level of its urban counterpart.
Wu, the Wuhan-based professor, said the imbalance between the country’s eastern and western regions is still more notable. The GDP of China’s eastern region, which includes the country’s economic locomotives such as Beijing and Shanghai, was 62 trillion yuan, compared with just 25 trillion yuan in the country’s western region, which includes Guizhou province and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
Besides, China’s industrial makeup features a greater percentage of agriculture and manufacturing with less added value when compared with developed countries such as the US.
Guan Xinping, director of the Institute of Social Construction and Management of Nankai University in Tianjin, said that China has much room for progress in nonnumerical aspects, such as an expansive yet relatively weak social safety net program.
China has achieved near-universal coverage of the pension fund program and basic health insurance for its people but with the fast development of e-commerce and platform companies, many flexible workers in urban areas do not participate in the pension fund program. Meanwhile, the pensions that some people receive, especially in rural areas, still lag far behind their urban counterparts, Guan said.
Luo Wangshu and Zhou Jin contributed to this story.