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China: 75 years of economic growth and scientific advances despite tensions with the West

Despite its confrontations with the West, China has had a sustained economic growth, especially in the scientific field, visible 75 years after its foundation.
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On October 1, the People’s Republic of China celebrated 75 years of foundation. With sustained economic growth, particularly in the last 30 years, China has become the world’s second largest economy.

The Western press has recorded that in the first half of 2024 China’s economic growth has not met the expectations formulated by its leadership, which was 5.1%. China’s statistics bureau recorded for the second quarter of 2024 a growth of 4.7%.


The International Monetary Fund forecasts world economic growth of 3.2% for 2024 and 3.3% in 2025, so that China’s will be above the world average and far from the average growth of the US economy, which the US budget office estimates at 2.1% for the 2024-2029 period.

IMF estimates, which claim that China is slowing its economic growth, anticipate a decline in 2029 to 3.3%, levels still higher than those estimated for developed countries in the West.

Reports from the World Economic Forum also support the boom period in the Chinese economy. Data from the Forum reveal that China’s per capita gross domestic product growth over the last decades has been 3,000%, reflecting a sustained growth far superior to that of any Western country.

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New Chinese approaches to development

According to Chinese authorities, the future focus will be on high-quality rather than high-speed economic growth, and seeks to overcome a reliance on labor-intensive exports by replacing it with an emphasis on high value-added exports, such as semiconductors, electric vehicles, renewable energies, solar panels and batteries.


China’s development has allowed it to remain at the economic forefront, becoming an industrial and technological powerhouse that has led it to be described as the world’s factory.

Recently the Chinese government announced a cut in interest rates and a stimulus package to strengthen the domestic market and the consumption capacity of the population, reducing the share of exports in GDP, which only represent 20% of GDP, higher than the U.S. rate of 12%, but lower than the world average of 29% according to World Bank estimates.

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Science as the basis for economic growth

According to CAS, an organization that tracks scientific advances, China’s economic growth is linked to science. China has made breakthroughs in biology such as a gene whose deletion increases the length and weight of wheat kernels, improvements that increase yields in corn crops by 10%.

China tops the Nature Index, which counts contributions to articles appearing in a set of prestigious journals. According to the Leiden Ranking of the volume of scientific research output, there are now six Chinese universities or institutions among the world’s top ten.

China leads the world in physical sciences, chemistry, and earth and environmental sciences, according to the Nature Index (a global database of scientific research). The country dominates publications on solar panels in electricity. Chinese chemists have developed a new way to extract hydrogen from seawater using a specialized membrane to separate pure water, which can then be split by electrolysis.

China’s Chang’e-6 robotic spacecraft landed in a giant crater on the far side of the Moon, collected some rock samples, planted a Chinese flag and departed back to Earth. In real terms, China’s spending on research and development (R&D) has increased 16-fold since 2000, according to the latest OECD data from 2021.

China’s progress in quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology, regenerative medicine, and exploration of “frontier areas” such as deep space, the deep oceans, and the Earth’s poles is notable.


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Between 2000 and 2019, more than 6 million Chinese students left the country to study abroad, according to China’s Ministry of Education. In recent years these professionals have returned. OECD data suggest that, since the late 2000s, more scientists have returned to the country than have left.

China has the world’s largest aperture radio telescope and a subway dark matter detector. In addition, the country has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high energy cosmic ray detector (which has recently been used to test aspects of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity), the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field (which can probe the properties of materials) and will soon have one of the world’s most sensitive neutrino detectors (which will be used to determine which type of these fundamental subatomic particles has the highest mass).

In 2020, Chinese universities awarded 1.4 million engineering degrees, seven times more than the United States. China has now trained, at the university level, 2.5 times as many top AI researchers as the United States. And by 2025, Chinese universities are expected to produce nearly twice as many PhD graduates in science and technology as the United States.

The sustained growth of the Chinese economy has underpinned global economic growth and has meant an increase in its influence on the world economy and politics.

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