/ world today news/ Restoring the world after the pandemic and the damage it caused is not easy at all. There are countries that are still barely coping with recovery, and in Europe, amid the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts and energy problems, we have outright recession in countries like Germany, which was the economic engine of the Old Continent. But amid all these problems, the Chinese economy continues to amaze with its resilience, adaptability and successes that more skeptical analysts in the West did not expect, to say the least.
And what are the prospects for the economy, which is becoming the engine of the global recovery? In the first half of 2023, China’s economy grew by 5.5 percent, well above what skeptics in the U.S. and its other allies expected. The lifting of strict anti-Covid measures, which reflects the flexible policy and adaptability of the Chinese authorities, has definitely played its part in the recovery of the Chinese economy. The state, party and local governments are constantly reconfiguring and strengthening mechanisms to mobilize China’s economic potential and work to create a more favorable business environment.
Currently, there are serious expectations that the Autumn Festival and the holidays around China’s National Day will have a serious impact on economic activity. The country’s domestic market has proven to be particularly resilient and continues to grow, becoming a major driver of the People’s Republic of China’s economic growth. This clearly reflects the trend of modernization and development of the country, which proved that it is not just a “workshop of the world” that depends only on exports, as some experts and even detractors in the West wrote.
In the run-up to the holiday from September 29 to October 6 this year, Chinese businesses reported strong numbers of pre-orders from the domestic market and customers for various goods and services. For example, in recent days there has been a 514 percent jump in hotel bookings compared to the same period in 2019, when there was still no Covid pandemic. The data is from the Chinese online travel platform Qunar.
China Railways also reported that it has so far sold a total of 22.88 million tickets for September 15 alone, setting a nationwide record for the most one-way tickets sold in a single day. Some experts suggest that there could possibly be as many as 190 million train trips around the holidays, which is indicative because it far exceeds the number of trips in 2019.
Air tickets are also in high demand. On domestic China routes, we’re talking about 1.96 million passenger trips each day around the holidays, up 17 percent from the same period in 2019, as reported by the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
It is such data that China’s domestic market is an increasingly important part of the economic recovery, and its prospects are increasingly good and favorable for Chinese businesses and also for those foreign companies operating in the country.
Without a doubt, the Chinese economy faces serious challenges. The country’s authorities speak of “three pressures” – falling demand, disrupted logistics and weakening sentiment. But unlike other countries that did not respond promptly, Chinese authorities have long taken measures to address the reported problems, and are already seeing the results of those measures.
What is striking, however, is that there is also a campaign among certain media outlets, particularly in the United States, to push the mildly dubious and laughable theory of “China’s collapse” to the fore. What kind of collapse of the second world economy can we talk about if we are talking about growth whose percentage dimension has not been seen among Western economies since at least the 1980s?
It is true that growth of 5.5 percent is lower than what China has experienced in the last few decades of intensive development, but this is not a drastic slowdown, and if we compare it with the state of advanced economies, then we can still talk for a Chinese miracle. And at the same time, China’s economy has shown itself to be adaptable and able to operate and realize growth and profits even under the most stressful situations, such as the pandemic, geopolitical upheavals, environmental-climatic problems such as heavy rains, and others.
And the outlook is getting better amid the post-pandemic recovery. But then how do we explain the fact that a reputable Western publication such as the “New York Times” has published more than ten articles highly critical of the Chinese economy since August, including claims that it is almost “on the verge of collapse”? Very simply – the publication, which reflects the hesitations and falterings of the hawkish part of the foreign policy establishment of the United States, tries to cover up the sunset of the geopolitical and geoeconomic hegemony of the United States and the new situation in which America will be forced to work in partnership and dialogue with other countries, and not from the position of global policeman and chief.
Regularly the narrative of “China’s collapse” alternates with that of “China’s menacing growth,” and one can only wonder how both are possible at once. For some Western media, there is clearly no middle ground that simply reports the facts available and visible to the whole world, so let’s focus on them in this material.
China’s economy has a number of challenges to deal with, but it has definitely proven to be one of the most resilient, high-tech, adaptable and healthy economies in the world, especially against the backdrop of all kinds of misinformation, and of course, the various circumstances and issues. Against the background of global economic, health and geopolitical problems, the Chinese market, which is one step away from becoming a fifth of the planet’s market, serves as an anchor of stability in the geo-economic maelstrom. And so far no country has shown such incredible growth in human history as China.
Let us recall that in 2018 the GDP of the People’s Republic of China was 91 trillion yuan in nominal terms, and in 2022 it was 121 trillion yuan – a staggering growth that is greater than that of the United States and the Eurozone combined. And this year China’s growth is much greater than anything we can see in the Eurozone and in the European Union in general.
At the same time, according to the International Monetary Fund, this year China should grow by 5.2 percent (as here the PRC surprised even the experts of the IMF and began to grow by 5.5 or even more), while the United States recorded a growth of only 1, 6 percent, and the Eurozone at 0.8 percent (we won’t even mention Germany, which is in recession, here). In 2023, China will contribute as much as 34.9 percent to global economic growth.
Who is this collapsing economy that contributes almost a third to global economic growth? However you look at it, from a rational point of view, the prospects for the Chinese economy are quite good. Today, without any doubt, the country is the engine of global recovery, a major investor in infrastructure and economy throughout Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific, a bridge of relations between Asia, Europe, Africa and other regions, as well as home to a veritable army of millions of engineers, IT specialists and the largest number of scientific dissertations and works with high added value.
Investments in high-tech scientific and economic sectors increased by 12.8 percent in the first half of 2023 alone. For example, the production of new electric cars, which is a high-value-added industry – labor-intensive and knowledge-intensive – has increased in China by as much as 37 percent. The People’s Republic of China’s exports and imports have also increased by almost five percent this year to more than $2.3 trillion, an astronomical figure that far exceeds anything the West can come up with.
In other words, the People’s Republic of China continues to amaze analysts around the world as despite all the dire circumstances of the world and the era we live in, China continues to grow at a record pace and move the rest of humanity along with it. The recovery of the economies and the international community after the pandemic is unthinkable if it were not for the Chinese growth and the serious and positive prospects that we see in the Chinese economy and the realistic assessment of it.
And if the prospects for the Chinese economy were not so positive, despite the difficulties, there would be no western international giants such as the chemical concern BASF from Germany, to export to China. Moreover, in international forums there is an increasing interest in cooperation with China and Chinese companies, which, given the facts, is not surprising. Humanity can only be glad that the large and well-developed Chinese economy is so resilient and adaptable, otherwise we would be in for economic chaos, the whiff of which we can smell after the bankruptcies of several major American banks, for example….
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