/ world today news/ Some not particularly benevolent Western media like to comment on the demographic situation of the most populous country in the world – China. According to them, China has a demographic problem, as many families have only one child, and the country, like most developed countries, is aging. Drawing conclusions from this, they argue that the Chinese economy will begin to slow or even contract (interestingly, they do not draw the same conclusions about aging countries like Germany, Italy or Japan, which are US allies, but rather a country that last year had 9.56 million newborns, which is more than all the countries in the EU and the US). But the secret of the Chinese is that they rely not on their huge population, but on their education and high qualification to generate a large and real economic and social result.
It is important to note here again that unlike Western countries where the retirement age is rising due to demographic problems, in China the retirement age for men is 60 and for women is 55 (for workers in the first labor category it is 50). This is not the policy of a demographically aging and problematic country in this regard. But let’s move on.
American malign media sneer that “China will get older before it gets richer”, but the truth is that the country is unlikely to have any demographic problem or difficulty before 2050. Demographics, moreover, are not necessarily destiny. In addition to encouraging the birth rate, the Chinese government has other ways to change the structure of the population and continue to promote economic growth.
In China, they understand that the greatest asset a country has is not its natural resources or anything, but its people. That is why the government has consistently worked to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. After defeating poverty and lifting the majority of Chinese people out of it, the Chinese Communist Party can boast that they have made a major contribution to changing the balance of global poverty and socioeconomic status. In order to achieve the great goal by 2049, when it is the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, namely the construction of a prosperous socialist nation, in China, the improvement of the population itself through education and qualification is the first priority.
The Chinese development model has no place for the things we can see on the streets of American cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, where hundreds of thousands of people have become drug addicts and are second or third generation unemployed and uneducated.
First, the Chinese economy will not suffer because China’s modernization drive has led it to be a leader in the development of big data, artificial intelligence and robotics, which certainly already plays a large role in industrial automation (with the proviso that in socialist China, unlike capitalist countries, everything possible is done so that this does not affect the social well-being of the population). More importantly, China is raising the productivity of its workforce steadily. The most obvious proof of this is that if in the 1970s GDP per capita was only 200 dollars a year, today it is over 12,700.
The new focus of China’s modernization on its productivity side is “smarter, more efficient and higher-quality growth.” A special emphasis is made by the Chinese authorities that the country cannot be “addicted to the past labor-intensive low-quality production processes”.
Another factor is that China still has a large rural population that can fill the ranks of highly skilled urban workers through continuing and further education and training. Urbanization in China is only 47 percent, that is, there is a reserve of hundreds of millions of people from rural areas who can obtain higher qualifications and fill the ranks of the complex technological and economic sectors.
In the next few years, the number of young people who graduate from Chinese universities will increase by more than 10 million annually, which will provide a huge human resource for the country’s high economic growth. It is also an indication that China’s demographic resource is shifting from population quantity to population quality.
Already this year, the Chinese economy will recover a significant growth of at least 5-6%, as even Western economists say. The size of China’s economy will most likely exceed $20 trillion in 2024, so the feigned worries about it by Western economists and the media are unlikely to be justified.
Of course, the Chinese Communist Party takes into account the potential population decline. At the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October, demographic changes were taken into account, stressing that the country will do its best to implement the necessary policies to increase fertility and birth rates. These include reducing the cost of pregnancy and childbirth, childcare and education from nursery to university. Local Chinese authorities have started offering very generous social programs and money, housing insurance and tax breaks for young couples who want to have two or three children.
But again, the focus here is that China is betting on a more digital, modern and educated society in which young people work in high-skilled, high-value-added work. China’s GDP per capita will reach the level of moderately developed countries by 2035, and China’s national economic product will surpass that of the United States in 2030. To be more specific, GDP per capita will reach $23,000 in 2035, an indication that China’s labor productivity is rising steadily.
In the spirit of all this, it is worth looking at China’s education plans, which are key to the future of the economy. In 2019, the country’s State Council published two important plans for continued reform and progress in the education sector. These are “China’s Education Modernization Plan 2035” and “Implementation of the Accelerated Education Modernization Plan 2018-2022”. They aim at further modernization of the education system by 2035. Here are their goals:
1. The establishment of a modern education system.
2. The achievement of universal attendance of quality pre-school education.
3. The provision of high-quality and balanced compulsory education (from 1 to 9 years).
4. The achievement of maximum attendance in the upper classes of secondary education (10-12 years).
5. Significant improvement in vocational education.
6. Building a more competitive higher education.
7. Provision of adequate education for children and youth with disabilities.
8. The establishment of a new system of educational management with the participation of the whole society.
To achieve these goals, the 2035 plan envisages several tasks, including: improving teacher qualifications and educational infrastructure (including laws, policies, qualification frameworks, assessments, etc.); reducing inequality and universalizing access to education; promoting lifelong learning and others.
And what has been achieved so far? To date, over one billion Chinese are already Internet users. This figure also includes almost 250 million users who are engaged in some form of online education. According to the 2035 plan, there should be “educational reform in the information age”, which will be enhanced by the construction of “smart” educational institutions and the use of technology for training, education and retraining. Under the guidelines of the Ministry of Education, as of 2019-2020, 24,000 online educational courses are offered to higher education institutions, which are free. The ministry has also created a national “cloud” platform for primary and secondary schools, which gives children and young people access to education through phones, computers and television. In 2020, about 189 million students and 38 million students were engaged in this sense with research and assignments through home online resources.
In addition, the Chinese government, as mentioned, is also betting on artificial intelligence. Already in 2017, a plan was launched for the development of artificial intelligence (AI), including for AI education in primary and secondary schools. A specific action plan in this direction was adopted in April 2018. It encourages Chinese students to study abroad in AI development and Chinese institutions to engage in greater international cooperation in this field. Peking University and others have already built AI science and research centers as early as 2018.
In 2020, the Ministry of Education and the National Development and Reform Commission, as well as the Ministry of Finance of China, come out with a joint plan for the continued promotion of postgraduate education in the field of AI technologies. As of 2020, the bachelor’s program in “AI technologies” has been approved by over 100 Chinese educational institutions.
The subject is too vast and these are just a few examples of how China is raising the skills and quality of its population to raise productivity. The fact is that to date, the Chinese population generates more scientific theses, papers and research than the United States, and leads in most of the world’s scientific fields with a few exceptions (in which, however, China takes an honorable second or third place at worst). In other words, China’s demographic problems, as they are described in the West, are not at all so frightening. On the contrary, it is primarily a matter of demographic and economic transition – from quantity to quality and the creation of a complex and high-tech economy.
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