For almost four decades, since Deng Xiaoping launched the Four Modernizations in 1978, the Chinese economy has been growing an average of 10 percent per year. But, recently, due to a series of problems -- massive pollution, extensive corruption, poverty, rural rioting, rapidly aging population, extensive ghost towns, massive debt, authoritarian rule, a trillion dollars fleeing the country in little over a year, and a weak global economy -- the Chinese economy has been slowing its rate of growth to perhaps six percent per year. And that number may be exaggerated.
The world's view of China is changing dramatically. Replacing a Western adoration of China over the decades, there comes gloom and doom about the future of the Chinese economy. Is it warranted?
Many fail to remember all the positives still pushing the Chinese economy forward or the role that recessions and even depressions have played in our own Western economies. The United States for example, went through a series of steep declines and even depressions in its 200+ years' existence yet became a global economic superpower. No economy forever goes straight up but rather there are cycles of boom and bust in economic development.
The same is true for the Chinese economy, even if it is at best (but never declared) semi-capitalist with "Chinese characteristics." Furthermore, China is trying the heretofore impossible: to develop the world's biggest economy in record time.
China has done a huge number of positive things that set them apart from other economies. When I first started going to China in 1988, the leading universities, still suffering from the ills of the Cultural Revolution that had shut their doors for an entire decade, were doing poorly. Gender preference was openly given to men over women. In the late 1980s only several hundred thousand students graduated from college while today the number is close to eight million students. And, in many schools, women are now the majority. Back then, only a small number of Chinese were studying in the West; Now over 300,000 Chinese students are studying in American universities.
Exports were less than $10 billion at the onset of the Four Modernizations and today, as the world's leading exporter, exceed $2.3 trillion. Its $10 trillion economy is expected to overtake the United States as the world's leading economy in the next two decades.
In the late 1980s a majority of all Chinese were peasants in the countryside while today, after 250 million peasants have moved to the cities, the majority of all Chinese (52 percent) are now urban. The regime intends to move another 200 million more peasants into cities in the next ten years.
Twenty-five years ago almost no one, not even high officials, had their own cars while today China is the world's leading auto market. Similarly, in the 1980s almost no one owned their own condos while today hundreds of millions of urbanites own their own homes.
Such economics are important but so too are politics. China has brought pride to the Chinese people not only through its economic growth but also its emerging role as the dominant power in Asia. Of the rising revisionist powers in the world -- China, Russia and Iran -- there is little doubt that in the long run China will become a major power, if not a superpower, in the next two decades as well. Its growing military capability (fueled by an $150 billion budget) and the "Chinese Dream" of Xi Jinping erase the disgrace of the humiliating century of shame and humiliation from the First Opium War in 1839 to the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945). For the first time in perhaps two centuries Chinese are now proud of China and its place in the world.
The future will surely not be a straight up drive to power, economic and political greatness. But, the direction is clear. In the next 20 years China will emerge on the world stage as an economic superpower and a great military and political power.