What China's reform and opening up means

OPINION

By Sidney Miria

The Chinese proverb, "If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy" rings true of the progress the People's Republic of China has made over the last 40 years since it first embarked on a path of reform and opening up under President Deng Xiaoping.

Early this year in a keynote address at the Boao Forum for Asia, President Xi Jinping re-echoed a statement made famous by Deng that China crosses the river by feeling the stones, which was an allusion to country's approach to development which entails learning on the go.

This, he said had enabled them to refine and perfect their plans. Describing the policy shift as China's second revolution, Jinping said it had not only changed China, but also influenced the whole world.

Indeed, the results are there for all to see. The last 40 years have seen China lift over 700 million people out of poverty. On a global scale the Chinese effort accounts for more than 70% of world poverty levels since the 1980s.

More recently in regard to the Millennium Development Goals, China was the first developing country to meet its targets on poverty reduction.

That success encouraged it to set an even more ambitious goal of lifting 30 million people out of abject poverty by 2020, several years ahead of the 2030 target set by the UN for meeting the Sustainable Development Goal on poverty reduction.

China's huge population of 1.4 billion people, coupled with the huge development strides and significant poverty reduction milestones it has attained, means that the rest of the world cannot simply ignore it, in the same way China cannot thrive in isolation.

The previous week, the Chinese Government and World Bank Group jointly hosted the International Forum on Reform and Opening Up and Poverty Reduction in China under the theme International Cooperation on Poverty Reduction: Building a Community With a Shared Future for Mankind.   

The forum took stock of the milestones China has made since 1978 when it first adopted a market-oriented approach to the economy fashioned for the country's context of governance and the partnership role played by international financial institutions in putting the country on a path of progress. It also explored the country's poverty reduction models and innovative practices.

Indeed, the last 40 years of reform and opening up have seen China develop owing to hard work, technology, innovation, cooperation and foreign capital in the river of progress.

In the early years, China started off by attracting foreign capital, which flourished thanks to tax concessions and an inherently big market. Of course in combination with other factors, this gave the country's economy a major boost and push.

Later, when China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, it had already undertaken a raft of industrial and tariff policy reforms among others, which further helped the country to align itself to the global economy.

Although there might still be some disagreements at the WTO, they are not insurmountable. It is important to note that China's greatest strength lies in its underlying philosophy of collaboration and that learning never ends.

Although China is the second biggest economy in the world, the fact that it is still a developing country is not lost on the country's leadership, which is focused on changing the poverty narrative through targeted policies.

China's leadership is cognizant of the fact that sustainable growth and development is best attained through cooperation with other countries in the world. As a leading exporter of goods, China can arguably be described as the world's manufacturing hub, which is increasingly becoming integrated with the rest of the global economy

 The writer is a journalist with interest in research