Over the past 74 years, Beijing has always prioritized education for its social and economic development. Since the establishment of the country in 1949, China has worked to eliminate illiteracy and promote basic education; from 1970 onwards, it has been aggressively promoting university education.
China has developed the world’s largest state-run education system comprising an estimated of 291 million students and 18 million teachers in more than 529,000 schools; two of the Chinese universities, Tsinghua and Peking universities, according to the Times Higher Education, have overtaken the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University.
In a short span of less than seven and a half decades, China has indeed accomplished what developed countries took hundreds of years to triumph. Beijing now boasts the world’s biggest social security and healthcare systems that ensure an increased wage rates to the people, leading to unemployment insurance benefits and sick leave pay during the healthcare period, permit them to open private pension account, encourage enterprises to hire unemployed youth graduates and alleviate the burden of financial burden on account of medical expenditure.
These measures not only radically increased the life expectancy from 35 to 78 years in China and helped it emerge as one of the world’s largest manufacturing sectors and the world’s second largest economy; a long-term people-centric approach contributed to the international fight against poverty by slashing more than 800 million people from the global impoverished headcount.
A World Bank report in April 2022 revealed China alone had contributed close to three quarters of global extreme poverty reduction. “China’s poverty reduction story is a story of persistent growth through economic transformation,” said Manuela V. Ferro, the Bank’s Vice President for East Asia and Pacific.
This era of Beijing’s high GDP growth rates, which by many measures continues to be one of the most successful economic stories the world over, is far from over as China is expected to expand at a faster pace (5.2% per the IMF forecast) in 2023 than it actually needs to fund its social spending and other programs and the country makes a transition from “Made in China” to “Smart Manufacturing by China” with 5G technology, high-speed railways, new-energy vehicles and cross-border e-commerce providing new engines of growth to the Chinese economy.
In an age of globalization, China keeps opening up for the rest of the world, promoting outbound investment, hosting exhibitions such as the China International Import Expo and reinforcing connectivity and increasing trade through the Belt and Road Initiative to share the benefits of its development with other nations. Xi’s Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative offer the world to jointly address the global development and security challenges and strengthen exchanges between civilizations as well as contribute to economic growth, infrastructure development, job creation, green transformation, social inclusion and improvement of people’s livelihoods across the world.
This approach is urging the world leaders to deepen ties and draw lessons from Beijing. Congratulating China for its remarkable successes over the past decades, spotting Beijing’s futuristic approach and emergence as a global powerhouse to tackle the pressing international issues – Guyana’s Prime Minister Mark Phillips seeks to collaborate with China on food, energy and climate change and learn from China’s infrastructure investment, industrial promotion and support for manufacturing sector to drive economic growth and employment opportunities.
Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili struck a similar tone as he pledged to boost cooperation with China in trade, economy, tourism, culture and within the BRI framework. In Greece, former and current government officials participated in the reception and expressed a desire to further expand cooperation in trade, energy, tourism and science and technology, stressing the BRI had opened up new opportunities to strengthen economic and commercial cooperation.
Several government delegates in Qatar, which will host the Sixth China-Arab Friendship Conference, Armenia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Norway and Vietnam also joined China’s independence day celebrations, supported Beijing's role in the global economy and acknowledged its projects’ contributions to their growth. In India, the mainstream media published special pages, highlighting China’s initiatives, characterizing Beijing as a green power and hailing its high-quality growth, innovation-driven development.
In Nigeria that also celebrates its independence on October 1, the government representative lauded the Chinese efforts to bring development and growth to the African country by actualizing several projects and took inspiration from Beijing’s outstanding accomplishment in critical areas such as infrastructure, technological innovations, and aerospace technology, ecological development, and cultural evolution.
Top executives of the big technology companies including Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk heaped praise on China for its rapid innovation and "very strong" capability in artificial intelligence. The United Nations too is upbeat about Beijing’s investment in tackling climate change; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has eulogized the role of exhibitions such as the China-ASEAN Expo and the BRI to promote trade, investment and tourism. The Solomon Islands describes the Chinese investments as “less restrictive, more responsive and aligned to our national needs.”
Over the years, China has played a vital role in the global economy and development. The former US President Barack Obama in 2016 “very much” welcomed Beijing’s contributions to global development, peacemaking and refugee assistance. As the country celebrates its 74th anniversary, meeting this year's economic and social targets is equally important for other countries, particularly the developing nations, for this will further empower the world's largest economy to help them overcome their own economic, social and security challenges.