China’s wealth is credited to its former leader Deng Xiaoping who opened China’s gates for overseas investments and businesses that made it an economic superpower.
The communist ideals that Mao started have banned businesses in the country but Deng have turned China from a communist agrarian system of economy into a capitalist system.
At present, China is the top exporter of manufactured merchandise in the world. A lot of western businesses subcontract their work force in China particularly due to the low labour costs.
In just a decade, it is undeniable how China has physically transformed itself and created an elaborate form of economy. The forecasted China’s GDP for 2009 is said to be up 7%-9%.
The Chinese people also have an inherent talent in doing business. In every country around the world where there is a sizeable Chinese population or China towns, a lot of them make their living by entrepreneurship and most of their businesses are stories of triumph.
As China’s economy continue to rise, a lot of finance experts still see plenty of barriers that could stagnate the country’s growth or even break it.
Economic imbalance is one of these causes. One of which is the urban and rural areas’ uneven development. As the urban population in China experiences an improvement in their lives, a lot of China’s rural population still come across hardships particularly the lack of proper agricultural equipments and housing facilities.
Taking quite a few page from “The Great Leap Forward” where Mao ordered farmers into industrial workers resulting to widespread famine. Today’s China, however, have learned from past errors and is somewhat sensible to its food production but it still has a long way to go before it can achieve perfect balance.
The political climate in China can also be a potential obstruction. So far, every dissent in the country has been suppressed with no mercy in its mainland and other places they claim to be theirs such as Tibet.
China is also poised to keep Tibet under an iron grip and their way of doing this is by building infrastructures, encouraging Chinese from the mainland to migrate, and crushing oppositions.
In Xinjiang, another region in China, where there is a sizeable population of Muslim Uighurs, is also experiencing both economic and political instability because of unrest.
The last factor that is perhaps the most serious of all is climate change. A large percentage of the world’s total carbon emission is produced by China. The costs could not only upset China, but also the other countries. The irreversible effects of climate change will trigger rising sea levels will certainly cause problems in China’s south, and could even melt glaciers from China’s western part and the Tibetan region which will eventually be a source of flooding and fresh water shortages.