V. The World Benefits from China's Prosperity
China cannot develop in isolation from the rest of the world, nor can the world achieve prosperity without China. The country always considers its own growth in the context of the common development of all humanity and binds the interests of its people to the common interests of all peoples across the world. It will continue its efforts to safeguard world peace, contribute to global prosperity, uphold the international order, and provide public goods to the whole world. Building a moderately prosperous society in all respects is China's contribution to building a global community of shared future.
Achieving moderate prosperity in all respects has made China more prosperous, the people happier, and society more stable. This is how China – the world's most populous and largest developing country – is contributing to world peace and development in its own right.
From 1979 to 2020, China's compound annual GDP growth was 9.2 percent, much higher than the world average of 2.7 percent. Leading the world in both scale and extent, China has been the largest contributor since 2006, making an average annual contribution of more than 30 percent of world economic growth. In 2008, when the world economy was struck by the global financial crisis, China took effective measures in response, and quickly restored its economic growth back to a relatively high rate. It became a major stabilizer and driver of the global economy.
After the outbreak of Covid-19, it was the first country to contain the virus, reopen its economy, and achieve economic expansion, and again it led the recovery of international trade and economic activity.
China's innovative achievements in science and technology have brought greater convenience to work and daily life around the world, and injected further impetus into the global economy.
China succeeds in feeding almost 20 percent of world population and satisfying their diverse demands for high-quality agricultural products with only 9 percent of the planet's arable land.
It is making great efforts to strengthen eco-environmental governance and has become a major force in global eco-environmental progress. One fourth of the world's new vegetation areas over the past two decades have been added by China, by far the largest share of any individual country. It is the country with the greatest expanse of new forest resources.
China takes active steps to advance green and low-carbon development, and has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. No other country will have achieved so much in such a short time. When these targets are met, China will have achieved the world's largest ever decrease in carbon emission intensity.
China has maintained long-term overall social stability since the founding of the PRC in 1949. While benefitting the Chinese people, it also contributes to world peace and stability.
In achieving a moderately prosperous society, China has helped to dramatically reduce the world's poverty-stricken population. Poverty elimination is an enormous challenge in global governance and development. Through a realistic assessment of its own prevailing conditions and a profound understanding of the fundamental causes of the problem, China has fought against poverty with an unswerving faith and dauntless will, leading to a massive reduction in the number of the world's poor. Since China launched reform and opening up, 770 million rural Chinese have crossed China's current poverty line and moved out of poverty. According to the World Bank's poverty line, poverty reduction in China represents 70 percent of the global total, achieving the target set by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule. This transformation is unprecedented in human history. In recent years, global poverty reduction had been regressing, with more and more people falling under the poverty line. Against this backdrop, China's historic success in poverty reduction has boosted the confidence and strength of other peoples who are fighting to eliminate poverty.
Now that a moderately prosperous society in all respects has been realized, the Chinese people are embarking on a new journey towards socialist modernization.
China's all-round opening up promotes win-win cooperation. China will not close its doors in the face of spreading opposition to globalization; it will only open them wider. It will remain committed to its mutually beneficial opening-up policy and build an even more open economy, so as to provide other countries with more opportunities in markets, investment and growth. China is increasing the number of pilot free trade zones and accelerating work on the Hainan Free Trade Port.
It is steadily improving its business environment and providing foreign investors with larger markets. In 2020, China took 31st place among 190 economies in the World Bank's ease of doing business ranking, rising from 91st place in 2012. China has formulated high-standard policies to facilitate free trade and investment. It enacted the Foreign Investment Law, implemented pre-establishment national treatment, and expanded market access by reducing the number of items on the negative list. It received a new high of more than RMB1 trillion of FDI in 2020.
China is playing a more significant role in the dynamics of the international economy. It is the largest trading partner of more than 50 countries and regions, and one of the top three partners of over 120 in total. China's consistent and healthy economic growth has optimized its consumption structure and moved its consumer demand up market. With a supersized consumer market, its potential is increasingly apparent. Today, China's manufacturing and service industries are developing in parallel, and China's roles as "factory of the world" and as "market for the world" are mutually reinforcing. China is offering bigger markets, better cooperation opportunities, and greater development space to businesses from all over the world.
In achieving a moderately prosperous society, China has gained new experience of modernization for humanity. The global path to development is a rocky one. By building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, the CPC has opened a new and distinctive path to modernization suited to China's actual conditions, and created a new model for human progress. China's modernization – featuring common prosperity, balanced material and cultural progress, harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, and peaceful development – will be shared by a huge population.
China's experience offers a new option for those countries and peoples who are looking for both rapid growth and independence, and its success provides them with considerable opportunities for development. In the future, China will continue to embrace and interact with the rest of the world, adopt a more open and inclusive mindset, and contribute even more to building a global community of shared future and a better world.
