Authoritarian state of China hinders greater economic development
China is without a doubt a country that has risen through the ranks of economic development.
Their technological aspirations have allowed them to compete with developed countries like
the US and Japan even though they are still a middle-income country. This essay will discuss
China’s placement in regard to their economic development in comparison to other countries
as well as mentioning factors as to why China is not yet a developed country even though
they have succeeded into the second largest economy in the world. Furthermore, this essay
will explore the political system and structure of an authoritarian state that governs China and
compare it to that of countries that are developed, like the United States of America (US) and
Japan who follow a democratic regime, in an attempt to determine the hindering factors that
holds China back from attaining an increased economic development status.
Chinese technological sophistication
In order to understand how one can measure the technological sophistication of a country,
one must know the criteria that is taken into consideration when evaluating the sophistication.
Technology, innovation and research and development are the key driving factors that need
to be present in order to achieve economic performance (Vlčková, 2012). Innovation being
the implementation of a new or significantly improved product generated by a country and
research and development offers creative work that is undertaken on a systematic basis
whereby it increases knowledge of man, culture and society in order to use the knowledge to
devise new applications which increases technological sophistication (Vlčková, 2012). China,
specifically, has been on a mission to achieve technological sophistication and furthermore
technology leadership since the 1980’s.
China has been successful thus far in their pursuit of economic growth which is surprising to
researchers seeing as though the state has not accomplished many important reforms and the
rule of law remains weak. The progress that has been achieved is largely due to China’s trade
participation as it played a significant role in their economic transformation and only
intensified after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). China’s development strategy
focuses largely on technological transformation in research and development, artificial
intelligence and 5G networks whereby China has been able to match that of the US and even
in some circumstances surpassed them (Paszak, 2019). This is evident through continuous
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economic growth which led the country to becoming the second largest economy in the world
and was possible due to the combination of receiving large inflows of foreign investments
and a high rate of household saving. Another crucial component for China’s economic
transformation was the reallocation of workforce from the agricultural sector and rural areas
to the cities (Paszak, 2019). However, it should be noted that China faces a challenge which
is to maintain high growth rates without hindering their sustainability therefore the future
goal for China is to build on their domestic technology capacity, innovative and efficient
industries and increase domestic consumption and role of services. The economic growth
rates of China for 2021 thus far have exceeded the rates of past three years, with the growth
rate at 18.3% in the first quarter and 7.9% in the second.
It is evident that China’s economy is thriving, especially considering they are a middleincome country. This begs the question of why they are not considered to be a developed
country like those of the US and Japan. China is known as the world’s workshop as it is the
largest trading nation with Chinese products conquering the world markets (Paszak, 2019).
However, China lags behind developed countries in the following departments; Gross
Domestic Product, Human Development Index, productivity and efficiency and indigenous
innovation. Seeing as though China has achieved, to a degree, technological sophistication,
one must shift their attention to the political structure and system that governs China in order
to find accountability for China’s inability to achieve an economically developed status.
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth argue that it is relatively easy to move from a
developing country to a middle-income economy however, the true test lies within the next
step of becoming economically developed (Vlčková, 2012).
Political situation of China
China has indeed proven to be a competing force for developed countries in the economics
field. The key differentiation between China and other developed countries is the political
structure and system by which the government adheres to. China, unlike Japan and the US, is
an authoritarian regime whereby the party-state system, Central committee of Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), is the core feature (Zhang, 2017). Authoritarian parties’ absolute
control over core agendas illustrates that party-state relations should be when determining the
development of the country. Xi Jinping is the leader of the party-state communist party in
China and has been since he was appointed in 2016, even though he has had political power
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in the communist party since 2012. In comparison to a democratic regime, this is a long
period of time to be ruling a country which means China is subjected to experiencing policy
punctuation whereby the political agenda of the country is stable for a long period of time but
is vulnerable to occasional changes that are large (Yun, Yang and Yuan, 2021). This is
because policy punctuation becomes increasingly severe when a political party is centralized,
and an authoritarian state is known for centralization of power.
It is therefore only sensical to weigh out the pros and cons for either opposing political
regimes. Democracy was not always correlated with development and today it is still
questionable that this specific regime provides a country with the tools necessary for
development. Democracy was considered to be destabilizing and too focused on short-term
outcomes to fuel any sort of real long-term development thus the regime was considered to
make a country vulnerable to resistance due to the differing opinions of a countries
population and therefore economic reform would not occur (Sáez and Gallagher, 2009). In
the 1980/90’s debtor countries agreed to make internal governance modifications in return for
loan conditions as donors believed that little to no economic reform would stem from
democracy. However, after one party-states failed to achieve economic reform, international
donors believed that in fact democracy might be a necessary condition of development (Sáez
and Gallagher, 2009). Many authoritarian states have not flourished to the extent that China
has in terms of having the ability to undergo ambitious development projects like; The Three
Gorges Dam project and hosting the 2008 Olympic games.
However, it is worth mentioning that authoritarian state regimes have not led to the same
economic and social developmental success of that of a democratic regime. In order to gage
the social development levels of a country one must consider the Human Development Index
(HDI). It is an aggregate measurement of a country’s performance over an extensive range of
developmental variable namely; child and adult literacy rates, child and adult morality rates
and life expectancy. China find themselves ranked 85th out of 189 countries with a score of
0.761. this is by no means an impressive HDI score and it suggests that the living standards
for the average Chinese citizen does not correlate with an HDI level of a developed country.
Therefore, one can gather that high levels of economic growth does not translate with
development even though there can be developmental gains associated with a growing
economy, the relationship is not uniform. This is because countries with high levels of
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inequality fail to impact the lives of the poorer citizens because there are virtually no
improvements on their standard of living (Sáez and Gallagher, 2009).
Although China’s authoritarian state rule does not provide much evidence to confidently state
that development will be obtained through the progression of this chosen regime, there are a
few examples whereby high growth democratic countries that are categorized as an emerging
country is hampered by democracy and therefore it has been recommended that instead of
choosing a specific political regime, one would be more successful in the pursuit of
development to include a mixture of variables which correlate most effectively with a given
country.
The World bank argues that “without an effective state, sustainable development, both
economic and social, is impossible”, therefore an effective state is one with good governance
which is predicated in terms of government accountability and transparency (Sáez and
Gallagher, 2009). Therefore, authoritarian states like China, where the power is centralized,
cannot be held accountable as the rule of the one party-state is not challengeable because
there are no opposing parties for accountability to be held and transparency to be demanded.
Furthermore, based on the previous point, it is unlikely that China will be able to develop
further without changing their political system to one that is more inclusive.
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