10Dec/094
China Mythbusting
James Fallows points to a recent survey by Pew in which a shocking percentage of Americans believe that China is more of an economic superpower than the US. This is of course completely false, as Fallows goes on to explain and then illustrate with a photograph of dormitory conditions at Chinese universities.
I've discussed previously that rural China is as valid- if not more so- a representation of the country as the major urban centers in the east. Why then does this misconception persist?
- China's massive population skews numbers. In gross terms, China's economy is the third largest in the world, ranking between Japan and Germany. In terms of growth per capita, though, China is by any measure a poor country. This Wikipedia page lists GDP per capita figures in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). Countries ranked near China include Angola, Armenia, and Namibia. Nobody in America thinks of these countries as economic superpowers, do they? And yet in one sense China's economic position is more similar to them than it is to America, Japan, or Germany. There are a lot of wealthy people in China, but that's because there are a lot of people, period.
