Op-Ed Contributors

Developing country status

By Li Qingyuan (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-19 09:04

Compared with developed countries, China is still in the middle stage of modernization and has yet to catch up

Despite its overtaking Japan in second quarter economic output, the basic fact that China is still in the primary stage of socialism determines that the country will still be a developing nation for a long period in the future.

It is an indisputable fact that China ranks among the world's middle and low-income countries in terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Based on gross national income per capita basis, the World Bank classifies countries into four categories: low income, lower middle income, upper middle income and high income economies, with the first three classified as developing nations.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's per capita GDP in 2008 was $3,330. A World Bank report for the same year put the figure at $2,940 and ranked the country 130th in the world, labeling it a lower middle-income country.

That classification was confirmed by the 2009 data released by the International Monetary Fund, which said China's per capita GDP the previous year ranked it 105th in the world.

The large proportion of China's rural and impoverished population means the country has not yet extricated itself from a developing nation status. Of the country's 1.3 billion population, 700 million, or about 58 percent, still live in rural areas, seven percentage points higher than the world's average level of 51 percent.