What Produced the China Miracle?

One of the most impressive attempts to address these questions that I’ve come across in years is a slim new book that isn’t the product, as one might expect, of an economist, historian, or political scientist. This work, China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, is of course informed by all of these fields but is written by Wang Feng, a Chinese-born sociologist at the University of California, Irvine.

China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, Wang Feng, Cambridge University Press, 272 pp., $34.99 (pb.), April 2024

Reading Wang’s new book was humbling for me. I lived in China during the booming first decade of this century, covering it for the New York Times, and I’ve continued to visit the country, write books about it, and read innumerable works on its affairs, often reviewing them. Yet China’s Age of Abundance astounded me—not least for this argument, made indirectly in the book but stated squarely in a recent public talk that Wang gave at my university, Columbia: China’s economic takeoff since Mao Zedong died in 1976 is an event of human importance that deserves consideration alongside the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most impactful phenomena of the past millennium.

In light of the evidence that Wang, who was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, marshals for this argument, I am a little embarrassed not just for myself but for my own profession that this frame hasn’t taken hold in the public imagination before. How many other events have affected for the better such a large swath of humanity? Throughout its recent period of reform, which began in 1978, China accounted for roughly one-fifth of the world’s population. And when one considers the speed of the country’s ascent, including a 25-fold increase in per capita income, even those Western historical parallels begin to look inadequate.

Young people gather for a birthday picnic at the Children’s Palace in Shanghai in May 1987. Jean-Marc Charles/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Early in his book, Wang tells the story of an unnamed child who one suspects might be the author himself. In 1972, feeling hungry, this boy precipitated a mini family crisis by snatching a boiled egg and swallowing it before his screaming grandmother could catch him. Later, the child learned that the egg had been procured as a nutritional supplement, prescribed amid dire national scarcity, for his father, who was suffering from liver disease. Back then, when roughly 80 percent of its population was occupied in agriculture, China only managed to produce less than one egg per person each week to feed its citizens.

Wang documents the exploding supply of one staple after another to illustrate just how tough conditions were early in his lifetime and how dramatically the situation has reversed since then, with most of the country long since delivered into abundance, or even, as he writes, commonplace gluttony. With eggs, that began with a 50 percent increase in consumption between 1978 and 1983 and another threefold increase by 1988, followed by subsequent increases. The story was much the same for other major foodstuffs. According to data Wang presents, from 1978 to 1983, per capita pork consumption rose by 61 percent, vegetable oil by 151 percent, and poultry by 268 percent, with each (and pretty much all other food production) continuing to rise sharply thereafter.

This abundance had a clear impact on the average height of Chinese people, a rough proxy for overall health. Life expectancy, which had already risen substantially during the Maoist period, continued to grow as China quickly became richer. “In just 20 years, children in China grew at a historic pace,” Wang writes. “At age 7, upon entering primary school, a boy in urban China was 5.2 cm taller in 2002 than in 1992, and a girl was 5.7 cm taller. Height increases among the less well-off rural children were even more notable.”

In 1981, Wang writes, the average Chinese person bought one pair of cheap cotton shoes, along with 1.3 pairs of socks and one pair of underwear. By 2000, though, China was exporting 1.56 billion pairs of shoes, more than half of them leather; five years later, that figure had reached 2.48 billion, and China was well on its way to becoming the world’s biggest clothing manufacturer.

Nowadays, nearly everyone, expert and layman, is aware that China is the globe’s dominant manufacturing power. Think, though, about some less familiar metrics for the country’s rise: At the end of the 1980s, Wang writes, China had about 620,000 miles of roads but hardly any highways. By 2000, it had built 10,100 miles of highway. Two decades later, China boasted a 100,000-mile highway network. Today, these freeways course with electric vehicles, including those made by the Chinese company BYD, which has traded off the title of the world’s largest EV manufacturer with Tesla over the past year. Today, as the United States and other Western nations seek to protect themselves from cheap (and often heavily subsidized) Chinese goods such as EVs, they warn of a second “China shock.”

Villagers parade a dragon through a tunnel under a highway in the fields near Gutian village in China’s eastern Fujian province on Feb. 11, 2017. Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

The Beijing subway, one of many new urban transportation systems in the country, likewise grew more in the 2010s than the London Underground had in 150 years. During the first decade of this century—the peak period of growth and transformation in China’s history—I witnessed the utter remaking of one of the world’s biggest cities, Shanghai. Week after week, for a book I produced, I photographed the old neighborhoods with long-established residents that were razed and converted with breathtaking speed into new districts full of glimmering high-rises.

In 1980, Wang writes, when annual air passenger traffic barely reached 3.5 million flights for a population of nearly 1 billion, most Chinese people had never seen an airplane. By 1990, total air trips had risen to 16.6 million. Air travel continued to multiply, and by 2017, Chinese passengers took 552 million trips by air. One consequence of this was the parallel explosion in overseas travel: In the 1990s, when I visited China for the first time, traveling abroad was still extremely rare; in 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese people undertook 162 million trips overseas for private reasons.

Wang believes that this widespread travel contributed to the opening of the Chinese mind, which he sees as even more crucial to the country’s extraordinary growth and attendant social transformation than any conventional economic policy measure.

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The violent and politically turbulent Mao era was marked by stifling political and social conformity, as British journalist Tania Branigan details at length in another impressive recent book on China, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution. Branigan quotes Chinese philosopher Xu Youyu, who has described the China of those years as a nation controlled by one mind, Mao’s. A common quip about that era, cited by Branigan, is that there were only eight approved operas for a country of 800 million people because of Maoism’s suffocating ideological controls on the arts.

After Mao’s death, though, education and the circulation of ideas took off. Wang writes that the number of books published annually increased from under 13,000 in 1977 to about 32,000 in 1982 and then more than doubled again by 1990. School enrollment also exploded. Senior high school enrollment, Wang writes, increased more than 300 percent between 1995 and 2010, with vocational education also growing fast. Most impressive, though, were China’s achievements in higher education. In just a decade, between 1995 and 2005, annual enrollment in colleges and universities increased fivefold, reaching 5 million. At the turn of the century, only 1 in 50 college-aged Chinese people were enrolled in higher education. By 2020, that figure had risen to more than half.

China had come a long way from the time when, as one source told Branigan, the country produced so many billions of little aluminum lapel pins bearing Mao’s image that the amount of metal used to make them would have sufficed to manufacture 40,000 aircraft instead.

A portrait of Deng Xiaoping is seen in Shenzhen’s Luohu district on Jan. 30, 2015. Raul Ariano/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Another popular explanation holds that after Mao, the Chinese Communist Party stopped making so many egregious mistakes and simply got out of the way of economic progress. A popular variant of this thesis credits famous government reforms, including the creation of special economic zones, or SEZs, such as in the southern city of Shenzhen. After Deng Xiaoping designated Shenzhen an SEZ in 1980, it has been endlessly recounted, the unremarkable fishing village went on to become one of China’s largest and richest cities, a metropolis that increasingly casts a shadow over nearby Hong Kong. Proponents of this theory also cite other signal reforms, first undertaken in the early 1980s, that involved attracting foreign investments and generating exports.

Many other analyses have emphasized China’s sheer historical good fortune. Around 1980, China was embarking on a demographic dividend—simply put, a youth bulge—just as Western corporations were looking to base manufacturing operations in cheaper places overseas. By being a first mover among developing countries in embracing outsourced industries such as textiles, plastics, and simple assembly, China became the biggest beneficiary of this new trend of globalization. And China’s dominance, whether by design or not, made it enormously difficult for any would-be emulators to hoist themselves up the rungs of the same development ladder in its wake.

To be sure, some of these explanations have elements of truth. But to help understand why they are all overly facile, if not altogether wrong, Wang demonstrates just how hard it was to foresee the extent of China’s successes early in the reform era. He does so in part by sharing the projections of many of the world’s leading economists in 2004. That year, the Wall Street Journal asked 12 Nobel laureates in economics whether they thought the United States, the European Union, or China would boast the world’s largest economy 75 years later, in 2079. By then, China had already been booming for more than two decades, but only half of the economists named it as the winner. The others either equivocated or doubted that China could close the gap with the West.

As it happens, judging by purchasing power parity, a measurement of wealth that reflects what a unit of national currency can buy in a given country, China became the world’s largest economy a mere 12 years after the survey. Going by the more widely cited but arguably less accurate nominal GDP, China today still ranks second behind the United States—but with an economy that’s about 64 percent of the size of the U.S. economy, it has dramatically closed the gap. By comparison, the Soviet Union’s economy peaked at around 57 percent of the U.S. economy in the mid-1970s.

A steel box girder is hoisted at the construction site of Lingdingyang Bridge in Shenzhen on Feb. 22, 2023.Qiu Xinsheng/VCG via Getty Images

Even China’s own leaders—who often take credit for, in the World Bank’s and many journalists’ accounts, “lifting” hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—have persistently underestimated their country’s economic performance and in doing so betrayed little understanding of its phenomenal growth. This record of lowball misjudgments began, but by no means concluded, with the leader who is almost universally credited with engineering China’s rise, Deng himself.

In 1979, Deng speculated that with some difficulty, China could achieve a per capita income of $1,000 by the end of the century; it would take another 30 to 50 years, he believed, for China to approach the ranks of a developed country. By 1982, though, he was already publicly worrying that his target for 2000 was too high. And this is no idle historical fact: Inflation nearly ran out of control in China later in that decade and became a leading source of the ferment that led to the 1989 Tiananmen protests and their deadly suppression.

At the age of 87 in 1992, Deng once again attempted to gaze into the future. By 2049, the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he said, his nation could enter the ranks of middle-income countries, which would constitute a remarkable achievement. Instead of a 57-year wait, as Wang notes dryly, Deng, who died five years later, lived to see this goal attained. From 1980 to 1997, China’s per capita income had more than quadrupled.

The tendency of China’s leaders to underestimate the forces of change at play in powering the country’s economic rise long survived Deng. For example, in 1995, Beijing announced a goal to double GDP between 2000 and 2010. Yet, in that decade, Wang writes, “following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and despite the worst global financial crisis in seven decades, the country grew its economy by more than 270 percent, from $2.77 trillion to $7.55 trillion. Per capita income rose 2.57 times from $2,194 to $5,647 and 29 percent above the goal.” China’s leaders had such a hard time catching up with reality because it was not their policies that were most responsible for the change in national fortunes. Beijing, Wang argues, never had a coherent road map for reaching the kind of economic success it attained.

A farmer works his plot of land, which runs to the edge of a recently built manufacturing and assembly factory on the southern outskirts of Beijing, on Oct. 14, 2008. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

China’s well-known experiments in agriculture, which freed peasants from the obligation to produce only for rural communes, have long been trotted out as a key reform. To this, Wang adds another decisive change that has received far less attention: a formidable wave of early industrialization in the countryside. In its first phase, Wang writes, industrialization “took off in situ.” Rather than moving to cities, farmers began to work as industrial laborers in their villages. “By the mid-1990s, 40 percent of China’s rural labor force was producing industrial goods in the Chinese countryside,” he writes. “In 1995, China’s rural laborers generated more than half of all China’s industrial output.” In 1987, Deng revealed his surprise over this to a visitor from Yugoslavia: “In the rural reforms our greatest success—and it is one we had by no means anticipated—has been the emergence of a large number of enterprises run by villages and townships. They were like a new force that just came into being spontaneously.”

It was only in the second half of the 1990s, well after the onset of rural industrialization, that an exodus to China’s cities took off in earnest. Historically, urbanization has been a key feature of many economic takeoffs, including that of Japan and, much earlier, of the United States. In China, though, urbanization had two special features. Because so many newcomers to cities had industrial experience, they were much better prepared to step directly into factory jobs. Secondly, because China enforces a two-track social structure under the hukou (household registration) system—a kind of soft-apartheid that favors long-standing urban residents—the new industrial workers migrating from the countryside could be given lower wages and far less generous social benefits than preexisting city dwellers. Moreover, factory workers enjoyed few protections from labor unions, which are toothless and government-controlled.

What has just been described fits with the theory that China simply had a vast pool of cheap labor during its takeoff period. But Wang rightly notes that this greatly oversimplifies things. It is undeniable that the hukou system discriminates against people who are not from rich metropolises. But urban newcomers nonetheless arrived with special attributes that were crucial in fueling the country’s fast growth: They boasted high literacy rates and generally good health.

These were both tangible fruits of the emphasis on social equality during the otherwise punishing Mao years. For Wang, this means that China’s urban newcomers were not just a cheap source of labor. They were also capable of performing complex tasks—a factor he believes was as important as their cost. This helps explain how China had around 3 million people, most of them urban newcomers, working for Apple, a company making advanced products, and its manufacturing partners in the late 2010s.

None of these transformations were initiated by the state. “Instead, they were all born out of the strong desires of the population, who were desperate and determined to improve their lives,” Wang writes. “Such grassroot initiatives were often resisted by the government at first, before being accepted and embraced by them.” It was the Chinese people, and not their leaders, he argues time and time again, that produced the “China miracle.”

Two other factors in China’s rise, which I find particularly interesting, involve history and culture. Wang argues persuasively that the violence and disarray of the Cultural Revolution played a powerful role in driving fast growth in the years that came after 1976. “At the close of this tumultuous decade, ending with Mao’s death, the Chinese people were profoundly disoriented, disappointed, and utterly exhausted,” Wang writes. “They yearned for change, for a life with greater material prosperity, social stability, and human decency.” Deng, we learn, seems to have loosely agreed. Wang quotes him as saying that the Cultural Revolution “looked like a bad thing. But ultimately it was a good thing. It made people think, to realize the problems we had. We could implement the policies in the 1970s and 1980s exactly because we learned the lessons from [that era].”

The final piece of Wang’s explanatory puzzle involves an openness to new ideas, debate, and varied discourse, which flourished in relative terms in China’s reform period. Wang writes that China’s economic growth peaked in 2007, and its openness and tolerance peaked the following decade. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, both growth and intellectual freedoms have been in sharp decline.

Passengers arrive at a train station during peak travel ahead of the Lunar New Year in Hengyang, in China’s central Hunan province, on Jan. 31. AFP via Getty Images

The accelerated aging of the population will bring staggering social costs related to retirement, chronic illness, and elder care. By 2030, Wang projects, the Chinese government will need to spend nearly half of all its revenue on education, health care, and pensions, assuming no increase in the generosity of these programs. If, say, China wanted to provide a level of health care and pension support commensurate with the 2009 average of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it would have to spend two-thirds of all government revenue just for these services by 2030 and more than 100 percent by 2050. As China’s recent decision to dramatically raise passenger fares for its enormous high-speed rail networks foretells, even maintenance costs for new transportation infrastructure could become a major financial liability, as the user base shrinks along with the population.

This demographic future and its harsh consequences—which are topics I have written about for years—imply daunting political decisions that will sorely test a starkly undemocratic system that withholds information from the public and shields it from meaningful debate.

Recently, Chinese students on my campus questioned me with wonderment about the era when I lived in China, particularly its relative freedoms of expression and association that are now almost unimaginable. With the internet (even a heavily policed one such as China’s), broad access to higher education, and international travel, there can never be a return to a situation where one leader utterly dominates the minds of a nation so large, as Mao’s once did. But this has not prevented Xi from trying. In the past, China’s leaders were slow to grasp the potential of their society and its growth. Now, if anything, Wang seems to think they are severely underestimating the downside of the resurgence of a domineering state.

“Having achieved a level of material abundance unimaginable merely a generation ago, China has traveled through an age of abundance and entered a new phase of complacence,” he concludes. “In the absence of legal-rational authority, state power bureaucratization with its opaque policy setting will lead to stagnation, a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history. Nearly a half-century after bidding farewell to the godlike leader Mao, the country seems to be once again willing to put up with another era of charismatic authority.”