When analysts talk about the past three decades of Chinese economic growth it is often in reverential, quasi-religious terms. China’s 35 years of 9.7 per cent average annual expansion “is a miracle unprecedented in human history”, says Justin Lin Yifu, who was chief economist at the World Bank from 2008 to 2012.
The lifting of 400m to 600m out of poverty could possibly count as a miracle but the model of growth, and the expansion rates, are not unprecedented, even among China’s neighbours.
“We’ve seen this movie before – in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan. We’re just seeing a bigger and more colourful version in China,” says Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economic research for HSBC. “Japan in the 1960s grew at 10 per cent a year and was considered the miracle economy of the time.”