China is fighting to keep its “developing” status among international organizations as the House of Representatives votes to see it revoked.
Unanimous votes in Washington are as rare has hen’s teeth. But it happened recently in the House of Representatives which agreed that is would be a good thing to strip China of its status as a “developing country.” Of course, Washington has little power to force the issue, even if all the rest of the government agreed. That power lies with the international community and to some extent with China itself. Still, a stand on the matter from the United States does make matters awkward for Beijing. If nothing else, the vote makes even clearer than before Washington’s growing hostility to China.
Decades ago, when China first opened to the world and even in 1999, when it finally joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), there could be no doubt that it was not developed. The huge nation in 1990 had a gross national income (GNI) of the equivalent of $374 billion, less than 1.7 percent of global GNI. The nation’s imports and exports equaled barely 1.0 percent of global totals as did the amounts of direct investment into and out of the country. There was every reason to treat it as a developing economy.
But things have changed since then. China now has the second largest economy in the world, producing the equivalent of $20.3 trillion goods and services last year. Its GRI per capita verges on the equivalent of $12,000 a year, not far from $13,200 that the World Bank classifies as “high income.
