Liu Qian is the founding father of Wusawa Advisory and previously the managing director of The Economist Group in Higher China. She can be a distinguished advocate for gender equality, and the one Chinese language consultant within the core working group of the UN Ladies Leaders Community. On this interview, she discusses how Chinese language innovation differs from Western innovation, the place the US-China rivalry is headed and the important position of girls’s voices in policymaking.
In current months, a lot of the discourse round China’s economic system has centred on its exterior challenges, notably on how US tariffs may influence Chinese language exports. Is the rise in world commerce protectionism a big trigger for concern, or is that this an overemphasised side of China’s financial actuality?
To start out, it’s necessary to first be aware that the present US-China rivalry extends past commerce and has expanded into areas resembling expertise, ideologies and world collaboration. If this unhealthy competitors continues, it is going to harm not solely each nations but in addition the world.
That stated, by way of commerce and economics, the priority has been exaggerated. On the peak of exports’ significance to the Chinese language economic system, they comprised round 36 per cent of China’s GDP. At this time, they make up solely about half of that, after accounting for roughly 19 per cent of China’s GDP final 12 months. And inside that 19 per cent, exports to the US made up solely 14.7 per cent of the overall, behind the Affiliation of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and the European Union.
In case you do the maths, meaning exports to the US made up round 2.8 per cent of China’s GDP. So, even when the tariff struggle had been to wipe out your entire US export market, it could solely influence about 2 to three per cent of China’s economic system.
China’s largest export vacation spot is now Asean. Despite the fact that a part of the exports to Asean may finally go to the US – let’s say, hypothetically, half of the 16 per cent that goes to Asean – it could nonetheless characterize solely a small proportion of China’s GDP.
