A 2016 article predicting China would rise to high-income status in 2024 provokes too much comment given China’s current climate of economic gloom. The article was deleted but the status in question remains of great interest to various global objectives.

An article predicting China would become a high-income economy in 2024 was removed recently by its publisher, China’s leading Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily.

Was the optimism of pre-pandemic 2016 too much juxtaposition as the country enters the 2024 Lunar New Year struggling for cheer? China’s battered stock market, drawn-out property crisis, deflation and record-high youth unemployment have inevitably cast a damper on the season of peak festivity with even pork sales reflecting the current state of “Middle Kingdom” gloom.

Written in 2016, the piece entitled, “China is Expected to Enter Its ‘High-Income Phase’ in 2024” by author, economist Zheng Bingwen, the director of the Center for International Social Security Studies (CISS) at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), focuses on the experiences of other countries that have successfully avoided the “middle-income trap” to extrapolate what China might do as it transitions from an “upper-middle-income economy” to an “upper-income economy”. In their report on the article’s deletion after almost eight years, China Digital Times (CDT) describes the work as “not particularly controversial”.

The 2016 article might have stayed buried if not for a Weibo user sharing it online accompanied by the comment (a classic example of netizen humour]: “find a reason to spend a happy New Year”. The share prompted other netizens to repost the article, along with their responses seasoned by the events of the years following its original release. This led to its withdrawal by publisher People’s Daily Online. China Digital Times nevertheless was able to archive a copy of the article and republish it in full, along with a selection of comments from Weibo users. These comments included:

If you never become middle-income, how can you get caught in a “middle-income trap”?

Eight years ago, the People’s Daily couldn’t have known that the “driving-in-reverse Emperor” would throw the car into reverse and put the pedal to the metal.

China’s income status, however, remains a topic of great interest beyond the matter of Zheng Bingwen’s 2016 treatment of the subject. Were China to join the ranks of high-income economies, it would no longer be able to maintain its “developing country” classification. As part of the United Nations’ UNFCCC process, developed nations responsible for C02 build-up over decades in the pursuit of advancement are called on to compensate developing countries for impacts assigned to climate change and the transfer of high-polluting industries to the developing world.

Developing country status is recognized in international law and treaties, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Montreal Protocol and the World Trade Organization (WTO). A Radio Free Asia report on the issue of China’s continued use of the label, however, notes there is neither consensus on or an authoritative definition of ‘developing country’. For example, countries can self-declare as a ‘developing country’ in the WTO, which China did when it joined in 2001. But time has improved China’s economy (now the second largest in the world) and, although its GDP per capita is below the OECD average, its “economic clout far exceeds that of most other developing countries … and yet China requests the same breaks from WTO rules.” [See “China’s Developing Country Status in the WTO: Time for an Upgrade?”].

China’s unusual position as both a “climate-vulnerable developing country” and the world’s largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, permits leaning into the former as a buffer from the international responsibilities and duties of developed nations. Among those obligations: paying into a UNFCCC fund to provide financial compensation and assistance to climate-vulnerable countries. Although promising to ‘peak’ emissions around 2030 under its commitment to the Paris Agreement, in reality China will set its own pace for decreasing carbon dioxide emissions. For more on that pace, see China’s stance on climate here.