The U.S. House of Representatives passed the “PRC Is Not a Developing Country Act” with a 415-0 vote on March 27, directing the Secretary of State to have China's “developing country” status revoked in international organizations. “The U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of legislation to deprive China of its ‘developing country’ status in international institutions is solely aimed at undercutting a nation that the U.S. views as its major ‘competitor’,” William Jones, Washington Bureau Chief of the Executive Intelligence Review, told China Daily.
“Some people would argue, as lawmakers are doing, that China should not be regarded as a ‘developing country’ because of its large GDP and the rapid development in places like Shenzhen and Shanghai,” Jones said. “Through great efforts, China has eliminated absolute poverty, but its individual GDP is one-fifth that of the United States, and keeping people out of poverty will still require major efforts by the central government until the Chinese economy advances to a point where individual income is secure and at a level comparable to that of other developed countries.”
“It doesn’t really matter what the U.S. government or what the House says because the U.S. doesn’t provide any aid or preferential policies to China economically on the basis of this label, whether it’s a developing country or a developed country,” said Sourabh Gupta, Senior Fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies. However, international organizations have “their own or a little different definition” of what a developing country is. “The one which does have hard numbers behind it is the World Bank, which has various categories. At about USD30,000 per capita, they start categorizing a country within the advanced economies or the developed countries.”
Gupta mentioned that starting from around 2005, the U.S. has been saying that China and India need to be re-categorized as advanced developing countries or something beyond that. “Even when China was a USD2,000 per capita economy, they wanted to reclassify China. So the U.S. doesn’t have good intentions,” he said. “The point is that if China is classified as a developed country, then China has to accept certain burdens, such as in climate change or international trade negotiations. And so it needs to take added commitments. That is the main thing.”
Jones pointed out that trying to restrict China’s development by depriving it of its rights as a developing country is not only a blow to the Chinese population, but also to the entire developing world, which has benefited from China’s outreach in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Jones said “more and more countries will rally around alternative structures of governance now available to them”, whether BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or the Global Development Initiative (GDI), the China Daily reports.
