China is one of the major emerging countries in the world. As the country is a major consumer of many global commodities and is a top exporter of cheap goods to most developed countries, China plays an important role in the global economy. Since China is also a major holder US debt chnages in the Chinese economy and economic reforms have an impact on the US economy. From a poor and undeveloped country for a long time, China has turned into a fast-growing country in a fairly short period of time. Today though the political system followed is Communism, the Chinese economic model is market socialism that has helped unleash its China’s full potential in terms of economic growth. As a result, in some aspects China is far ahead of democratic developed countries.

I came across the following graphic from Blackrok showing some stats comparing China with the US and world:

Click to emerge

Source: Why all investors should care about China, Isabelle Mateos y Lago, Blackrock Blog

One of the examples where China beats other countries is the high-speed rail network. China has 22,000 kms of high-speed rail network while the U.S. has just 45. In this form of transportation the U.S. is far behind China. Lack of political will and vision, lack of strong leadership, corruption, politics, special interests and other ills prevent the U.S. from buidling a nice and decent high-speed network like other developed countries and China have done.

In the areas of high-technology such as cellphone and internet usage, aircraft carriers, etc. the U.S. is well ahead of China.As the GDP per capita figures above show, China has still a long way to go before reaching the U.S. economy’s size and standard of living.

it is suprising that the retail e-commerce market in China accounts for 47% of the global market.