China is an interesting place. I fully recommend a visit for anyone who wants to discover somewhere quite unlike anywhere else they might have previously been. Even if you're from China, the country is so big and diverse that there is undoubtedly somewhere that is new to you.
Part of what makes China such an interesting place is that it is not easily classifiable as 'developed' or 'developing'. Clearly, China is a world power. They make pretty much everything that we find on our store shelves in Western nations. China's 2012 GDP was US$12.4 trillion (compared to the US' $15.6 trillion, which is the only country with a higher GDP than China, according to both the IMF and the World Bank). And in case you're curious, the exchange rate for the Chinese yuan to the US dollar is roughly the same as the Swedish crown to the US dollar.
While I've been here, I feel like I have been existing in the 'developed' aspect of China. We're in a very fancy hotel and I'm looking out the window at lit up high-rises. We've been chauffered to many of the places we've been going (I should note that we are here for a wedding, and our 'chauffeurs' are generally family members of the friends who are getting married), and in nice, new cars. I have pretty speedy wi-fi just about everywhere we go (except, ironically, in this hotel room, although I can go down to the lobby to connect). Everyone's on their smartphones all the time, even the monks on the Tibetan plateau.
But technically China is a 'developing' country. 150 million of the country's approximately 1.35 billion people live at less than US $1 per day, and the country has a growing income disparity with a Gini coefficient of 44.7 (the US has only slightly worse income inequality with a Gini coefficient of 47.7). Much of the infrastructure has only recently been built; there is so much new construction in the cities that China sometimes appears to be a land of cranes—but I don't mean the birds. As we drove through my friend's hometown in Shandong province (south of Beijing), he described to us how large areas that are now built up were cornfields only 5 years ago. But because things are being built up so quickly, some of the roads still don't have names. That, in addition to the fact that things are also being knocked down to accomodate new buildings, means that addresses don't stay the same from day to day, and thusmail delivery is difficult and not always all that reliable. Aside from the new roads, it's not always easy to get from place to place either, as transportation infrastructure construction is not keeping up with the build-up of the cities themselves. So we were able to take the bullet train (at 300 kph!) from Beijing to Shandong province, we then had to drive an hour into my friend's hometown. Airports are in the same situation; to fly to Lanzhou in north-central China, we would have to fly/train to Beijing and transfer there, or drive a couple hours to an airport in another province. (We did the latter, if you were wondering.)
It seems very strange to classify China as a 'developing' country, in the same way that we call Vanuatu a developing country. China has far more resources and in very many ways is far more advanced than Vanuatu. But so much of China's progress is very recent. Much of the country just feels 'new', where there is a feeling of established-ness in most developed countries. This seeming contradiction is part of what establishes China as one of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), which are all classified as 'developing', but also as newly emerging economies. These countries are expected to rise above the current G7 by 2050, making them some of the most economically powerful countries in the world. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens within these 'developing' nations as the become certified world powers.
*Note: Statistics came from Wikipedia.com and its respective citations.
