ON CHINA'S REMARKABLE PROGRESS





How does one re-cycle a million or more bicycles? Whoever in Beijing knows the answer must be doing a roaring trade, for almost overnight the millions of bicycles that used to commute on the streets of Beijing when it was still Mao’s Peking have been replaced by metal ribbons of motors cars, buses, trucks and heavy trailers. Endlessly, they ply along the city’s broad avenues and curve into the six ring roads that girdle modern Beijing.


The China that innumerable Chinese dynasties shaped and squandered, the China that Napoleon predicted, that Mao Zedong liberated from its archaic past and his successor Deng Xiaoping catapulted into the 21st century with his socio-capitalist reforms, is on the move. It surges sleeplessly into the 22nd century, and if by chance it does encounter any red light, it pauses only long enough for the light to turn green again so that it can rush further forward.


Modern China is becoming rapidly a skyline of skyscraper statistics. Once, the only figure above a billion known about China was the number of its burgeoning hungry population. Today, those 1.3 billion people in China are self-sufficient in food. Chinese agriculture feeds 22% of the world’s population from only 10% of the world’s arable land. Its GDP rate of growth in 2005 was 9.9%. It has exports of over 760 billion dollars. It has Foreign Exchange reserves of almost one trillion US dollars. Every year, it adds to them another 160 billion dollars - ten times what we in Pakistan have been able to accumulate over the past six years. [EXTRACT]





Published in DAWN, 17 Dec. 2006.