Containerization and globalization
From the chart above, the growth of China’s GDP per capita almost followed the same trend as the country’s container port traffic, and we can clearly notice the influence of world economy on China as well, like the 2008 financial crisis, which isn’t seen t hat often before, when China was still a ‘ traditional ’ Communist country that rarely gets involved in the global market. The idea is that the low cost created by containerization made it possible for China to join the globalization process by doing labour- intensive manufacturing, which is although considered as low-end jobs in most of the Western world, are still good-paid jobs in developing countries. China’s integration of the global economy also pushed the country’s urbanization and industrialization. A ccording to the chart below, only about 37% of China’s population lived in a city, but that has gone up to over 55% in 2015, whichmeans over 200million peoplemoved from rural areas to cities due to higher wages. These higher wages also meant a lot. It is obvious that if someone has money, he/she has to spend it somewhere, and that was what Chinese people did. With a fast-growing economy, China’s market has already become big enough to consume most of its products as people in China has become wealthier, which is why China’s GDP per capita began to grow even faster than container traffic since 2011 in the curve above: China’s market is growing at a higher rate than world economy as a whole.
Proportion of urban population of China, 1998-2017
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Figure 6: Proportion of urban population of China, 1998-2017 22
However, as wages in eastern China have risen rapidly, 23 China’s advantage in labour -intensive industries has beco me smaller and smaller. But this wasn’t bad for the Chinese economy at all: Higher earnings and education level of China enables the country to start entering into industries with higher technology level, which is how companies like Huawei and DJI quickly took down a good proportion of
22 National Statistics Bureau of China. ‘ China Statistical Yearbook-2017 .’ http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2017/indexeh.htm. 23 Average annual earning of China’s urban workforce has risen to 82,461 CNY ($12,437) in 2018. Source: National Statistics Bureau of China. ‘ China Statistical Yearbook-2018 ’. http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2018/indexeh.htm. Exchange rate used: Average closing price in 2018 (1 USD=6.63 CNY)
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