Op-Ed Contributors

China still a developing nation

By Feng Zhaokui (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-06 08:02

As a comparative measurement of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide, the HDI is more preferentially used to distinguish whether the country is a developed, a developing or an under-developed country, and it measures the impact of a country's economic policies on its citizens' quality of life.

According to the 2007 HDI, 182 listed countries were divided into four categories in their human development: the very high, high, medium and low level.

Countries falling in the first category, which stands above 0.9, are referred to as developed countries, and the last three are all grouped in the developing countries' list.

Last year's HDI indicates that China was 0.772, ranking 92nd among all the 182 nations, which also put the country at a medium level among developing nations.

For the US and Japan, the world's largest and second largest economies, the index was 0.956 and 0.960, ranking them 13th and 10th in the world, respectively, in terms of human development.

The reason why developed countries are also branded as "industrialized developed ones" is that they completed their stages of industrialization much earlier. Despite its fast economic development in the past decades, China is still on the road to industrialization and its economic quality has yet to improve.

The country heavily depends on imports for high-performance material, core parts and major heavy equipment purchases.

Compared with developed countries, China is still at a disadvantage in technological innovations and the "Made-in-China" brand is at the low end of the world's industrial chain given that skilled labor is in short supply.

Among China's manufacturing industry, foreign-funded ventures take up a large portion, and the labor-intensive and middle and low-end high-tech products exported by these ventures have contributed much to its surging export.