China had the world’s largest GDP until the 1820s.

Published: May 18,2023

By Staff writer

When the Chinese talk about the dream of national rejuvenation they are literally talking about pursuing strength of the country in all its form, rejuvenation of the nation and happiness of the people. China was once a strong country economically and was weakened by foreign invasions. In the 21^st century, China is slowly but surely regaining her lost glory by catching up and even surpassing some developed countries although it is still considered an upper middle income developing country.

China today is the world’s second largest economy by nominal GDP, and the world’s largest economy since 2016 when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP).

According to economic historian Angus Maddison, China remained the country with the world’s largest GDP until the 1820s, accounting for one-third of the world’s total GDP (Maddison 2007). China’s GDP was six times as large as Britain’s, and almost twenty times the GDP of the nascent United States.

However, 20 years later, the country was defeated by Britain in the First Opium War and again in the Second Opium War. After that, China became what Mao Zedong called a “semi colonial” country. Successive defeats in wars led Chinese political elites to realize that the strength of a country does not lie in its economic output, nor even in its military power alone, but in a new set of institutions, especially a political system.

However, this realization came at a price. Only after China lost to Japan, did Chinese elites realize the importance of establishing a new institutional system. With Mao Zedong at its core, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) eventually found its way to success. The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, ending successive defeats in modern times. Therefore, Mao Zedong’s generation of Chinese Communists solved the problem of “being beaten”, or what one professor once told me it was a period of China humiliation. 

The period of reform and opening up which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s championed by the Deng Xiaoping generation realized that a closed China was contributing to weakness  and they coined the saying that,  “Closed will be backward, backward will be beaten.” It is under Deng’s leadership, which China carried out a proactive policy of opening up to the world. 

For more than 40 years, China has transformed itself from a poor country to the world’s second-largest economy and largest trading nation. In terms of GDP per capita, China has risen from less than $300 in the early 1980s to $12,000 (The World Bank’s statistics 2021. The achievement of lifting more than 800 million people out of poverty is a miraculous achievement that has left the world in great wonder how China did it in less than one generation. 

Much are foreign invasions weakened China in the past, the west is still trying to   stop the rise of China in recent times. The question here is; will the west this time manage to sabotage and stop the rise of China?   The answer probably is that unlike in the past, this time it would be unwise, costly and catastrophic.