Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    WITH 2016 drawing to a close, increasing signs show that China’s target of a 6.5 percent increase in GDP will be achieved without a hitch, despite suspicion and doubts at home and overseas.

    In its latest update to its World Economic Outlook released in October, the IMF revised up its forecast of China’s 2016 GDP growth by 0.2 percent to 6.6 percent. Meanwhile, the IMF lowered growth forecast for the U.S., expecting the U.S. economy to grow just 1.6 percent in 2016, a significant drop compared to its 2.6 percent growth in 2015.

    It will be another disappointing year for the bears who keep short-selling China. They must feel puzzled as to why all the doctrines and theories they have been well-versed in fail to work when making forecasts about China.

    The China Miracle is by no means the result of luck or dramatic incidents. China has accumulated rich experience in national construction and governance. Among others, the ability to solve crises is China’s best asset. In essence, China’s modern history is a history of nonstop crisis solving.

    In the last 95 years, under the extraordinary leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the country has overcome four major crises.

    The first crisis was that of national survival. China had been on the verge of demise as a sovereign and independent nation since the world powers began to invade and carve it up in the late Qing Dynasty until the founding and growth of the CPC.

    The CPC was the first and only political force in China that was capable of mobilizing and uniting the Chinese people to fight as one against foreign invaders and domestic forces suppressing the people. The founding of the People’s Republic was the first great success in crisis management in modern China. After decades of arduous struggle with ferocious Japanese invaders and the corrupt Kuomintang regime, the CPC eventually succeeded in its great cause of letting the Chinese people stand up as the master of their nation.

    The second crisis was the formidable task of defending and consolidating the new-born nation. New China inherited barely any wealth from the Kuomintang regime but a huge and impoverished population and an agriculture-dominant yet broken economy.

    Once again, the CPC exhibited an extraordinary ability to solve crises. Not only did China fend off countless external threats such as the Korean War and withstood internal turbulence like the “Cultural Revolution,” but it eventually created a stable environment both at home and internationally for an economic take-off.

    China’s reform and opening up enabled the country to usher in its first period of strength and prosperity since the fall of the Qing Dynasty, thus going through the third crisis, one of defeating poverty. In a mere three decades, China has risen up as the world’s second-largest economy.

    But the fourth crisis soon struck as the new-found prosperity came along with some unexpected side-effects: serious pollution, widespread corruption, pathetic moral and ethical decline, soaring housing prices and a widening rich-poor divide.

    At various points in previous years, China has been faced with difficulties of such severity that it seemed logical and reasonable for pundits to forecast a fiasco for China, as any other nation would go bust under similar circumstances.

    However, China’s crisis-solving capability was underestimated again. Since the Xi Jinping-led new Chinese leadership took office in 2013, China has been overcoming numerous seemingly unsolvable problems, and every aspect of society is changing for the better.

    If China could overcome such extreme crises as national subjugation, abject poverty, rampant corruption and severe pollution, what other difficulties could there be that China couldn’t solve, given the powerful economic, political and social resources the nation has accumulated over the years?

    The best times for China are yet to arrive.

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)