When I started researching China’s national conditions in 1985, I got my doctoral dissertation in 1988. The research on population and development is for the medium and long term, focusing on 2020. In fact, we have also achieved 2020, especially the population at that time also achieved 2030.
Today we will mainly focus on the period before 2050, and we will make a further discussion in 2030, mainly combining China's economic development, energy, and climate change trends, and look back at the past 40 years of China's reform and opening up. While doing my doctoral dissertation, I judged that China entered the economic take-off around 1980 and continued to the high-speed growth stage. Around 2020, the growth rate will be about 5 to 6 points, less than 7, but we are Seeing that it is now 9.6, higher than our expectations at the time. Another judgment is that after 2020, China will transition from high-speed growth to stable growth until 2050. The main reason is that Comrade Deng Xiaoping proposed a three-step strategic vision in 1987. At that time, we studied the second and third steps. Now It appears that there may be three stages:
First, the rapid growth stage lasted from 1978 to 2011, with an average annual growth rate of 9.9%.
Second, the new normal stage, from high-speed growth to medium-to-high-speed growth, we estimate that it may be by 2030 or even by 2035, and it will also be in the stage of economic take-off.
The third is the stable growth stage, which is related to your development stage, not only the increase of per capita income level but also urbanization, industrialization, and so on.
Now it seems that as long as the core goals of the 13th Five-Year Plan are completed, we believe that the first century-old goal has been achieved. At the beginning of this century, the Party Central Committee made a big judgment that we have achieved a lot in the first 20 years and must firmly seize the period of strategic opportunities. The core is to put forward the first-century goal. Now we can see that in the previous 15 years, first of all, the GDP quadrupled last year, and this year we are very sure to achieve the goal set for the second time in the report of the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which is to quadruple the per capita GDP. We can define 20 years as 30 years and divide it into a track such as 2015, which will help us make corresponding predictions and analyses later.
First, from 2015 to 2020, China's economy entered a new normal, which indeed shows a shift from high-speed growth to medium-to-high-speed growth, which is maintained between 6.5% and 7.0%. This year it may reach 6.9%, and 7.0% is not ruled out. What we care more about China is not how high its economic growth rate is but whether it has entered the center of the world stage. We have concluded that we have already entered the center of the world stage. Here I use the PPP adopted by the World Bank, the United Nations, and other organizations. According to the constant price in 2011, we can see that during this period, China’s GDP accounted for 17.2% of the world’s total in 2015, and it rose to 19.9% last year, can roughly reaching one-fifth by 2020 during this period, and the per capita GDP can also reach 18,300 US dollars. From 2020 to 2030 (calculated based on the global growth model), China's economic growth rate can be roughly between 5.3% and 6.0%, which will be further reduced by 0.5% or even a little more than during the 13th Five-Year Plan period. By 2030, China's economic aggregate will roughly reach RMB 160 trillion at a constant price in 2015. But because we are substantially higher than the global economic growth rate, the global share may increase to nearly 24%. The key is that the per capita GDP can undoubtedly enter the high-income category, which can be close to 30,000 US dollars, equivalent to 2.2 times that of 2015. We use 2015 as the base period. In the past, it generally took 10 years to double the per capita GDP. Since we have reached a relatively high-income stage, the per capita GDP may double in 2015.
Second, the demand for power generation per capita will definitely increase further. This needs to be discussed by our experts. We are more concerned about whether the per capita carbon emissions will increase and how to achieve a low-carbon society, economy, transportation, industry, and cities. This may be the greatest challenge faced by China.
At the same time, China has also entered the era of the service industry, which will help us develop a low-carbon economy, especially the knowledge economy will become one of the main industries in the future. More importantly, we believe that the most important thing that may depend on China's future economic development is the continuous improvement of our labor productivity because labor productivity reflects the average productivity of all employed people in a country. From the comparison of labor productivity, in the past decade or so, the gap in labor productivity between China and the United States at constant prices has shrunk from 13.9 times to 4.6 times and will further narrow to less than three times by 2030. It is 2.25 times. This also explains why the 13th Five-Year Plan clearly puts forward the expected goal of increasing the average annual growth rate of labor productivity to 6.6%, which reflects that at this stage, we must rely on the improvement of labor productivity and the increase in capital stock per capita. And it will increase rapidly. From this, we have noticed that one of the most important modernizations is the modernization of China's infrastructure. Can China's infrastructure modernization increase, such as high-speed railways and expressway mileage? We have already surpassed the United States. We need to study the total amount of China and some large provinces, such as Henan Province and Sichuan Province. The infrastructure of these large provinces also poses a challenge to us, including energy demand, low carbon, and the country’s development by 2030. China is already considering how to build comprehensive transportation, information, and communication facilities.
The following is a brief introduction to the trend of urbanization in 2030. In the past 15 years, China has been in the process of accelerated urbanization, or new urbanization, which provides significant space for the transfer of the labor force population, especially rural and agricultural populations. China has completed a process from quantitative change to qualitative change. The key point is that the rural population has gone from above 50% to below 50%. In the next step, we hope to further reduce it to one-third. This is an internationally recognized turning point in quantitative change. The proportion of China's urban population in the global urban population has increased significantly, while the proportion of our rural population in the global rural population has decreased significantly. China has entered a new round of reshaping the internal geography of the Chinese economy. Urban agglomerations have emerged and are indeed connected through the agglomeration of elements. By 2020, the GDP of China's large urban agglomerations will account for more than 80% of the country's total, and the trade volume will account for more than 90%. , Financial revenue accounts for more than 90%. In addition, the main functional areas that are currently underway should be designed from version 1.0 to version 2.0. By 2030 or even a longer period, the already formed urbanization pattern of two horizontal lines and three vertical lines can be further strengthened.
According to the clear goal of the 13th Five-Year Plan, the urbanization rate of the permanent resident population must reach 60% by 2020, and the household registration population must reach 64%. What we are more concerned about is that we should do some pre-research in 2030. By 2030, China's urban population will reach nearly 1 billion people, and the urbanization rate will reach about 70%. Even so, we will definitely be a high-income country by then, which is still far lower than some European and American countries. Of course, what kind of urbanization do we need to discuss further?
The bottlenecks in China's development are:
Still a large population.
A relative shortage of resources.
A relatively fragile ecological environment.
Unbalanced urban-rural development and regional development.
This determines that China follows the law of urbanization development and follows the road of new urbanization with Chinese characteristics. A brief introduction and analysis based on our research results: first, look at the effect of economic growth rate. The higher the growth rate, the higher the demand for electricity itself. The key is that its demand elasticity will also change; the second may depend on the industry The lower the proportion of structures, including high energy-consuming structures, does go in this direction, the lower the corresponding electricity demand. The most important thing may be power production technology, power grid technology, and power transmission technology. It also depends on the extent to which we apply the digital economy. We call it China's ninth strategic-basic national strategic resource. From 2000 to 2015, the average annual growth rate of the country's total electricity consumption was as high as 9.85%. From 2015 to 2030, it is estimated that it will be reduced by more than half, reaching 4.26%. This is related to our demand elasticity and the decline in growth rate. Even so, our per capita growth rate of electricity consumption is still the highest in the world.
To a large extent, this has something to do with the growth of our GDP, the continuous increase in the level of per capita GDP, and the slight increase in the total population. If you compare it, by 2020, the country's per capita electricity consumption will still be lower than the current average level of developed countries. It is estimated that by 2030 it will be roughly equivalent to the current German per capita level, but it will be higher than the current EU per capita level and lower than the entire OECD level. In general, our per capita GDP is equivalent to half of that of the United States and has reached the level of developed countries. We do not simply look at absolute and relative numbers. It seems it is still too early for China to enter the post-coal era, but we have already seen signs of this. With the conditions of our economic structure and continuous upgrading and optimization, this trend is still possible, at least so far It can be seen that it will definitely be lower than 60% in 2020.
Most importantly, I think China has entered the era of a green energy revolution. China has encountered an unprecedented background of developing a low-carbon economy and promoting our transition to a low-carbon economy and society. We hope to enter a new era and consider the issue of carbon emissions. Compared with 2030, we can judge that it is very likely to enter the stage of absolute emission reduction more than ten years earlier. Of course, it has already appeared in 2014. Whether it is structural or trending, we have no way to judge. As I just mentioned, the big picture is very important. On the one hand, can we continue to give full play to our follow-up advantages, and can we have lower emissions than the leading countries' per capita GDP and per capita energy levels? We made a comparison. From 1949 to 2020, if we can reach the peak of carbon emissions, China will take 71 years to complete this process, which is equivalent to one-third of the time in the United States. In this sense, how do we use the world's best technology to achieve this, to finally create a new first-mover advantage?
Thank you all.
