case study on china

The Economy of China: A Case Study on the Second-largest Economy in the World

Harshit Verma

The world has about 775 crore people living on its surface. If you look at the population graph, you will notice a straight line facing the sky. The rate at which the population is growing makes a steep graph.

The world is divided into continents and countries. Most people live in china. China is the most populous country in the world. In fact, China has been the most populous for a long time now. When we write ‘for a long time, it means centuries. The first census showed the Chinese population at 583 million and by the fifth census, it had risen to double at 1.2 billion. The Chinese population now has crossed a mark of 1.4 billion people. It also covers most geographical time zones after that of Russia. This means that the country is not just big in population but also huge in the area.

A big country like that of China needs a lot of products and services. They need a lot of goods to meet the needs of people residing in that country. Some of the goods can be imported and the rest have to be produced in the home country. In fact, most goods that they can’t import or the goods that are not economical to import, they have to manufacture by themselves.

Not to mention that China is one of the cheapest labour countries out there. In this article, we are gonna cover the economy of this country. We will discuss what comprises the most in this economy and what are its driving factors. Read on to know more about the second-biggest economy in the world.

China: The Most Populous Country China: The Culture China: The Economy The Reasons for Economic Growth in China What can go wrong with China? FAQ

China: The Most Populous Country

China or the Republic of China (official name) is a country in East Asia. As we mentioned earlier it is the biggest, in terms of population. It contains the largest number of people than any country. This country also spans and covers most geographical time zones after Russia.

The country has 23 provinces, 4 municipalities, 5 autonomous regions and 2 SARs (Special administrative regions). The capital of China is Beijing . The largest city in China, which is also the financial centre, is Shanghai . In terms of technological and innovative approaches, the city of Shenzhen tops the chart in this country.

China at its inception emerged as one of the very first civilisations. It was the fertile land basin of a river named Yellow that marked its beginning. After the civilization boom, China also emerged as one of the first economically strong countries. Their time as a strong economic power also remained for almost most of the two millennia (thousand years).

Also, the political system of this country is based on monarchies. It has been this way for almost a thousand years (Millenia). This means that for those many years, China’s political system was controlled by rulers and then their heirs and then their heirs. This is what we call an absolute hereditary monarchy. This system of political control began from the ‘ Xia dynasty in about the 21st Century BCE. Moreover, since then the country of China has seen multiple expansions, fractions and re-unities.

China: The Culture

The culture of such a big country is expected to be special and unique. Since very ancient times, the culture has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism. Which is a tenet in philosophy. This is also known as a truism and inspires people to live a humanistic, rationalistic and very simple life.

The culture there in the past also offered examinations, tests. Those exams were to be passed by a person to get a highly prestigious and better status in society. This is one of the reasons why China has a long history of writing and calligraphy. In fact, calligraphy, writing poetry and painting are more celebrated than other forms of art like dancing or dramatics. Its culture also inspires people to be diving deep into the lanes of history to know about their past. This also invokes the trait of an inward-looking behaviour of Chinese people in the past, this ran at a national level of thought process.

China: The Economy

It is an aforementioned fact that China is big and has a lot of people. It has to cater to about 1.4 billion people for its sustenance. This really marks that the economy must be big and effective. However, this is not as easy as it seems.

Even though China is the largest in terms of population, we cannot really say that it is the biggest when it comes to the economy. It is second in terms of magnitude just after the United States . It is important to note that economies are weighed in terms of GDPs. GDP stands for the gross domestic product. That is in simpler terms, the sum total of all the valuable products or services that a country produces in a financial year.

According to the GDPs, in the pandemic year 2020, China is seen to have the second-largest GDP in the world. Here are the top five countries according to the GDP ranks.

When we talk in terms of GDP, we measure it in dollars. We can also notice that China may be the second largest in GDP but it is the largest in terms of PPP.

PPP stands for purchasing power parity. PPP is a popular macroeconomic analysis metric that is used to compare economic productivity and standards of living between countries in purchasing power. The theory follows a theory known as the “Basket of goods” for comparing the purchasing power of different countries.

China tops the list when we see through the lens of purchasing power parity. This shows us the fact that even if the Chinese economy is the second-largest, the citizens of China are better in purchasing power and economic productivity than that most countries. Please note that PPP here does not mean a paycheck protection program , made by the CARES Act.

China’s growth rate (In annual terms) is displacing that of the United States of America. Many think that China’s rate will overtake the United States in terms of Nominal GDP too in the upcoming years. Don’t get scared of the terminology “Nominal GDP”. Nominal GDP is a form of GDP that is in the current rates, without accounting for the effect of inflation on the GDP. So, this is a GDP at the current market price.

There are many reasons for china that made this country get this spot of a top tier pacer in the economic race. We will discuss more in a second. But let us get some overview, China has progressively opened its economy with the whole world, continuously for more than forty years. This reveals a good reason why its economy is on a paced growth and why the standards of people there have been improving vastly.

The Chinese government has gradually phased out collectivised agriculture too. It means the type of agriculture in which multiple farmers can hold land and share workloads of the agriculture activity. Thus, it helps in sharing Profits and losses among farmers and makes farming a little more smooth sailing.

Collectivised farming has also boosted flexibility for market prices and increased the autonomy of businesses. When a country’s agriculture is doing well, it can then pay more attention to the industrial sector and thus China’s domestic and foreign trade magnitudes are also rising at a good rate of growth.

The Reasons for Economic Growth in China

By far we have discussed China and its economy. We have seen that it is a rapidly growing economy with such a behemoth sort of population. This might interest you in how this big country is fostering growth with such a huge number of people and how it is able to raise citizens' standard of living. This is the part of the article where we discuss the reasons for such growth in China. How it is becoming, what it is becoming and what are the main drivers of growth for this economy.

The Manufacturing Hub of the world

China, if you don’t know, is the manufacturing hub of the world. If you are using a product that is sold by a brand or even a local product then it is a good possibility that the product would be manufactured in China.

Yes, look around yourself. Your favourite Apple products are assembled in china, your favourite Converse or Nike sneakers are made in China, and most things that you can think of are manufactured in China. Do you ask for a reason? The reason is obviously cheap labour.

With such a big population, China has some special benefits over any other country in the world. It can provide a good basis for cheap labour. For that one reason, it has emerged as the global capital of manufacturing items.

Besides its large hands on the textile industry, the economy also is big on machinery, processing of food items, Cement for infrastructure, consumer goods and many many more fields.

Moreover, China is not a huge hub only for domestic manufacturing plants, it also caters to the needs of foreign companies to come and manufacture there or assemble items. Famous examples may include Apple. Apple designs their products in California and they are assembled in China. Adding to this, The Chinese software and IT industry grew by over 14.2% from 2018 to 2019, generating revenue of approximately $940 billion.

Heavy Focus on Industries

Another reason which makes this country a big economy is its industries. As any normal developing country, China knows that for growing its economy, it needs to pay attention to the industries that are set in its territory. So they focus extensively on that.

China is a super friendly nation when it comes to industries wanting to set up manufacturing plants there. Results of which are the fact that China is the world's biggest steel manufacturer . This shows a strong will of steel.

The Chinese government began opening up the economy for the whole world in 1978. Which is also known as globalisation. So it began its reforms for economic development under the leader named Deng Xiaoping. That was a turning point in the history of this big country, after the reforms it went on to become the fastest-growing major country globally.

According to a report, the growth rates were averaging 10% over 30 years. China also has three of the ten largest stock exchanges in India. They are located in prime cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. They are big in terms of market capitalisation and trading volume. All these factors establish that China is an industrial hub.

The Medicines industry

Abbreviated as Pharmaceutical industry. China has one of the best, state of the art medical supply chains. The growth trends in this industry copy the whole of China. It grows almost as China grows, which is rapid. China had the second-largest pharmaceutical market in the world as of 2017.

The pharmaceutical industry follows the same structure as most of the world. They have manufacturers at the top and then middlemen or distributors and then retail stores communicate directly to the general public. However, the global share of China's medicines is seen less. With a big population, it is forecasted to grow even more and is still one of the biggest in terms of scale.

The Population’s Demand-pull

As mentioned earlier, China is very populous. Which makes it a generator of huge demands. Brands all over the world try to target this demand to get some share of this market. So this has become one of the most important drivers of economic growth for that country. It is a consumer paradise with all types of demands for goods, be it normal or luxury items.

China has some of the biggest shopping malls in the world. They, not to mention, stimulate growth in a good direction. The retail lines of China contributed about 1.8 trillion dollars to the Gross domestic product.

China is also the home to the E-Commerce giant Alibaba. It is responsible for giving a lasting boost to the already big consumerism in China. A report said that Alibaba on a shopping festival achieved something sort of called a miraculous sale. It touched a sales record of 540.3 billion Yuan (it is about 84.5 billion dollars), which is a huge record for such a huge country. This gave a much-needed boost to the consumer sector. Even today it is one of the benchmarks for sales all over the world.

Tourism and travel is also big sector in China. It reportedly contributed 992 billion dollars to the Chinese GDP in the year 2019. Other sectors that are the prime demand pullers are transportation, construction and estate.

What can go wrong with China?

China, however big it may seem from the outside, can go weak from the inside. There can be many premises on which the country is not doing well. For example, China uses a lot of Non-renewable resources to produce power, electricity. The population needs it and the shift in this sector seems impossible. This marks the country as a huge member of the world's pollution and a big emitter of greenhouse gases.

As we discussed previously, the China government is a monarch at its core. This makes enough space for corruption. The government is however trying to curb corruption and make the country more flexible and friendly for the world’s businesses. This can take time and if not done correctly can leave a bad impression on the image of China. This problem is not just one faced. It is a multifaceted problem, as it can lead to fewer industries in China and thus low employment rates in the country.

Speaking of that, China also faces the problem of unemployment . It needs to place people with enough skillsets for employment. Which is also a big deal in a country as big as China.

In addition to the political and the internal housing issue, one more issue lurks there. The recent downward trend of the labour industry. This means that China is slowly losing the crown of the cheapest labour in the world . The reason for this can be inflation and the digitalised working models and economy. China is losing its position to other cheap labour countries like Pakistan, India etcetera. For India, it is good news but if China has to retain its manufacturing position then it needs to be more ready for this changing technological world.

As we discussed above, China is a big country with a huge population and big demands. It is important to note that it, obviously, also has some cracks. Some cracks in the economy that are not severe but if not cured could sink a big ship.

The recent Evergrande fail was one such big example of how things can go wrong. China has seen real estate bubbles in its history too. The previous bubble burst and hit the whole world’s market, more recently the Evergrande crisis made the investors scared of investing in China.

It is a good point to say that “With great powers comes great responsibilities”. China has a load of the most people on the globe, which can be overwhelming to the government. In these times of pandemic, the future remains random and uncertain.

The fact that the Covid 19 pandemic originated from the heart of China also is affecting the Chinese economy in the wrong manner. It has defamed China in some sense. This is the reason that some industries are looking to shift base to developing countries like India.

For China, it remains a tough call to tackle a pandemic and the future of its economy. Again, it is not supposed to be easy to handle such a big and populous economy.

Is China a developed country?

Yes, China is one of the largest developing countries in the world.

What is China's GDP?

The gross domestic product (GDP) of China is around 14.87 trillion U.S. dollars as of 2020.

Is China the fastest growing economy?

Yes, China ranks second in the world's fastest-growing economy.

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Case Study: China

The Chinese government introduced the ‘One Child Policy’ in 1979. The aim of this policy was to attempt to control population growth. The policy limited couples to one child. Under this policy couples have to gain permission from family planning officials for each birth.

If families followed this policy they received free education, health care, pensions and family benefits. These are taken away if the couple have more than one child.

The benefits of this policy are that the growth rate of China’s population has declined. Without the policy it is estimated that there would be an extra 320 million more people in a country whose population is estimated to be 1.3 billion.

The scheme has caused a number of problems in China. This is particularly the case for hundreds of thousands of young females. Many thousands of young girls have been abandoned by their parents as the result of the one child policy. Many parents in China prefer to have a boy to carry on the family name. As a result large numbers of girls have either ended up in orphanages, homeless or in some cases killed. Also, 90% of foetuses aborted in China are female.

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How Google took on China—and lost

• Matt Sheehan archive page

Google's first foray into Chinese markets was a short-lived experiment. Google China’s search engine was launched in 2006 and abruptly pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results. But in August 2018, the investigative journalism website The Intercept reported that the company was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly. Amid a furor from human rights activists and some Google employees, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the company to kill Dragonfly, saying it would “strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.” In mid-December, The Intercept reported that Google had suspended its development efforts in response to complaints from the company's own privacy team, who learned about the project from the investigative website's reporting.

Observers talk as if the decision about whether to reenter the world’s largest market is up to Google: will it compromise its principles and censor search the way China wants? This misses the point—this time the Chinese government will make the decisions.

Google and China have been locked in an awkward tango for over a decade, constantly grappling over who leads and who follows. Charting that dance over the years reveals major shifts in China’s relationship with Google and all of Silicon Valley. To understand whether China will let Google back in, we must understand how Google and China got here, what incentives each party faces—and how artificial intelligence might have both of them dancing to a new tune.  

The right thing to do?

When www.google.cn launched in 2006, the company had gone public only two years before. The iPhone did not yet exist, nor did any Android-based smartphones. Google was about one-fifth as large and valuable as it is today, and the Chinese internet was seen as a backwater of knockoff products that were devoid of innovation. Google’s Chinese search engine represented the most controversial experiment to date in internet diplomacy. To get into China, the young company that had defined itself by the motto “Don’t be evil” agreed to censor the search results shown to Chinese users.

Central to that decision by Google leadership was a bet that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese users and nudge the Chinese internet toward greater openness.

At first, Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators.

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’” Google hadn’t asked the government for permission before implementing the notice but wasn’t ordered to remove it. The company’s global prestige and technical expertise gave it leverage. China might be a promising market, but it was still dependent on Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and knowledge. Google wanted to be in China, the thinking went, but China needed Google.

Google’s censorship disclaimer was a modest victory for transparency. Baidu and other search engines in China soon followed suit. Over the next four years, Google China fought skirmishes on multiple fronts: with the Chinese government over content restrictions, with local competitor Baidu over the quality of search results, and with its own corporate leadership in Mountain View, California, over the freedom to adapt global products for local needs. By late 2009, Google controlled more than a third of the Chinese search market—a respectable share but well below Baidu’s 58%, according to data from Analysys International.

The Chinese government cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that suffocated political discussion.

In the end, though, it wasn’t censorship or competition that drove Google out of China. It was a far-­reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack, which Google said came from within China, pushed company leadership over the edge. On January 12, 2010, Google announced, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

The sudden reversal blindsided Chinese officials. Most Chinese internet users could go about their online lives with few reminders of government controls, but the Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown.

“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.”

But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Six months earlier, following riots in Xinjiang, the government had blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in one fell swoop, fortifying the “Great Firewall.” The government was making a bet: China and its technology sector did not need Google search to succeed.

Google soon abandoned google.cn, retreating to a Hong Kong–based search engine. In response, the Chinese government decided not to fully block services like Gmail and Google Maps, and for a while it allowed sporadic access from the mainland to the Hong Kong search engine too. The two sides settled into a tense stalemate.

Google’s leaders seemed prepared to wait it out. “I personally believe that you cannot build a modern knowledge society with that kind of [censorship],” Google chairman Eric Schmidt told Foreign Policy in 2012. “In a long enough time period, do I think that this kind of regime approach will end? I think absolutely.”

Role reversal

But instead of languishing under censorship, the Chinese internet sector boomed. Between 2010 and 2015, there was an explosion of new products and companies. Xiaomi, a hardware maker now worth over $40 billion, was founded in April 2010. A month earlier Meituan, a Groupon clone that turned into a juggernaut of online-to-offline services, was born; it went public in September 2018 and is now worth about $35 billion. Didi, the ride-­hailing company that drove Uber out of China and is now challenging it in international markets, was founded in 2012. Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returning from Silicon Valley, including many former Googlers, were crucial to this dynamism, bringing world-class technical and entrepreneurial chops to markets insulated from their former employers in the US. Older companies like Baidu and Alibaba also grew quickly during these years.

In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks, software widely used for circumventing censorship.

The Chinese government played contradictory roles in this process. It cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that largely suffocated political discussion on China’s once-raucous social-media sites. Yet it also launched a high-profile campaign promoting “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation.” Government-funded startup incubators spread across the country, as did government-backed venture capital.

That confluence of forces brought results. Services like Meituan flourished. So did Tencent’s super-app WeChat, a “digital Swiss Army knife” that combines aspects of WhatsApp, PayPal, and dozens of other apps from the West. E-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, selling $25 billion worth of shares—still the most valuable IPO in history.

Amidst this home-grown success, the Chinese government decided to break the uneasy truce with Google. In mid-2014, a few months before Alibaba’s IPO, the government blocked virtually all Google services in China, including many considered essential for international business, such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Scholar. “It took us by surprise, as we felt Google was one of those valuable properties [that they couldn’t afford to block],” says Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous cofounder of GreatFire, an organization that tracks and circumvents Chinese internet controls.

The Chinese government had pulled off an unexpected hat trick: locking out the Silicon Valley giants, censoring political speech, and still cultivating an internet that was controllable, profitable, and innovative.

AlphaGo your own way

With the Chinese internet blossoming and the government not backing down, Google began to search for ways back into China. It tried out less politically sensitive products—an “everything but search” strategy—but with mixed success.

In 2015, rumors swirled that Google was close to bringing its Google Play app store back to China, pending Chinese government approval—but the promised app store never materialized. This was followed by a partnership with Mobvoi, a Chinese smart-watch maker founded by an ex-Google employee, to make voice search available on Android Wear in China. Google later invested in Mobvoi, its first direct investment in China since 2010.

In March 2017, there were reports that authorities would allow Google Scholar back in. They didn’t. Reports that Google would launch a mobile-app store in China together with NetEase, a Chinese company, similarly came to naught, though Google was permitted to relaunch its smartphone translation app.

Then, in May 2017, a showdown between AlphaGo, the Go-playing program built by Google sibling company DeepMind, and Ke Jie, the world’s number one human player, was allowed to take place in Wuzhen, a tourist town outside Shanghai. AlphaGo won all three games in the match—a result that the government had perhaps foreseen. Live-streaming of the match within China was forbidden, and not only in the form of video: as the Guardian put it, “outlets were banned from covering the match live in any way, including text commentary, social media, or push notifications.” DeepMind broadcast the match outside China.

During this same period, Chinese censors quietly rolled back some of the openings that Google’s earlier China operations had catalyzed. In 2016, Chinese search engines began removing the censorship disclaimers that Google had pioneered. In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs), software widely used for circumventing censorship. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities began rolling out extensive AI-powered surveillance technologies across the country, constructing what some called a “21st-century police state” in the western region of Xinjiang, home to the country’s Muslim Uighurs.

Despite the retrograde climate, Google capped off 2017 with a major announcement: the launch of a new AI research center in Beijing. Google Cloud’s Chinese-born chief scientist, Fei-Fei Li, would oversee the new center. “The science of AI has no borders,” she wrote in the announcement of the center’s launch. “Neither do its benefits.” (Li left Google in September 2018 and returned to Stanford University, where she is a professor.)

If the research center was a public symbol of Google’s continued efforts to gain a foothold in China, Google was also working quietly to accommodate Chinese government restrictions. Dragonfly, the censored- search-engine prototype, which has been demonstrated for Chinese officials, blacklists key search terms; it would be operated as part of a joint venture with an unnamed Chinese partner. The documents The Intercept obtained said the app would still tell users when results had been censored.

Other aspects of the project are particularly troubling. Prototypes of the app reportedly link users’ searches to their mobile-phone number, opening the door to greater surveillance and possibly arrest if people search for banned material.

In a speech to the Dragonfly team, later leaked by The Intercept, Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, explained Google’s aims. China, he said, is “arguably the most interesting market in the world today.” Google was not just trying to make money by doing business in China, he said, but was after something bigger. “We need to understand what is happening there in order to inspire us,” he said. “China will teach us things that we don’t know.”

In early December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a Congressional committee that "right now we have no plans to launch in China," though he would not rule out future plans. The question is, if Google wants to come back to China, does China want to let it in?

China’s calculus

To answer that question, try thinking like an advisor to President Xi Jinping.

Bringing Google search back certainly has upsides. China’s growing number of knowledge workers need access to global news and research, and Baidu is notoriously bad at turning up relevant results from outside China. Google could serve as a valuable partner to Chinese companies looking to expand internationally, as it has demonstrated in a patent-sharing partnership with Tencent and a $550 million investment in e-commerce giant JD. Google’s reentry would also help legitimize the Communist Party’s approach to internet governance, a signal that China is an indispensable market—and an open one—as long as you “play by the rules.”

Google’s exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government. If leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run that risk again.

But from the Chinese government’s perspective, these potential upsides are marginal. Chinese citizens who need to access the global internet can still usually do so through VPNs (though it is getting harder). Google doesn’t need to have a business in China to help Chinese internet giants gain business abroad. And the giants of Silicon Valley have already ceased their public criticism of Chinese internet censorship, and instead extol the country’s dynamism and innovation.

By contrast, the political risks of permitting Google to return loom large to Xi and his inner circle. Hostility toward both China and Silicon Valley is high and rising in American political circles. A return to China would put Google in a political pressure cooker. What if that pressure—via antitrust action or new legislation—effectively forced the company to choose between the American and Chinese markets? Google’s sudden exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government in front of its own citizens. If Chinese leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run the risk of that happening again.

A savvy advisor would be likely to think that these risks—to Xi, to the Communist Party, and to his or her own career—outweighed the modest gains to be had from allowing Google’s return. The Chinese government oversees a technology sector that is profitable, innovative, and driven largely by domestic companies—an enviable position to be in. Allowing Google back in would only diminish its leverage. Better, then, to stick with the status quo: dangle the prospect of full market access while throwing Silicon Valley companies an occasional bone by permitting peripheral services like translation.

Google’s gamble

Google does have one factor in its favor. If it first entered China during the days of desktop internet, and departed at the dawn of the mobile internet, it is now trying to reenter in the era of AI. The Chinese government places high hopes on AI as an all-purpose tool for economic activity, military power, and social governance, including surveillance. And Google and its Alphabet sibling DeepMind are the global leaders in corporate AI research.

This is probably why Google has held publicity stunts like the AlphaGo match and an AI-powered “Guess the Sketch” game on WeChat, as well as taking more substantive steps like establishing the Beijing AI lab and promoting Chinese use of TensorFlow, an artificial-intelligence software library developed by the Google Brain team. Taken together, these efforts constitute a sort of artificial-intelligence lobbying strategy designed to sway the Chinese leadership.

This pitch, however, faces problems on at least three battlegrounds: Beijing; Washington, DC; and Mountain View, California.

Chinese leaders have good reason to feel they’re already getting the best of both worlds. They can take advantage of software development tools like TensorFlow and they still have a prestigious Google research lab to train Chinese AI researchers, all without granting Google market access.

In Washington, meanwhile, American security officials are annoyed that Google is actively courting a geopolitical rival while refusing to work with the Pentagon on AI projects because its employees object to having their work used for military ends.

Those employees are the key to the third battleground. They’ve demonstrated the ability to mobilize quickly and effectively, as with the protests against US defense contracts and a walkout last November over how the company has dealt with sexual harassment. In late November more than 600 Googlers signed an open letter demanding that the company drop the Dragonfly project, writing, “We object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable.” Daunting as these challenges sound—and high as the costs of pursuing the Chinese market may be—they haven’t entirely deterred Google’s top brass. Though the development of Dragonfly appears to have, at the very least, paused, the wealth and dynamism that make China so attractive to Google also mean the decision of whether or not to do business there is no longer the company’s to make.

“I know people in Silicon Valley are really smart, and they’re really successful because they can overcome any problem they face,” says Bill Bishop, a digital-media entrepreneur with experience in both markets. “I don’t think they’ve ever faced a problem like the Chinese Communist Party.”

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Alberto F. Cavallo

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China case study, situation analysis of the effect of and response to covid-19 in asia.

This case study provides a snapshot of the educational responses and effects of COVID-19 in China and is part of a comprehensive assessment of the effects of and responses to COVID-19 on the Education Sector in Asia.

The case study considers the direct effects of school closures and reopening and identifies its impact on learners, their families as well as on the overall education system. The objectives of the analysis are:

• to assess and estimate the various impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic on the education sector and stakeholders in China;
• to examine policy and financial implications on progress towards achieving SDG 4-Education 2030; and
• to identify examples of promising responses and strategies in education and associated social sectors, which can be shared with other countries. Finally, the case study presents lessons learned and recommendations for building back better and increasing the resilience of the education system to future shocks.

This case study includes an in-depth thematic deep dive looking at the implementation of inclusive and equitable distance education during COVID-19.

This case study is based on a comprehensive desk-review of qualitative and quantitative evidence and on key informant interviews with relevant education officials, local authorities and teachers.

The case study is a collaboration between UNESCO, UNICEF ROSA and UNICEF EAPRO partly funded by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) under the UNESCO-UNICEF-World Bank joint project on Global and Regional Response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

See all country case studies, sub-regional and regional reports  here

Files available for download

Related topics, more to explore.

Climate Action for the Last Mile: Reaching the Most Vulnerable Children

UNICEF welcomes Ms. Hannah Nguyen as a new member of the UNICEF International Council in support of girls’ empowerment

Sweltering heat across East Asia and the Pacific puts children’s lives at risk - UNICEF

Three-fold increase in civilian casualties caused by landmines and unexploded ordnance in Myanmar’s escalating conflict

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes: Studies from India, China, and the United States (2001)

Chapter: chinese case studies: an introduction, chinese case studies: an introduction.

Zhao Shidong Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences

With the rapid development of China's economy over the last decades, its land use patterns have changed significantly, especially since the central government's adoption of socioeconomic reform policies, beginning in the late 1970s. Across China, the speed and scale of land use change have varied because of the country's diverse natural and socioeconomic conditions. In order to understand the process and the mechanism of land use change, and then provide a solid basis for the future sustainable planning of land use in China's many different regions, the Chinese research team chose the Jitai Basin, a typical rural area, and the Pearl River Delta, characterized by rapid urbanization, as its study sites (see map , p. 178).

JITAI BASIN

The Jitai Basin, located in Jiangxi Province in south-central China, is made up of four counties that contain two cities. At the end of 1995, the Jitai Basin was home to 2.47 million people; its population density was 198 persons per square kilometer.

Historically, the Jitai Basin was a relatively developed area for agricultural production and handcraft industries such as shipbuilding and textiles, because the Ganjiang (Gan River) served as a main transportation artery between north and south. But with the development of modern industry and communications, the opening of foreign trade ports (Guangzhou, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Ningbo) in the late nineteenth century, and the building of the Guangzhou–Wuhan and Wuhan–Beijing

railways, the direction of the flow of goods changed rapidly, weakening the transportation function of the Ganjiang River. From then on, China saw its economy grow rapidly in coastal areas, and the Jitai Basin gradually lost its dominant position in communications and the economy and slipped into a declining state.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the central government began to promote the development of the more rural regions of the country. As a result, in the 1950s and 1960s the Jitai Basin was the beneficiary of significant investment in an industrial program, technological assistance, and an influx of trained migrants from the more developed regions. Development of the country as a whole, however, was at a very low level, and cultural, political, and economic restrictions hampered the assistance efforts. In the end, then, no significant socioeconomic development occurred in the Jitai Basin from 1949 to 1978, and, indeed, population pressure and extreme economic policies resulted in serious damage to the region's natural resources. For example, overcutting of forests to provide fuel for steel smelters caused deforestation and soil erosion. And the expansion of agriculture to marginal hilly and mountainous areas in order to meet the subsistence demands of the rapidly growing population for food and fuel further accentuated the serious problems of environmental degradation.

Since the introduction of government reforms in 1978, the Jitai Basin has achieved relatively remarkable economic development in absolute terms. With implementation of the “household responsibility” system in 1982, agricultural productivity increased and the transition from cereal production to cash crop production (such as fruits and vegetables) accelerated. Meanwhile, the local government, aware of the damage to the ecosystem generated by deforestation and soil erosion, successfully implemented a series of policies to reforest the hills and mountains. Despite these achievements, the Jitai Basin still lags behind the coastal regions in economic development and urbanization. In fact, the gap between its socioeconomic development and that of developed regions (for example, the Pearl River Delta) is widening. One important reason is that the central government's economic development strategy tends to favor coastal areas. Other reasons are the Jitai Basin's location in China's hinterlands and its limited access to investment, technology, and the markets in metropolitan areas. In addition, because the region had a surplus of agricultural laborers stemming from the significant lack of development of the nonagricultural sectors, the massive out-migration of young laborers from the Jitai Basin to developed regions such as the Pearl River Delta increased. This development relieved the pressure on local employment, but also weakened agricultural production.

PEARL RIVER DELTA

Formed by the alluvium delivered by the West, North, and East Rivers, the Pearl River Delta is located in southern China's Guangdong Province. The study region, which lies in the central part of Pearl River Delta, consists of 13 counties or cities, which belong to six municipalities and are distributed on either side of the Pearl River estuary. The Pearl River Delta is one of the most heavily populated regions of China. In 1995 its permanent population density was 743 persons per square kilometer, compared with 378 for all of Guangdong Province and 126 for China as a whole.

Historically, the Pearl River Delta was known nationally for its production of grain, sugar, silk, freshwater fish, and fruits. Indeed, the region was referred to as the “Fish and Rice County.” The Delta also was one of the places in China where modern industry first appeared. However, from 1866, when industry first arrived, to 1949, when the new China was founded, the region's economy developed very slowly, and many residents of the Delta left to earn a living abroad. One factor in its slow growth was its location; because the Delta is situated at the frontier of the national defense, very few of the important industries were allowed to set up operations in the region.

After implementation of socioeconomic reforms in 1978, the Delta quickened its pace of development and now is one of the richest areas in China. But rapid industrialization and urbanization also have produced dramatic changes in the Pearl River Delta's landscape, as well as environmental pollution. Overall, within less than 20 years the Delta area was transformed from a rural agricultural area into a highly developed region through rapid industrialization and urbanization. Within this process, the interactions between population growth, land use change, and the relevant economic and environmental problems are complex and unique.

As the world's population exceeds an incredible 6 billion people, governments—and scientists—everywhere are concerned about the prospects for sustainable development.

The science academies of the three most populous countries have joined forces in an unprecedented effort to understand the linkage between population growth and land-use change, and its implications for the future. By examining six sites ranging from agricultural to intensely urban to areas in transition, the multinational study panel asks how population growth and consumption directly cause land-use change, and explore the general nature of the forces driving the transformations.

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes explains how disparate government policies with unintended consequences and globalization effects that link local land-use changes to consumption patterns and labor policies in distant countries can be far more influential than simple numerical population increases. Recognizing the importance of these linkages can be a significant step toward more effective environmental management.

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• Published: 13 April 2021

Sustained sustainable development actions of China from 1986 to 2020

• Bingsheng Liu 1 ,
• Tao Wang 1 ,
• Jiaming Zhang 1 ,
• Xiaoming Wang 2 ,
• Yuan Chang 3 ,
• Dongping Fang 4 ,
• Mengjun Yang 1 &
• Xinzhang Sun 5  

Scientific Reports volume  11 , Article number:  8008 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Environmental social sciences
• Sustainability

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a long-term task, which puts forward high requirements on the sustainability of related policies and actions. Using the text analysis method, we analyze the China National Sustainable Communities (CNSCs) policy implemented over 30 years and its effects on achieving SDGs. We find that the national government needs to understand the scope of sustainable development more comprehensively, the sustained actions can produce positive effects under the right goals. The SDGs selection of local governments is affected by local development levels and resource conditions, regions with better economic foundations tend to focus on SDGs on human well-being, regions with weaker foundations show priority to basic SDGs on the economic development, infrastructures and industrialization.

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Introduction.

In 2015, 193 countries of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in New York 1 , which has become the program for most countries around the world to implement sustainable development. However, the SDG Summit in 2019 pointed out that the world was not on track to achieving the SDGs by 2030, and global progress in some areas of sustainable development had either stagnated or been reversed 2 . The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 has evolved into global public health and economic crisis, which has had severe negative impacts on most SDGs. And poor countries and vulnerable groups will be hit hardest in the long run 3 . Although many countries are developing and implementing policies to support sustainable development, new policies often bear the significant mark of the current government. It is a common phenomenon that national policies and strategies change with changes in government or leadership; for example, different governments in the United States and Australia have distinct attitudes towards climate change response policies aimed at SDG13 4 . Policy instability or “mobilized governance” will lead to a negative effect on sustainable development 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , and maintaining the “sustainability” of sustainable development policy itself is the premise for achieving SDGs.

Existing studies about SDGs can be mainly categorized into two groups:

One group of research is debating on the scientific rationality of SDGs. Some researchers believe that the SDGs reflect the ideology of Anthropocentrism, which is intertwined with the practice of industrialization and the ideology of economic growth 9 , 10 . Sam Adelman argued that the SDGs promoted a weak, anthropocentric form of sustainable development that ignored ecological reality and continued to prioritize economic growth above social justice and environmental protection 11 . Undeniably, the majority of sustainable development models still suffer from ‘an insufficiently developed theoretical framework’ 12 , but with the deepening of the theoretical research, the concept of environmental limit, carrying capacity, and planetary boundaries have been gradually fulfilled. For instance, some studies maintain that the SDGs should be integrated with the planetary boundaries so as to pursue the prosperity of human society within the limits of natural capital 13 . Holden et al. proposed a three-imperatives model for sustainable development including satisfying human needs, ensuring social equity, and respecting environmental limits, and highlighted the equally essential role of the three imperatives 14 . Comparatively, economic growth was just a potential means to fulfill primary dimensions, rather than a primary dimension of sustainable development 14 , 15 .

The other research cluster primarily focuses on assessing the trade-offs and synergies between SDGs 16 , 17 , 18 . For example, researchers have identified the prominent trade-offs between SDG12 and other SDGs, while extensive synergies between SDG3 and other goals have also been recognized 18 . Despite the overlaps and conflicts among SDGs, researchers had proved that the holistic way of thinking and the network attribute of SDGs would secure better outcomes for each goal. The SDGs network may not be completely self-consistent from a mathematical perspective, but targeted direct efforts and policies are able to maximize the benefit of SDGs under complex reality constraint 19 . Crist et al. also maintained that, although the social and economic development level vary enormously across countries, policy and regulation are priority tools for each country to leverage so as to guide population change toward an ecologically and socially sustainable direction 20 . Therefore, it is quite essential to assess the effect of sustained policies on achieving SDGs.

Much have done about assessing the progress and current conditions of all 17 SDGs 21 , 22 , 23 , however, research on stable sustainable development policy for an extended period and its implementation is lacking, and the characteristics of sustainable development actions over a longtime span remain to be disclosed. The policy of the China National Sustainable Communities (CNSCs) led by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has been implemented since 1986 and has become the experiments and demonstrations of innovation-driven sustainable development 24 , 25 . The policy has been implemented by four generations of state leaders for more than 30 years, which can be regarded as sustained sustainable development actions. Through January 2020, there have been 189 sustainable communities distributed widely in eastern, central and western China, covering cities with different natural environments, resource endowments and economic levels. Therefore, studying the effect of the CNSCs policy on the achievement of SDGs will be of reference significance for the implementation of sustainable development in different countries around the world.

The effect of long-term policies could be evaluated by several quantitative modeling approaches, such as general equilibrium model 26 , difference-in-difference model 27 , and input–output model 28 , 29 . However, these methods have high data requirements, which are usually difficult to satisfy by existing statistical system of a nation or city. The text analysis (TA) is an alternative approach to extracting the insight of texts (i.e., policy documents, reports, and the literature in a particular filed) and their objectives 30 , and has been widely used in policy analyses: (1) TA is used to define a certain concept or clarify the concept’s origin, rationale, and development state 31 ; (2) the method is employed to identify specific actions in policy implementation, so as to find the critical factors or practices to policy success 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ; and (3) TA is applicable to evaluating policy performance and status quo 37 , 38 . Compared with other quantitative methods, TA has the following advantages: first, the text materials related to policy formulation and implementation are easier to obtain; second, the analysis process is simple and reversible; third, the dynamic process and details of policy implementation can be reflected, enabling policy makers to summarize useful experience.

This study applies the TA method to illustrate the construction process and achievements of CNSCs from the spatiotemporal dimension, focusing on questions about three aspects: (a) the SDGs that the sustainable communities prefer; (b) the spatiotemporal changing trend of these sustainable communities since 1986 and the sustainability of the policy; (c) the performance of sustainable communities and the effect of the CNSCs policy on achieving SDGs. To answer these questions, we applied data from the evaluation for 189 sustainable communities in 2018 by the MOST. The construction themes and attainments were extracted, sorted and mapped to the 17 SDGs and 169 targets. Then, the spatiotemporal analysis was carried out to find the relationship between the action themes and factors in politics, regions, economy, society and environment and draw some conclusions.

The distribution of sustainable communities

China constructed a total of 21 batches of 189 CNSCs from 1986 to 2015, covering 31 provinces (Fig.  1 a). The cities, districts, counties and townships accounted for 15%, 34%, 48% and 3% of the CNSCs, respectively; the number of CNSCs in eastern coastal areas was the greatest, and it was followed by the number in the central provinces, with the lowest number in the western provinces. The number of CNSCs increased significantly after 2008 (Fig.  1 b), showing that the Chinese government has fully enforced the construction of CNSCs for more than 30 years and attached more importance since 2008. The government initially established these sustainable communities in the eastern region, where the economic development pace is faster, and then they expanded into the central and western regions; now, the ratio of the number in eastern, central and western regions is 5:3:2, respectively, which reflects that China has gradually strengthened the regional equality in the process of policy implementation. In 2015, the UN convened the Development Summit and adopted the 2030 Agenda. In response, China suspended the construction of CNSCs and switched to the Innovation Demonstration Zones for Implementing the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development (IDZSDs), which were based on prefecture-level cities. After two years of planning and preparation, China identified 2 batches of 6 innovation demonstration zones in 2018 and 2019, uniformly distributed in the eastern, central and western regions, and more than half of the IDZSDs are small cities with relatively low economic level but good development experience.

The distribution and change of CNSCs and IDZSDs. ( a ) The distribution of CNSCs and IDZSDs. The data for the base map were derived from the Resource and Environment Data Cloud Platform 39 , the map was generated by ArcGIS 10.4.1 ( https://desktop.arcgis.com/zh-cn/arcmap/10.4/get-started/installation-guide/introduction.htm ), and the number in the figure legend denotes the number of CNSCs in each province. ( b ) Change in the number of CNSCs.

The selection preference of SDGs in sustainable communities

We analyzed the major themes for the sustainable communities and found that these construction themes cover 15 of the 17 SDGs (Fig.  2 ), excluding SDG5 (Gender equality) and SDG17 (Partnerships for the goals). The possible reason is that “gender equality” was written into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China as early as 1954, and China has made some progress in promoting equal access to education, employment opportunities and political participation between men and women. Therefore, gender equality is no longer a major social issue that Chinese local governments focus on. Since the reform and opening up in 1978, China has constantly enhanced external communication in economy and culture. Numerous sustainable communities established sister city relationships with foreign cities, but the partnership was often regarded as a means to achieve goals rather than construction themes. Among the 15 SDGs covered by construction themes, most were related to SDG 8 (Decent work and economic growth) and SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), showing that China has attached great importance to economic development and urban infrastructure construction in the past 30 years. The themes related to SDG 9 (Industry, innovation and infrastructure) increased rapidly after 2008, which can be attributed to the industrial structural adjustment in response to financial crises and the impact caused by natural disasters such as the Wenchuan earthquake and snow calamity. The numbers of SDG 6 (Clean water and sanitation), SDG 2 (Zero hunger), SDG 15 (Life on land), SDG 12 (Responsible consumption and production), SDG10 (Reduced inequalities) and SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy) were at a medium level, and the numbers of SDG 16 (Peace, justice and strong institutions), SDG 4 (Quality education), SDG 14 (Life below water), SDG 1 (No poverty), SDG 3 (Good health and well-being) and SDG 13 (Climate action) were at a lower level. Waage divided all 17 SDGs into three concentric layers, including well-being, infrastructure and the natural environment 40 . According to this classification, the sustainable communities preferred the themes about the infrastructure layer, which aims to provide products and services for achieving well-being (SDG 2, SDG 6, SDG 7, SDG 8, SDG 9, SDG11 and SDG 12), while the themes related to well-being itself (SDG 1, SDG 3, SDG 4, SDG 5, SDG 10 and SDG 16) were rarer. The deviant results reflected the prevalent understanding variance of the Chinese city governments regarding the conceptual scope of sustainable development. The governments believed that the meaning of sustainable development lied in the support of infrastructure rather than the direct governance of well-being-related issues. In fact, China has made great efforts in poverty alleviation, education and medical care. For example, China has worked on poverty reduction for a long time, formulating the “precision poverty alleviation” policy, with the goal of eliminating absolute poverty by 2020 through a series of actions. Nine-year compulsory education has been in place in China for more than 40 years; as of 2017, the net enrollment rate of school-age children and the gross enrollment of secondary school reached 99.9% and 100%, respectively 41 . The medical system of China has improved, and insurance coverage has stabilized at more than 95%. Moreover, the effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 also reflected the medical proficiency level of China. In the natural environment-related themes (SDG 13, SDG 14 and SDG 15), the number of SDG 15 was larger than that of SDG 13 and SDG 14, which might result from the fact that most cities are inland cities. At the same time, these numbers showed that local cities paid less attention to the concept of climate change before 2015. Actually, China has made great efforts to tackle climate change since it signed the Paris Agreement.

The number of construction themes related to different SDGs in CNSCs.

The changing trend of sustainable communities

In temporal distribution (Fig.  3 a), China has experienced four generations of state leaders since the first sustainable community was established in 1986. There were only 2 sustainable communities making attempts in health, education, city infrastructures and land environment protection under the leadership of Deng (1978–1989). During the leadership of Jiang, Hu and Xi, the number of themes related to different SDGs maintained a similar proportion. The proportion of themes in the aspect of economic growth and industrial innovation (SDG 8 and SDG 9) increased gradually, which might also indicate the reason for the constant economic level rise over 30 years. Although the proportion of infrastructure construction (SDG 11) remained at a relatively high level, it continued to decline with the change in state leaders, indicating that the status of city infrastructure construction as a local development characteristic was declining. The proportion of themes on SDG 15 and SDG 16 had an upward trend, which means that the governments strengthened the conception of inland environmental protection and law-based governance.

The proportion of themes in different periods or regions. ( a ) The proportion of themes in different periods. ( b ) The proportion of themes in different regions.

In the regional distribution (Fig.  3 b), themes on SDG 8, SDG 9 and SDG 11 had higher selection proportions in the eastern, central and western regions. In comparison, the inland central and western regions with relatively weak economic bases and ecosystems showed obvious motivation for achieving SDG 1, SDG 13 and SDG 15, while the eastern coastal region with a better economic foundation explored SDG 3, SDG 7 and SDG 14 more. Therefore, it can be seen that the conditions regarding resources, the environment and the economy had a certain effect on the priority of achieving SDGs.

The performance of sustainable communities

After the sustainable communities were set up, local governments incorporated the construction themes into their development plans and programs, carrying out related work. According to a 2018 evaluation report by MOST on the effect of 189 sustainable communities, 168 (89%) sustainable communities had fully implemented the construction work and had obtained achievements, 11 (6%) sustainable communities had failed to achieve the goals of development plans, and 10 sustainable communities (5%) were not included in the evaluation due to administrative division adjustments and other reasons, which can be regarded as invalid data. The results of the evaluation report illustrated that, as a policy mechanism for exploring the way of sustainable development, the policy of CNSCs had both successful and failed cases, and the proportion of successful cases accounted for the vast majority, which showed strong enforceability. The number of actions to achieve goals was generally the same as the number of themes (Fig.  4 ); actions on SDG 11, SDG 8 and SDG 9 were the most common, which indicated a higher consistency between the plans and actions of the CNSCs policy. Meanwhile, the number of actions related to SDGs was larger than the themes approved at the beginning, probably because of the improvement in the understanding of the sustainable development concept scope and the willingness to implement SDGs in more extensive contexts. It was noteworthy that the actions of some SDGs had a higher proportion than themes on those SDGs, such as for SDG 1. The actions toward poverty alleviation were concentrated in the sustainable communities established after 2012, corresponding to the “precision poverty alleviation” proposed in 2013.

The number of actions related to different SDGs in CNSCs.

The effect of CNSCs policy on achieving SDGs

A particular bias is that the achievement of SDGs is rooted in scientific theories, rather than political resonances. In other words, assessing the technological feasibility of SDGs is more strongly representative than the evidence of political will. Dawes discussed the effect of “science” and “policy” on achieving SDGs respectively: in SDGs network, technological solutions in an area linked to one goal can drive improvements of other goals in the system, and the “science” is itself aligned with the intrinsic and systemic effects within the network; while the “policy” accords more obviously with extrinsic effects, and the direct investment of governments or civil society can solve local issues related to specific goals 19 . Thus, the conflicts between SDGs and their associated negative impacts can be addressed by combining technology and targeted policies.

This paper focused on gauging the role of a sustained policy in achieving SDGs in China, we rated the number of actions of sustainable communities towards SDGs and compared them with the dashboard for SDG implementation in China, which was released by Sustainable Development Solution Networks (see Table 1 ). The results proved that, as a whole, the SDGs to which sustainable communities paid more attention and into which they put more effort showed a better current situation; conversely, other SDGs gained less attention, and implementation actions were performed more poorly. The differences between the number of actions and the current situation were within one grade. The reason for the differences was that the policy was led and implemented by the MOST of China, and the themes and implementation actions tended to be more science- and technology-oriented. To some extent, the number of actions can represent the input of sustainable communities to each SDG, while it may produce deviations because of less attention to the goals on human well-being. For example, education (SDG 4) was the SDG with the highest disparity in grades, as previously analyzed, possibly because the nine-year compulsory education requirement had been carried out for more than 40 years, and local governments did not realize that education also belonged to the scope of sustainable development. Additionally, attention and actions towards infrastructure construction (SDG 11) and industrial innovation (SDG 9) were at a high level, while China still faced significant challenges in achieving the two SDGs. This may result from the obvious distinctions in the infrastructure and industrialization level between the eastern and western regions, and constant input into these SDGs was still required.

Sustainable development has gone through Agenda 21 (1992), Millennium Development Goals (2000) and sustainable development goals (2015), while China has conducted experiments and practices at the governmental level since 1986. We aimed to provide China’s experience in achieving SDGs to other countries.

The policy of CNSCs has been implemented for almost 30 years, and it can be regarded as a long-term sustainable development practice of a country after the introduction of market mechanism. Therefore, the policy and its results are representative. To evaluate the effect of the CNSCs policy, this paper employed a qualitative TA method to extract information and classify themes from MOST’s reports on 174 CNSCs, and conducted statistical analyses for CNSCs’ SDGs and relevant actions. The text analytics framework developed by this paper provides an open and reversible approach to policy analysis, which substantially reduces the need for quantitative data and allows more in-depth analyses as sustainable development theory continues to evolve and more data of CNSCs become availability in the future.

More local governments have been willing to choose economic development (SDG 8) as one of the themes, which matches the national situation of China as a developing country. For countries with different levels of socio-economic development and hence having different opportunities and constraints, their sustainable development priorities vary 12 . As discussed in Holden et al. (2017), some countries may satisfy the imperatives of respecting environmental limits and ensuring social equity, but fail to meet human basic need. This makes extreme poverty eradication and human capacities enhancement priorities of their policy management. As a result, policies and institutions that promote economic growth are essential for these countries’ capacity building 14 . The preference of theme selection for different regions implied that areas with solid economic foundations focused more on the SDGs requiring high technologies and massive investment, such as health, well-being and sustainable energy. To some extent, it suggested that a better economic foundation can provide stronger support for cities to solve social and environmental problems, and economic growth is not the opposite of sustainable development. Under the leadership of the Chinese government with Xi at its core, more sustainable communities chose inclusive economic growth, infrastructure, and innovation (SDG 8 and SDG 9) as construction themes, and these themes have regional or even global spillover effects. Corresponding national development strategies, such as the “Belt and Road Initiative” and “Made in China 2025”, will help China to promote the achievement of SDGs on regional and global scales, generalizing its excellent experience and embodying the development concept of a community with a shared future.

China prioritized economic growth in the past, and its extensive economic growth once posed environmental pressure, especially in the eastern regions. But the Chinese government has learned the lessons, and variations in the CNSCs’ themes have also reflected that the government has recognized sustainable development in a more holistic and systematic manner. In the period of Hu and Xi, although the SDGs related to basic conditions were still the largest part in the construction themes, the number of themes related to human well-being and the environment was also increasing. Enriching the connotation and scope of sustainable development requires the government to incorporate them into the national basic policy and to influence the selection of local levels from top to bottom. Since the reform and opening up (1978), the national development concept has gone through five stages: the “focus on economic construction” (1980), “emphasis on both material and spiritual civilizations” (1982), “trinity of political, economic and social construction” (1986), “construction of politics, economy, culture and society" (2005) and “five in one of economic, political, cultural, social and ecological civilization construction” (2012). These social and ecological civilization constructions in China manifest the central government’s implementation of the sustainable development concept. Policies such as precision poverty alleviation and ecological redlines and the conviction that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” reflect the country’s determination to achieve SDGs and to build a 'Beautiful China'. Economic growth underpins a prosperous society, and is thus a major cornerstone that forms the foundation of sustainable development. However, economic growth must be pursued within environmental carrying capacity. On the other hand, China has been exploring new development models in western areas with weak economic foundations and vulnerable ecological environment, such as making full use of desert areas to deploy renewable energy technologies (i.e., solar and wind farms) and build big data centers (that will be powered by renewable electricity), to achieve well-being improvement and ecological restoration simultaneously. The main purpose of the CNSCs is to make attempts and accumulate experience, and the results have demonstrated that sustained sustainable development actions can be effective under the premise of suitable goals. Generally, the more input that is given to some SDGs, the better the country will perform in those SDGs. Local governments with lower economic levels tend to prioritize the economy, infrastructure and industrialization. With the growth in the economy, the higher requirements of well-being and living conditions will force local governments to provide equal education, healthcare and political services, along with a better environment and more efficient resource exploitation. Moreover, comprehensively understanding the concept of sustainable development and incorporating it into national policies is of great importance for the country to fully achieve SDGs. The changing of theme preference has reflected the differences existing in the understanding of sustainable development of the Chinese government in different leadership periods. Due to the imperfect understanding of the scope of sustainable development in the past, the themes and actions related SDGs on human well-being, climate and environment were fewer than those related to economic development. It is worth noting that the sustainable development concept of the national government has been constantly improved with the implementation of the CNSCs policy, and the support measures for SDGs which were less concerned in the past are also increasing, the effectiveness of these support actions remains to be discussed due to the short implementation time. These conclusions can provide references for countries around the world to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and achieve SDGs.

We used a TA method to evaluate the themes and actions of sustainable communities and innovation demonstration zones. There were two main steps.

Step 1 The processing methods of mapping the construction themes and implementation actions to the SDGs

This research mainly adopted the TA method, which makes subjective interpretation of text content through a systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns. The method is widely used in social science research and includes three means 42 : (1) conventional content analysis, where the coding categories are directly derived from text information; (2) the directed approach, which uses existing research as the basis for classification; and (3) summative content analysis, conducting frequency statistics and comparison or in-depth analysis of keywords based on context. In this study, we applied the latter two means to conduct TA on the materials of sustainable communities. The specific process was carried out as follows:

Theme classification

We deeply understood the implementation measures corresponding to all 17 SDGs and 169 targets through “China’s National Plan on Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and built a corpus of thematic keywords of the construction of sustainable communities. Then, we classified the themes in batches according to the keywords (see Table 2 ).

Information extraction

We extracted the text verbatim and categorized the text on the implementation measures from the reports submitted by sustainable communities. The text and documents are large in volume and highly unstructured, placing high requirements on the subjective initiative, and it was not suitable to use keyword frequency statistics directly. Therefore, researchers read the evaluation opinions of the sustainable communities carefully and mapped the text information to 169 targets of SDGs in the “China’s National Plan on Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. One action corresponded to one SDG, and the repetitive goals were counted only once.

Discussion on classification differences

To fully overcome the subjectivity of text classification, two researchers analyzed text separately at first, and then we compared the results from the two researchers and discussed the differences with the third researcher. Finally, the classification results of themes and actions were reviewed by three experts who had experience in research related to SDGs to add missing categories, identify fuzzy theme categories and unify opinions.

In the TA, we removed 9 sustainable communities with vague themes and summarized 303 themes of 180 sustainable communities. We also removed 7 sustainable communities without submitting reports and 9 sustainable communities without specific progress, summarizing 679 actions in 174 sustainable communities. Sustainable communities would generally propose several themes and multiple actions, so the themes and actions of each sustainable community can be matched to more than one SDG.

Step 2 Rating the number of actions on SDGs in sustainable communities and the progress of implementing SDGs in China

The rules of rating the number of actions on SDGs in the sustainable communities are shown in Table 3 . The method for grading the progress of achieving SDGs in China was based on the results of the SDGs dashboard and index report issued by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solution Networks (see Table 4 ).

Data availability

Data generated or analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.

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Acknowledgements

T.W. acknowledges funding provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72074034 and No. 71871235) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2020CDJSK01PY16).

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School of Public Affairs, Chongqing University, Shapingba District, Chongqing, 400044, People’s Republic of China

Bingsheng Liu, Tao Wang, Jiaming Zhang & Mengjun Yang

The State Key Lab of Cryospheric Science, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Science, Lanzhou, 730013, Gansu, People’s Republic of China

Xiaoming Wang

School of Management Science and Engineering, Central University of Finance and Economics, Changping District, Beijing, 102206, People’s Republic of China

School of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Haidian District, Beijing, 100084, People’s Republic of China

Dongping Fang

The Administrative Center for China’s Agenda 21, Haidian District, Beijing, 100038, People’s Republic of China

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T.W. and B.L. coordinated the research team for this Perspective, designed, wrote and reviewed the paper. J.Z. contributed to the data processing and wrote and reviewed the paper. Y.C., X.W., D.F. and X.S. supported the design, and reviewed the paper, they also assessed and reviewed SDG corpus as for the Supplementary Information. M.Y. contributed to the data processing.

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Liu, B., Wang, T., Zhang, J. et al. Sustained sustainable development actions of China from 1986 to 2020. Sci Rep 11 , 8008 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87376-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87376-8

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Uneven population distribution: Case Study 1: China

The subject guide, a. china: introduction, b. china's population density.

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• To what extent can you see a connection between the wealth of provinces in China and their population density?

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• Which provinces are anomalies? Suggest reasons.
• Now use Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient to investigate the strength of the correlation between the two sets of data.
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KFC’s Radical Approach to China

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To succeed, the fast-food giant had to throw out its U.S. business model.

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Global companies face a crucial question when they enter emerging markets: How far should they go to localize their offerings? Typically they try to sell core products or services pretty much as they’ve been sold in Europe or the United States, with headquarters calling all the shots—and usually with disappointing results.

The authors, both of Harvard Business School, examined why KFC China has been able to find fertile ground in a market that is notoriously challenging for Western fast-food chains. KFC’s executives believed that the dominant logic behind the chain’s growth in the U.S.—a limited menu, small stores, and an emphasis on takeout—wouldn’t produce the kind of success they were looking for in China. KFC China offers important lessons for global executives seeking guidance in determining how much of their existing business model to keep in emerging markets—and how much to throw away.

Global companies face a critical question when they enter emerging markets: How far should they go to localize their offerings? Should they adapt existing products just enough to appeal to consumers in those markets? Or should they rethink the business model from the ground up?

• David Bell is a Harvard Business School professor and chairs its marketing unit.
• MS Mary L. Shelman is the director of the Agribusiness Program at Harvard Business School.

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Cloud in China: The outlook for 2025

After a relatively slow start, China has made rapid strides in migrating to cloud computing and now has the world’s second-largest market after the United States. China’s public cloud is expected to more than double in size in the next few years, from $32 billion in 2021 to $90 billion by 2025. 1 Data from Gartner.

To date, China’s cloud adoption has been led largely by consumer-facing companies, which need elastic, on-demand access to unlimited computing power to help them respond to huge fluctuations in customer demand. During China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival, for instance, e-commerce traffic, transactions, and gross merchandise volumes can reach up to 30 times normal daily levels. Popular live-commerce shows with real-time purchasing and audience interaction also make enormous demands on computer infrastructure. The streaming room of top influencers can have up to 100 million views and over $1 billion in presales in a single day.

About the research

For the McKinsey China Cloud Survey 2021, we surveyed 278 decision makers in enterprise IT, digital, and cloud from a wide range of sectors: IT, e-commerce, transport and logistics, education, retail, healthcare, auto, finance, real estate, hotel and restaurants, manufacturing, and industrial. The executives taking part came from local public and private companies, state-owned enterprises, and multinational corporations.

The survey was designed to gather data and generate insights in four main areas: cloud-adoption status and plans, motivation to shift to cloud, cloud purchasing factors, and challenges and capability gaps.

To be selected for the sample, companies needed to have annual revenues in excess of 1 billion renminbi, a workforce of more than 500 employees, and a digital transformation already under way or at the planning stage. The purpose of the survey was not to provide a representative view of the market but to generate indicative insights into cloud adoption in China.

Consumer-driven growth will remain an important driver of cloud adoption, but we believe the next wave of migration could be spearheaded by China’s critical industrial and manufacturing sectors. To better understand the developing cloud landscape in China, we surveyed 278 decision makers in enterprise IT, digital, and cloud from a wide range of sectors, and derived insights about where business value is likely to be created in the next few years (see sidebar, “About the research”).

Private cloud remains prominent in China’s hybrid and multicloud future

Over the next few years, the pace of China’s cloud migration will be broadly in step with the rest of the world’s, with a 19-percentage-point increase expected in IT workloads shifting to cloud between 2021 and 2025. But China differs from other countries in its high proportion of private cloud, which is expected to reach 42 percent by 2025, compared with 36 percent for public cloud. 1 “Public cloud” refers to on-demand, pay-by-use services and infrastructure offered and maintained by a cloud service provider; “private cloud” refers to self-hosted, dedicated hardware running packaged software to provide consumable services; and “traditional server” refers to self-hosted, dedicated hardware with no packaged software providing consumable services.

Only 11 percent of the companies in our survey intend to be mostly on public cloud. The remainder will continue to combine private cloud with traditional servers or use hybrid cloud , and 49 percent intend to become cloud native. Demand for private-cloud customization is very high in China, constraining scalability and profitability. Our analysis suggests that companies typically choose private cloud because they doubt their ability to configure public cloud securely, operate in a regulated sector such as financial services, or prefer to keep data in house.

Most Chinese enterprises are not keen on recurring-cost models for enterprise IT and software spending, preferring instead to make one-off or up-front payments to capitalize IT and software costs (and use up any remaining annual IT budget). As a result, cloud service providers (CSPs) seeking growth in China will need a strong value proposition in private as well as public cloud and the ability to support enterprises in managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure. They will also face the challenge of finding a scalable economics model and managing short- to medium-term economics that are likely to be less attractive than in developed markets.

When enterprises are selecting CSPs, just 19 percent intend to use a single provider, while 76 percent intend to partner with multiple CSPs. Only 5 percent believe they can build cloud themselves without external help.

The two most important sectors economically lag in cloud adoption

While sectors with numerous tech-savvy and digital-native companies, such as e-commerce and education, have shifted a significant portion of their IT workloads to the cloud, others have not—notably, the labor-intensive industrial and manufacturing sectors that contribute more than a quarter of China’s GDP . But that could quickly change given the latest national policy guidance.

In its 14th five-year plan for 2021–25, China seeks to transform the industrial and manufacturing sectors by boosting digitization and productivity to offset rising labor costs and slowing population growth. 1 The People’s Republic of China’s 14th five-year plan, covering the years 2021–2025, was passed by the Chinese parliament, the National People’s Congress, in March 2021. The plan calls for the adoption of industrial internet-platform applications to triple from 15 to 45 percent, and the digitization of management and operations to increase from 55 to 68 percent in product research and development (R&D), manufacturing execution, internal operations, maintenance services, and similar processes. As a result, the industrial sector is poised for transformation, with 32 percent of local IT workloads expected to migrate to (mostly private) cloud by 2025. Travel, transport, and logistics is expected to see the next-highest shift to cloud, at 26 percent.

Business growth is the biggest reason for migration

Our survey found that the three most important reasons for migrating to cloud were the need to scale fast to support business growth (cited by 60 percent of executives as one of their top two reasons), the need to increase IT efficiency (43 percent), and the need for high availability and resiliency (36 percent).

Notably, only 17 percent of executives said their main reason for migrating was to gain access to software as a service (SaaS). This is understandable given the size of China’s SaaS market, which was worth just $5.2 billion in 2020, a tiny fraction of the $120 billion US market. The broad adoption of SaaS applications and tools would unlock enormous opportunities for innovation and value creation, but it would require a fundamental shift in Chinese companies’ willingness to pay for software.

The biggest barrier to migration is the perceived difficulty and cost

When asked to identify their top two concerns about cloud adoption, 94 percent of survey respondents cited the cost and difficulty of migration, security, and regulatory compliance. By contrast, only 16 percent were concerned about the lack of a compelling business case.

This suggests enterprises have yet to fully appreciate cloud’s ability to improve efficiency, boost productivity, and capture business value. Clear messages about how revenues and margins can be enhanced by adopting cloud could help CSPs and technology providers convince businesses to make the shift.

Cloud leaders have more than 70 percent of their IT workloads on the cloud

Clear differences in cloud adoption have emerged between companies:

— Leaders had more than 70 percent of their IT workloads on the cloud in 2021 and expect to reach 90 percent by 2025. We subdivided them into two segments: Public-cloud leaders (16 percent of the survey sample) are typically consumer-facing enterprises that look to their CSPs mainly for technical performance and support with key accounts. Private-cloud leaders (21 percent of the sample) are typically state-owned enterprises, financial and real estate firms, or traditional manufacturing and industrial companies; they favor private-cloud and hybrid solutions because of security, regulatory, or data-compliance constraints or latency requirements, 1 Latency requirements refer to the need to minimize communication times between client requests from local devices and the CSP’s cloud infrastructure. and are therefore unlikely to move to public cloud.

— Followers (34 percent of the sample) had between 50 and 70 percent of their IT workloads hosted on the cloud in 2021, with a roughly even split between public and private cloud. Most followers are multinational corporations or relatively price-sensitive businesses. They are starting to accelerate their cloud migrations, but many are struggling with the shift to a new cloud operating model.

— Laggards (29 percent of the sample) had only 31 percent of their IT workloads on the cloud—less than half the share for leaders—in 2021. On average, two-thirds of their workloads are still hosted on traditional servers, typically because they began their digital transformation late and lack clear road maps and business support for cloud. Their share of IT workloads on the cloud is expected to rise sharply, to 60 percent by 2025, but they will still lag well behind leaders’ 90 percent. It’s worth noting that the largest relative increase in cloud adoption in the next three years is expected to come from laggards (up by 29 percentage points) and followers (20 percentage points).

In terms of public-cloud adoption, there is an enormous gap between laggards, with only 13 percent of their IT workloads on the public cloud in 2021, and public-cloud leaders, with 58 percent. This gap should persist to 2025, when the share of IT workloads on the public cloud is projected to be 72 percent for public-cloud leaders but only 24 percent for laggards.

Internal business-facing functions have the greatest gaps in cloud adoption

The aggregate numbers for China’s cloud-based IT workloads—roughly 60 percent in 2021, rising to 78 percent in 2025—mask wide variations in adoption rates between different functions and between leaders and laggards within functions. Consumer-facing functions, such as marketing and sales and service operations, have the highest average adoption rates, at 69 percent and 64 percent, respectively, while more internal functions, such as logistics, manufacturing, and risk, have the lowest. One of the largest gaps within a function is in strategy and corporate finance, where leaders average 47 percent adoption and laggards just 11 percent.

We broke these nine functions into 40 “domains,” or groups of business use cases, and found that the average cloud adoption rate in each domain varied enormously, from less than 5 percent to 60 percent. We then broke these 40 domains down across 12 industry sectors and found that the average adoption rate by domain and industry was less than 25 percent. This further demonstrates that Chinese companies still have enormous opportunities to develop, adopt, and scale use cases that have a direct impact on revenues and margins.

Examples of promising domains with low adoption rates include:

— Marketing and sales: customer-retention management, pricing and promotions, personalization, omnichannel fulfillment

— Service operations: contact-center automation, chatbots, asset tracking and maintenance

— Product development: process design R&D

— Supply chain: sales and parts forecasting, store operations, inventory and parts optimization, procurement, spend analytics

— Manufacturing: digital twins and 3-D modeling simulations, yield and throughput optimization, predictive maintenance

— Human resources: performance management, optimization of workforce deployment, sales force execution

Key industry-specific use cases with direct business impact offer the greatest potential for cloud pull-through

The opportunities to improve revenue or EBITDA through industry-specific use cases will be the most powerful factor in persuading lagging sectors and businesses to adopt cloud. Our experience is that cloud adoption alone is not enough to unlock business value. Instead, enterprises need to reimagine how business models and processes can be improved through applications and solutions that take advantage of cloud. These use cases are likely to be developed and implemented through partnerships between CSPs, technology providers, and the enterprises themselves.

One example is the digital twins 1 Digital twins virtually replicate real-world assets for use in simulations. used to simulate, test, and validate new manufacturing processes before they are put into full-scale production. By using digital twins, a supplier of machinery, robotics, or automated systems can typically reduce R&D costs by 5 to 10 percent in product manufacturing and 40 to 50 percent in process design. Yet only about a fifth of the manufacturing and automotive companies in our survey—and none of the industrial companies—had adopted digital twins or other forms of cloud-based simulation in product development.

Top Chinese CSPs lead the market, but global CSPs still have substantial value pools to address

In our survey, 70 percent of respondents expressed a strong preference for Chinese cloud service providers. That leaves 30 percent of the market that could be realistically addressed by global CSPs, comprising the 10 percent of companies that strongly prefer global CSPs plus the 20 percent that are open to CSPs from any region.

When assessing CSPs, the top three buying factors for Chinese enterprises are cybersecurity and data compliance, performance and technical requirements, and key account and operations support. Other significant factors include domain-specific solutions and value for money. The leading Chinese CSPs are perceived to be at least twice as strong as other competitors across almost all key buying factors.

Although global CSPs are not the preferred choice for most Chinese companies, roughly 30 percent of companies are open to using global providers, which translates into a total addressable cloud market of $30 billion to $70 billion by 2025. Our survey indicates that public cloud could account for 45 percent of this total addressable market, similar in size to the entire public-cloud market in Germany—the fifth largest in the world at $25 billion.

What enterprises and CSPs can do to accelerate cloud journeys

Businesses wanting to accelerate their shift to cloud and capture some of the more than $1 trillion of value at stake need to ensure that they take the right approach and put key enablers in place. Following are some of the most important steps:

• Target investments at business domains where cloud can enable revenue and margin improvements. In our experience, carefully selecting applications within a specific domain to move to the cloud and sequencing these moves thoughtfully delivers far more business benefit than a wholesale “lift and shift” approach aimed at cutting IT costs. Applications should be aligned to specific business cases and quantifiable business value so they can be prioritized and tracked.
• Set up a governance model that facilitates collaboration between IT and the business. To manage the strategy and governance of their cloud migration, successful companies create a business-execution office comprising business, finance, and technology leaders, who are jointly responsible for delivering the migration and defining business value, key performance indicators (KPIs), migration paths, economic models, and prioritization criteria. The business-execution office is often supplemented by a cloud center of excellence made up of engineers, architects, and product designers. Their role is to design the foundational reference architecture, translate migration scenarios into deployable archetypes, integrate modern ways of working into a cloud-native operating model, facilitate rapid adoption across the business, and champion site-reliability engineering to optimize the cloud’s operational efficiency.
• Build a cloud-native operating model to unify and standardize infrastructure management and technology delivery. To prevent legacy IT processes, manual interventions, and multiple handoffs from impairing migration speed and quality, successful companies redesign the entire technology-delivery process. They reengineer every step—from architecture design and infrastructure-resource provisioning, through application development, testing, and deployment, to production, monitoring, and incident handling. They also ensure that the new processes are highly automated and have extensive self-service functionalities to provide a seamless developer experience.

For their part, global CSPs seeking success in the Chinese market could target sectors where they can bring global best practices to bear and offer a suite of technology solutions to accelerate business value creation. They could help clients to define their cloud target state, focus on how to create value, plan a clear migration route with separate paths for legacy and modern applications, manage a hybrid model during the transition, and support private- and public-cloud operations thereafter. Along with local CSPs, system integrators, ecosystem technology providers, and coaching and change-management firms, they will also participate in cloud ecosystems to build technology solutions that improve outcomes for Chinese businesses.

China’s cloud migration is now entering its second wave. Adoption in the next few years will be driven by the introduction of an array of industry-specific solutions to improve business performance.

Kai Shen is a partner in McKinsey’s Shenzhen office, Anand Swaminathan is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, Xiaoxiao Tong is an expert in the Shanghai office, and Kevin Wei Wang is a senior partner in the Hong Kong office.

The authors wish to thank Xinghong Fang, Jayne Giemzo, Chris Thomas, Joanna Wu, Tiff Wu, and Jeff Yang for their contributions to this article.

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CRITIC-PROMETHEE II-Based Evaluation of Smart Community Services: A Case Study of Shenzhen, China

• Published: 04 June 2024

Cite this article

• Tiantian Gu 1 ,
• Enyang Hao 1 ,
• Chenyang Wang 1 ,
• Shiyao Zhu 2 &
• Yongchao Wang 1  

In the process of constructing smart communities, smart community services are frequently emphasized as a crucial aspect that directly impacts the residents’ quality of life. While numerous studies focus on developing advanced technologies to modernize smart community services, little research evaluates the level of smart community services. Therefore, this paper develops an evaluation method for smart community services to increase the effectiveness of developing smart community services. Through a systematic literature review and expert interviews, an evaluation indicator system comprising 27 indicators across five dimensions for evaluating smart community services was developed. Subsequently, a novel hybrid evaluation method integrating CRITIC and PROMETHEE II approaches was established and employed to analyze the smart community service levels, highlighting that the Yucun community exhibited the highest level of smart services among the five surveyed communities. A sensitivity analysis further validated the robustness of evaluation results, ensuring the reliability of the decision-making process. Finally, several recommendations have been put forward to promote the development of smart community services, including drawing on advanced experience from demonstration communities, establishing close collaboration with the public sectors, and enriching service content to meet the needs of different residents by utilizing new technologies. This study not only proposes a comprehensive evaluation method that enriches the smart community services knowledge system but also provides cost-effective guidance for their sustainable development.

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Data Availability

The original data come from the field survey conducted in smart communities. We confirm that the data and method used in the research are proprietary, and the derived data supporting the findings of this study are available from the first author on request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors hereby express their special gratitude to all the respondents who presented the needed data with great patience, as well as the surveyors and interviewers who did their best in terms of data collection.

This research paper is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.72104233) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No.2023M743767).

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Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points

By Alina Chan

Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

Here’s what we now know:

1 The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

• At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengli.
• Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live r oughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

Large cities

Mine in Yunnan province

Cave in Laos

South China Sea

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2

were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

philippines

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found

in southwestern China and Laos.

Sources: Sarah Temmam et al., Nature; SimpleMaps

Note: Cities shown have a population of at least 200,000.

There are hundreds of large cities in China and Southeast Asia.

There are hundreds of large cities in China

and Southeast Asia.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away,

in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan,

home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

• Even at hot spots where these viruses exist naturally near the cave bats of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the scientists argued, as recently as 2019 , that bat coronavirus spillover into humans is rare .
• When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory , saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
• The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire . Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

2 The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

• Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals , as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
• The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious : Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
• By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started , when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
• In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse , which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
• Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. T he Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States . However, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

The Wuhan lab ran risky experiments to learn about how SARS-like viruses might infect humans.

1. Collect SARS-like viruses from bats and other wild animals, as well as from people exposed to them.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of human cells.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of

human cells.

In Defuse, the scientists proposed to add a furin cleavage site to the spike protein.

3. Create new coronaviruses by inserting spike proteins or other features that could make the viruses more infectious in humans.

4. Infect human cells, civets and humanized mice with the new coronaviruses, to determine how dangerous they might be.

• While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
• Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
• When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
• Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse. In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
• Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him . Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
• In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military . In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

3 The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

• Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions .

In the United States, virologists generally use stricter Biosafety Level 3 protocols when working with SARS-like viruses.

Biosafety cabinets prevent

viral particles from escaping.

Viral particles

Personal respirators provide

a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

DIRECT CONTACT

Gloves prevent skin contact.

Disposable wraparound

gowns cover much of the rest of the body.

Personal respirators provide a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

Disposable wraparound gowns

cover much of the rest of the body.

Note: ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

The Wuhan lab had been regularly working with SARS-like viruses under Biosafety Level 2 conditions, which could not prevent a highly infectious virus like SARS-CoV-2 from escaping.

Some work is done in the open air, and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities

for contamination.

Some work is done in the open air,

and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities for contamination.

• In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice . Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafet y levels , including BSL-2.
• Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping . Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels , and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
• An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.” Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak : “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
• SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
• One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 . One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick .

4 The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

• In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed. To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
• A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019. More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
• Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

An analysis of SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree shows how the virus evolved as it started to spread through humans.

SARS-COV-2 Viruses closest

to bat coronaviruses

more mutations

Source: Lv et al., Virus Evolution (2024) , as reproduced by Jesse Bloom

The viruses that infected people linked to the market were most likely not the earliest form of the virus that started the pandemic.

• Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

5 Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals.

Infected animals

Earliest known

cases exposed to

live animals

Antibody evidence

of animals and

animal traders having

been infected

Ancestral variants

of the virus found in

Documented trade

of host animals

between the area

where bats carry

closely related viruses

and the outbreak site

Infected animals found

Earliest known cases exposed to live animals

Antibody evidence of animals and animal

traders having been infected

Ancestral variants of the virus found in animals

Documented trade of host animals

between the area where bats carry closely

related viruses and the outbreak site

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing , more than four years after the virus emerged.

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing ,

more than four years after the virus emerged.

• Despite the intense search trained on the animal trade and people linked to the market, investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
• Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade . For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill. No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
• With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species . Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections. In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals . The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them . Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics .

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic. Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

More on how the pandemic may have started

Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Even if the coronavirus did not emerge from a lab, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

By Zeynep Tufekci

Why Does Bad Science on Covid’s Origin Get Hyped?

If the raccoon dog was a smoking gun, it fired blanks.

By David Wallace-Wells

A Plea for Making Virus Research Safer

A way forward for lab safety.

By Jesse Bloom

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Alina Chan ( @ayjchan ) is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “ Viral : The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” She was a member of the Pathogens Project , which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organized to generate new thinking on responsible, high-risk pathogen research.

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