We are publishing some key figures taken from Dan Wang’s book, named among the Financial Times finalists for book of the year. More information available on the author’s website
China produces “twice as much solar and wind energy as the rest of the world combined”; “As a general rule, [elle] produces between a third and a half of all manufactured goods. (p.12)
“China inaugurated the Beijing-Shanghai line in 2011, at a cost of $36 billion. During its first decade of operation, it carried 1.35 billion passengers. » (p.15)
“One in seven guitars made in the world is produced in Guizhou”, (p.30) and the region also has “45 of the world’s 100 highest bridges”, as well as “11 airports with 5 more under construction”, “8,000 kilometers of highways”, and “1,600 kilometers of railway”. “However, Guizhou has a per capita income of $8,000”, or “the income of Botswana”, an income “40% lower than the Chinese national average and [valant] less than a third of that of wealthy coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai.” (p.33)
In 2010, “only half of Guizhou’s children were in school,” which represents “the lowest rate in the country” (p.33). Despite its place as “China’s fourth poorest region”, Guizhou has “exceptional infrastructure” with a highway network “three times the length of that of New York State”. (p.34)
«In 1990, [la Chine] had half a million automobiles, compared to 435 million in 2024. » (p.34)
“Between 2003 and 2013, Shanghai added as many subway tracks as the entire New York network. » “Fifty-one Chinese cities will have metro lines in 2025, eleven of which are longer than those of New York. » (p.34)
“Shanghai loaded and unloaded more containers in 2022 than all U.S. ports combined. » (p.34)
“China has a longer high-speed rail network than the rest of the world combined”, which represents “2 billion passengers transported each year”. (p.34)
“China builds between a third and half of the world’s new wind and solar capacity each year. » “In 2025, [elle] has caught up with the United States in terms of the number of nuclear power plants: fifty-five and fifty-four, respectively. » (p.35)
“Its urban population has increased by an average of sixteen million people per year since 1978 […] : the state built each year for thirty-five years a new city the size of the metropolitan area of New York and that of Boston combined. » (p.35)
“The 4.4 billion tons of cement produced by China between 2018 and 2019 is almost equivalent to the amount of cement produced by the United States during the entire 20th century. » (p.35)
“The Chinese have experienced economic growth rates of 10% per year. » (p.35)
“The average cost of building a high-speed line [en Chine] is 20.6 million per kilometer — 40% cheaper than in Europe and 80% cheaper than in California. » (p.38)
“Nearly three-quarters of China’s population is exempt from income tax. » (p.38)
Only “10% [du] GDP is devoted to social spending, compared to 20% in the United States and 30% among the most generous European states. » (p.39)
“Only a tenth of unemployed Chinese are entitled to modest benefits. » (p.39)
“Guizhou’s income grew by nearly 10% annually between 2011 and 2022, driven in part by urbanization and tourism. However, of its eleven airports, “five have less than a dozen flights per week”. (p.42)
“The American rating agency Moody’s has ranked Tianjin and Guizhou as the two most indebted regions in China. Each of them has a debt/GDP ratio close to that of Italy. » (p.46)
“The central government has designated a dozen urban areas to concentrate investments. The five biggest […] have an average population of 110 million, almost the population of Japan. » (p.46)
“China now has the capacity to produce around sixty million cars per year – one third electric vehicles, two thirds thermal vehicles – in an annual global market of around ninety million cars sold. » (p.47)
“Although the economy grew eightfold in real terms between 1992 and 2018, the Shanghai Composite Index remains one of the worst-performing major stock indices. » (p.49)
“China today consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined. » (p.49)
“The largest dam in the world is the Three Gorges Dam, located not far from Chongqing. Its construction required the displacement of nearly 1.5 million people. » (p.50)
“The Covid pandemic has exposed the weakness of the country’s health system, which suffers from a shortage of doctors and nurses and has six times fewer intensive care beds per capita than in the United States. » (p.51)
“After a year of sluggish growth at the end of 2023, Beijing announced it would spend a whopping one trillion yuan (or $140 billion) on flood prevention and resilience to natural disasters. » (p.52)
“Never mind that China has achieved less growth for each unit of new investment since its great infrastructure frenzy of 2008.” (p.52)
“China spent 13.5% of its GDP on infrastructure investment in 2016. By comparison, the US average over the past three decades is closer to 3% per year. » (p.53)
“In 2023, while the United States added 6 gigawatts of new wind installations, China added 76.49 gigawatts. That year, Beijing built two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar power plants, four times more than all other G7 countries combined. » (p.53)
“The population of Shenzhen increased from 300,000 inhabitants in 1980 to 7 million in 2000 and 18 million in 2020.” (p.57)
“At peak times, 300,000 people work on Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus. That’s about as much as the population of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. A 2009 Chinese report estimated that the campus consumed 40 tons of rice, 20 tons of pork, 10 tons of flour and 500 barrels of cooking oil each day. As of 2020, Foxconn employed nearly 1 million workers worldwide. » (p.59)
“According to the Shenzhen Commercial Daily, [l’emploi de mauvais matériaux] resulted in an eighth of rural buildings completed in 1983 suffering major structural problems, sometimes leading to collapse. » (p.62)
“In 2012, an article published in the New York Times reported that Apple had to hire nearly 9,000 industrial engineers to build the iPhone. » This campaign which “should have taken 9 months […] will only last 2 weeks. (p.64)
“According to an analysis report, China’s contribution to the iPhone » (p.66)
“When Tesla vehicles began rolling out of the Shanghai mega-factory in 2019, BYD saw its sales fall by 11%, while its profits fell by 42%. » (p.74)
“In total, China’s manufacturing industry employs more than one hundred million people, about eight times more than the United States. » (p.75)
“According to Apple’s latest supplier report (published in 2023), 156 of its top 200 suppliers have production sites in China. Seventy-two of them are in Guangdong province, as many as in the United States, Vietnam and India combined. » (p.78)
“Manufacturing accounts for 28% of China’s GDP — much higher than Germany’s 21% and Japan’s 20%, not to mention deindustrialized economies like the US and UK (around 10% each). » (p.79)
“Exports of Chinese goods to the United States reached a near-record level in 2022, equivalent to that of 2018, the year the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese products. » (p.84)
“By 2100, China’s population is expected to halve to seven hundred million. » (p.88)
“In 2019, China recorded 15 million births; four years later, that figure fell to 9 million. This number was lower than what the United Nations described as a ‘low fertility scenario’ a few years earlier. Six million Chinese will get married in 2024, half the level of a decade ago. Chinese families now have an average of 1.0 children per woman — well below the 2.1 children needed for a stable population. » (p.88)
“When the one-child policy was implemented in 1980, urban fertility rates were already trending toward 1.0 children per couple, while fertility was closer to 2.5 in rural areas. » (p.96)
“In 1999, statistics from the Chinese Ministry of Health showed that 35% of married women of childbearing age had undergone sterilization operations. » (p.99)
“During the thirty-five years of the one-child policy, a total of 321 million abortions were performed in China — a figure close to the current population of the United States — and 108 million women and 26 million men were sterilized. In 2024, Beijing announced it would end international adoptions. By then, more than 150,000 children had been sent abroad (about half of them to the United States), almost all of them girls. » (p.104)
“China’s population has increased by 40% since the one-child policy began — with Beijing doubling in size and Shanghai quadrupling. » (p.107)
“By 2025, sales of adult diapers are expected to surpass those of baby diapers. » (p.110)
“Half of Chinese women born after 1995 said, according to the 2021 Chinese General Social Survey, that they only wanted one child, or none at all. » (p.112)
“70% of divorce applications were accepted in the mid-2000s — a rate that fell to 40.75% ten years later. » (p.112)
“The country has only six hundred hospitals officially authorized to offer fertilization services in vitro. » (p.113)
“National health directories reveal a dramatic drop in the number of vasectomies performed in China. They went from 181,000 in 2014 — at the start of Xi Jinping’s mandate — to less than 5,000 in 2019. » (p.113)
“As of mid-April 2022, road transport activity in Shanghai was still only 15% of its usual level. » (p.123)
“Economists at Nomura estimated that the tests cost 1.8% of China’s GDP in 2022.” (p.145)
“China has announced an official total of around 125,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 – scientific estimates put it at almost 2 million additional deaths. » (p.146)
“Shanghai’s foreign population was in decline even before the pandemic: between 2010 and 2020, China’s most internationalized city lost a quarter of its long-term foreign residents. » (p.152)
“Nearly 14,000 millionaires will emigrate from China in 2023 and more than 15,000 in 2024.” (p.152)
“Both the United States and Canada have reported a doubling in the number of Chinese migrants who obtained permanent resident status after making a significant investment (which can be the purchase of real estate): from 2,000 to 4,000 in Canada between 2019 and 2023, and from 3,900 to 7,500 in the United States between 2019 and 2024.” (p.153)
“US border authorities have apprehended an increasing number of Chinese nationals: from 450 in 2021, this figure increased to 38,000 in 2024. The flow decreased during the second half of 2024 due to tightened border controls. But for two years, more than a thousand Chinese nationals have tried to cross the border on foot every month. » (p.153)
“During 2021, virtually no major Chinese technology company was spared. The regulatory storm unleashed by Xi has caused Chinese companies to lose a trillion dollars in stock market value. New Oriental, one of the companies in the education sector, lost 90% of its market capitalization and subsequently laid off 60% of its employees. Alibaba went from a company worth $800 billion to one just a quarter of that size two years later. » (p.157)
“The fact that there are only a thousand American students in China is not encouraging for the future of Sino-American relations — just before the pandemic, there were ten times as many. » (p.161)
“The Chinese yuan only represents 3% of global payments. This share has hardly increased in ten years. » (p.165)
“Chinese companies have embarked on an overseas spending spiral, with $1 trillion in loans outstanding in 150 countries” (p.165)
“According to Deloitte, China has become the largest financier of African infrastructure — building one in four projects on the continent. » (p.166)
“From a strictly financial perspective, the World Bank found in 2024 that BRI projects had generated a positive, albeit small, return for Chinese lenders. » (p.166)
“By 2023, China will increase its coal burning capacity twenty-fold compared to the rest of the world combined. » (p.167)
“China has around one hundred million people working in manufacturing. » (p.169)
“By 2025, China will have more than twice as many science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) PhDs as the United States. » (p.169)
“Fewer than 1,000 scientists of Chinese origin left the United States for China in 2010; there were more than 2,500 in 2021.” (p.171)
“In 2022, China had 1,800 ships under construction, compared to 5 for the United States. » (p.176)
“In 2024, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) predicted that China would have 45% of the world’s industrial capacity by 2030.” (p.176)
