Toward shared prosperity

Successfully tackling poverty is in turn a major step toward the creation of a middle class, in line with China's stated aim of being a "moderately prosperous society" and in time for the centenary celebration of the founding of the Communist Party of China next year, Brahm said.

"So we've seen over the past couple of years a complete transformation, with China going from abject poverty to a broad-based prosperity that is shared among the population.

"This is of course compared to the American approach which over these decades is focused only on the capital markets and certain elite industries, creating a situation in which only a select 1 percent of 1 percent of the people hold all the assets and wealth and the middle class is being forced to join the ranks of the poor."

The next steps in China's development, toward a "shared prosperity", will be crucial, Brahm said.

"One of the considerations now is to actually move people back to their villages, but people are not going to go back to a village which has been left behind.

"So the new stages of investment, in infrastructure, will be to create smart, green and blue ecological cities in rural areas people can return to and have the benefits that they would have had in coastal cities, and maybe even better benefits, because these will be new cities and they'll be designed in a way which is more ecologically sensitive and more sustainable and in many ways offering higher quality of living than some of these cities which have been built up on the foundations of earlier economic models."

"Continued investment in education, focused on technology, and advancing these areas, will all be new driving factors for the economy together with technology for the environment and healthcare.

"This will of course be transformational and will provide better quality living benefits to people, creating a more overall prosperous or healthier society, a bulging middle class as opposed to a narrowing one. And this we can consider shared prosperity."

Laurence J. Brahm is an international lawyer, crisis mediator, social entrepreneur, environmental activist, author and award-winning documentary film director. He is a senior international fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, the founding director of the Himalayan Consensus Institute, and co-chair of the Silk Spice Road Dialogues convened by the United Nations Development Programme. He received the 2019 China Friendship Award on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.