Second Assignment - Essay Example

Teacher Wall Street Journal Opinion Article China is certainly a country of interest. While America has long been the most prosperous and productive country on Earth, it seems that other countries have quickly been catching up, creating a competitive environment that spurred economic growth around the globe. Given this knowledge, I find the recent article in the Wall Street Journal detailing the reality that China has lowered its growth estimate to a staggering 7 percent to be particularly telling.

This article points out the truth that China’s economy has been growing for much of the last decade at rates that were seemingly out of control, ushering in a completely new middles class within and throughout the most populous country in the world. This bought about the recent comments made by Li Keqiang, the Chinese Premier, at the recent opening of the National People’s Congress in China on March 5. Lowering the economic growth forecast to 7% speaks to a ‘new normal’ of more sustained, but slower, growth throughout China (Magnier, 2015).

Given this, however, my opinion is that China is still growing at a rate that far exceeds most countries in the world and that they are well position on the economic front to continue its rise to possible world domination in the long term. To be honest, it is quite staggering to consider that the current growth rate of 7.4% is the lowest it has been in roughly 25 years. While the economy is strong, however, there are now concerns that unemployment and social unrest may begin to creep into an otherwise and generally peaceful Chinese society.

This speaks to the reality that the global population boom is leading to a lack of resources, both natural and physical. Nations such as China simply have too many people to truly sustain meaningful and lasting employment options. Unemployment leads to less spending, which over time does slow down economic growth (Che, 2013). We saw the same thing occur in the United States following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. While China weathered that storm quite nicely, it now appears that they are poised for a downturn of their own, even though certain benchmark indicators are still showing as being largely positive.

In essence, what the nations of the world need is long term growth opportunities that truly benefit the masses. In China, as elsewhere, the growing disparity between the wealthy and lower classes is staggering. While the world keeps adding many individuals every years whose net work is in excess of the 1 billion dollars, the number of poor among us continues to increase. In a world of excess, this simply should not occur. Even within China, where the rate of growth is far superior to much of the rest of the world, there is still great difficulty achieving an equal distribution of resources (Fan, 2012).

Rather than focusing only on issues of economic growth and prosperity for the echelon in society, may we turn back our focus to ensuring that the basic needs of every human on the planet is met first. Works CitedChe, Y. “Multinationals, Institutions, and Economic Growth in China.” Asian Economic Journal, 27.1 (2013): 1-16.Fan, R. “Resource Abundance and Economic Growth in China.” China Economic Review, 23.3 (2012): 704-719.Magnier, Mark. “China Lowers Growth Target to About 7%.” Wall Street Journal, 5 Mar. 2015. Web. 05 Mar. 2015.