MOSCOW, February 14. /TASS/. The Chinese authorities are restructuring the economy of their state, focusing on the development of high-tech industries and improving the education of the population, Alexey Maslov, orientalist, head of the Institute of Asian and African Countries at the Moscow State University, said in an interview with TASS.
"In China, the very model of economic development has changed. <...> Around 2015-2016, the country began to gradually rebuild this model, moving from the status of a "world factory of everything" to a "factory of technology", developing the production of highly capitalized, high-tech products. As the consequence [we see] the rise of corporations such as Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo," Maslov said.
In his opinion, the ongoing global changes in the Chinese economy also indicate the growth of the middle class of this country.
Now this is at least 400-450 million people. The quality of the workforce in China has also changed: it has become more intellectual. <...> China, apparently, has decided to get out of this situation (population decline - TASS), not by stimulating a new increase in the birth rate, but by focusing on the quality of its population. In simple words, to manage large robotic enterprises that are being created in China, you do not need many people, but those who work there must be well educated," the scholar said.
Maslov believes that China's population will decline until 2035 and will drop from the current 1.4 billion to just above 1 billion inhabitants. However, levels of prosperity and urbanization will continue to rise. "Today, the level of urbanization in China has reached 65%, although back in the days of Deng Xiaoping (from the late 1970s to the early 1990s - TASS) it was only 20%," the expert said.