On the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, British economist John Ross, senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, reflects on what he considers the Party's most extraordinary achievement: its ability to adapt while maintaining a clear direction over more than a century.
For Ross, the CPC's greatest achievement is not any single milestone but the journey as a whole. "The CPC made a promise to the Chinese people: if you adopt our policies and our methods, we will rejuvenate China from the terrible situation in which it found itself in 1921 to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," he reflects. "And it had to go through all these stages to achieve that. That's what makes it so remarkable, achievement after achievement."
A tale of two paths
Ross is blunt about how Western powers achieved industrialization. "The Western economies became industrialized by looting the world. Let's call it by its right name," he says. "The British started the first industrial revolution in Britain from the 1760s. What was this financed by? It was financed by the conquest of India. It was financed by the transatlantic slave trade."
Historical research has linked Britain's industrial expansion to profits from the transatlantic slave trade and the East India Company's exploitation of Bengal, where it began collecting taxes in 1757.
"If you look at the United States, what were the preconditions for its industry and its growth?" Ross asks. "It was, one, genocide, that is, the systematic elimination of the Native American population, and slavery. These were the conditions." France, too, he notes, built its wealth through the conquest of large parts of Africa. "Their industrialization was achieved through the looting of resources, either by military conquests or economic exploitation, or more usually both, of the rest of the world."
Ross acknowledges that a handful of other countries have achieved industrialization without direct colonization, but at the cost of their national independence. South Korea, he points out, developed peacefully, but "it wasn't nationally independent. It was entirely dependent on the United States, by permission of other countries." For a country of China's size and history, that model of externally dependent industrialization has never been viable. China could not develop by looting or exploiting other countries even if it had wanted to; the colonial empires that enabled such extraction had been overthrown. And it has not needed to.
China, Ross argues, is the first major country to have achieved independent development through peaceful industrialization. Its path did not require external conquest, colonial extraction, or the subjugation of other peoples. "The conditions to create that were not peaceful. There had to be a revolution, a civil war," he says. "But once that period of revolution was over, the development took place peacefully. This is absolutely unique in such a major country in human history." In this sense, China's experience represents something new: a large nation rising without repeating the violent patterns that defined earlier industrial powers.
Stability in contrast
Ross draws a sharp contrast with the growing political instability in Western democracies. "It has to have a situation in which the economy is growing and everybody has benefited from it," he says of what sustains political stability. The United States, despite GDP growth, has seen real wages fall under recent administrations, leading to social tensions and the rejection of incumbents. "It is not enough to have abstract economic growth. It's a necessary condition. But it's not enough if the population doesn't benefit from it."
He points to Britain as an even more striking example. "The instability of Britain, the famous six prime ministers in 10 years," Ross says, "it's because basically people are voting against the government. They're not even particularly voting for anybody in some cases."
Since 2016, the UK has seen a revolving door of prime ministers: Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and Starmer. As Ross pointed out, six prime ministers have held office in just one decade. Asked about Andy Burnham as a possible successor, Ross predicted that Burnham would not fare any better "because he's not prepared to change the underlying policies."
By contrast, Ross points to China's record of rising real wages and rural incomes, ensuring that the gains of growth are widely shared. "That's what maintains the support of the CPC," he says. "It guarantees that it is able to maintain the increases in the living standards of the population."
Ross rejects the framing of China's rise as a challenge to the existing order. "China didn't develop to challenge anybody. It developed to solve the problems of its own people," he insists. "China had to achieve the goals of national independence, national security, the overcoming of feudalism, and the abolition of landlordism. It then had to industrialize. It then had to develop technology."
He points to the broader significance: "China's national development and China's national rejuvenation coincide with the general interests of humanity." In his view, China's success represents the greatest contribution to human rights in the world today, "the single biggest step forward that can be taken by humanity as a whole."
From poverty to prosperity
The contrast with China could not be starker. When the CPC was founded in 1921, Ross says, "China was in the worst period in its history," ravaged by foreign invasions and civil war. By 1949, he notes, "China was almost the poorest country in the world," with only 10 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, recording lower per capita GDP.
Yet in the decades since, the transformation has been unprecedented. Between 1978 and 2025, China's GDP grew at an average annual rate of about 9.2%, far outpacing the global average of about 3.1%. By 2025, China's GDP had reached 140.19 trillion yuan, about $19.8 trillion.
In terms of poverty reduction, the World Bank estimates that China lifted about 800 million people out of poverty between 1980 and 2020, accounting for roughly 75% of global poverty reduction during that period.
Ross points to what comes next. "At the present time, only 16% of the world's population lives in countries which are high income by World Bank standards," he says. "But China is 18% of the world's population. That means that when it achieves that, which will be in one or two years, China will have lifted more people to the advantage of a high-income economy than all other countries in history put together."
With per capita GDP reaching about $14,000 in 2025, China is now at the threshold of high-income status.
Ross emphasizes that China's rise is not merely about scale; it is about quality. "China has now become the technological leader in EVs, renewable energy, large parts of telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and areas of AI," he says. "No developing country has ever done that." This is the first time a developing economy has achieved technological leadership across multiple industries.
The foundation for this, he argues, is China's commitment to research and development. According to the latest data, China's R&D expenditure accounted for 2.68% of GDP in 2024, surpassing the EU average of 2.2% and approaching the OECD average of 2.70%. Total R&D spending exceeded 3.6 trillion yuan in 2024, ranking second in the world.
Reporter: Guo Zedong
Video: Guo Hongda
Cover: Lai Meiya, Guo Hongda
Video capture: Guo Zedong
