Henry Huiyao Wang: Key lessons from China’s ascent over the past 25 years

CCG's President says "The country’s rise was shaped less by a single turning point than by its commitment to long-term planning, meritocracy and global engagement."

The following is the latest opinion of Henry Huiyao Wang in his South China Morning Post column.

Few developments over the past quarter century have been as consequential or widely debated as China’s ascent to global prominence as the vanguard of a rising Global South. To understand this change, we must look not only at outcomes but at the underlying drivers that made them possible.

China’s development over the last 25 years did not occur by accident. It was not the result of any single policy. Rather, it was the cumulative product of farsighted design and vision as well as an evolving relationship between state guidance and market dynamism.

In hindsight, we can definitively say that this period represents the most sustained development effort in history, one that saw China responsible for most of the world’s poverty reduction and which brought the country forward to its century in the sun.

At the centre of this story is China’s system of meritocratic governance. From top to bottom, public servants are seen not just as administrators but as chief executives of complex economic systems. Their promotions are premised not on public speaking and cheery promises but on tangible outcomes in growth, job creation, infrastructure development, social stability and environmental and technological progress.

The public sector has consistently recruited driven individuals while also tracking and rewarding success, with mayors and provincial leaders hoping to make the jump into a national government career by acting as a sort of public sector CEO. This administrative model incentivises experimentation and accountability at the local level while allowing successful practices to be scaled nationally.

Meanwhile, learning does not stop upon promotion. China’s public sector engages in regular study sessions, policy briefings, institutional training and engagement with scholars and practitioners to deepen understanding and strengthen outcomes. Over time, this resulted in officials with deep experience in managing cities, industries and large populations, which was extremely valuable as China urbanised and industrialised at unprecedented speed.

Building upon a motivated public sector, China’s political development has followed a path distinct from Western electoral models, emphasising consultative democracy, technological governance and data-driven decision-making. Public opinion surveys, grass-root consultations, pilot programmes and digital feedback mechanisms inform policy design and implementation. In this sense, China operates within a pluralistic environment of ideas and scrutiny.

Meanwhile, China lives in a world of democracies and has become one of the most closely observed societies in the world, with the United States and the European Union often taking on the role of the opposition. This has also encouraged reflection, adaptation and reform. China’s governance system has evolved not in isolation, but in continuous dialogue with itself, global norms and external pressures.

China’s commitment to long-term planning goes hand in hand with meritocracy and consultative democracy. Five-year plan after five-year plan, China has maintained policy continuity across political cycles, providing predictability for its hybrid economy with businesses, investors and local governments adjusting based on public feedback and the reality on the ground.

This adaptive consistency enabled the formation of a virtuous cycle: the government offers stability, strategic direction and positive incentives, while market forces generate innovation, efficiency and competition.

Rather than choosing between state control and free markets, China refined a hybrid model where state-owned enterprises, a vast private sector and multinational corporations all coexist. A 2022 report noted that foreign-invested enterprises alone employed roughly 40 million people in China and accounted for around 40 per cent of the country’s total imports and exports.

Meanwhile, China’s large population and deep wells of talent have become a strategic advantage. In 2023, more than 250 million Chinese citizens held university degrees, with an estimated 12.2 million graduates joining their ranks in 2025 alone.

Massive investment in education, vocational training and higher learning transformed demographic scale into a vast and increasingly skilled talent pool. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and skilled workers emerged in great numbers, supporting rapid industrial upgrading and technological advancement.

Finally, there is the role of the Chinese diaspora. In the early stages of reform and opening up, overseas Chinese communities provided capital, managerial expertise and international connections at a time when China’s access to global markets was still limited. Over time, these ties evolved into broader people-to-people exchanges, enabling trade, investment, education and cultural understanding, with the diaspora helping embed China within global networks.

Another defining moment was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

For China, WTO membership was about much more than trade; it was a commitment to engage. China has become a central pillar of global growth, a major trading partner to over 140 countries and regions and an active participant in international institutions. It embraced globalisation and multilateral frameworks even as those systems themselves came under strain.

China’s future will not be a simple extension of its past. Growth will be more measured, challenges more complex and expectations higher. For as far as China has come, there are still issues. Domestic consumption is depressed, local government debt remains high and the changing nature of labour has not yet settled.

However, the same underlying strengths that have brought China this far remain: governance capacity, long-term planning, human capital, openness to reform and a willingness to engage the world. The lesson of the past 25 years is not that China followed a perfect model, but that development requires coherence, adaptability and farsighted patience.

Understanding China’s rise through its own experience does not require agreement with every policy choice, but in an era of fragmentation and uncertainty, China’s rise shows the power of global networks and good governance.

Wang Huiyao is the founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank.