G4 China: An Overview
January 24, 2019 - 1:00-3:00 pm
Description: China emerged as one of the world’s earliest civilizations in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. Covering 3.7 million square miles, China has the most borders of any country in the world. For millennia, China’s political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning 2100 BCE. The Four Great Inventions were achieved during dynastic rule. Since then, China has expanded, fractured, and re-unified numerous times. The Chinese Civil War led to the breakup of the country in 1949, with the victorious Communist Party of China founding the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland while the losing Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, a dispute which is still unresolved today. China is officially a one-party state with a population of around 1.404 billion - the world’s most populous country. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China’s economy has been one of the world’s fastest-growing. As of 2016, it is the world’s second-largest economy by nominal GDP and largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). China is also the world’s largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. But China continues to be a challenging country to define. The dominant narrative across much of the world is of China as a rising hegemon, the next great superpower, a global economic powerhouse. But while it is true that China has experienced an astonishing transformation in its economic and geopolitical status over the past 30 years, this one-sided view of China fails to capture the complexity of the country and how it got to where it is today.
Purpose: Learn more about China’s culture, rapid development, and apparent plans for expansion
Facilitator: Colin Feng (Guest Presenter - AXA Advisors) 
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