How Far Has China Gone Toward "Exceeding the UK?"

"Exceeding the UK, catching the USA" was apparently a slogan of industrial development in China during the Maoist era.

Where "exceeding the UK" in manufacturing was concerned China would seem to have done that by the end of the 1970s--in the aggregate. In per capita terms the UK, with a population about one-seventeenth of China's at the time, was still the far greater producer.

However, as might be expected given China's rapid growth as a manufacturing power (and Britain's troubles in this era, worsened by the course the country has taken since the Thatcher era, with the trend especially bad since the Great Recession), has seen it close the gap in per capita terms as well.

Back in 2018 it appeared that China's per capita manufacturing value added equaled about 70 percent of Britain's. Checking the most recent figures I found that in 2022 China's per capita value added in that area was 93 percent that of Britain ($3600 vs. $3900 in current dollars).

At that rate it is likely that within the mid-2020s China will catch up Britain in per capita terms. One may add that it will catch up France (whose own process of deindustrialization has left it in about the same place) as well.

In doing so China, which has long ago left well behind even the more advanced of the developing countries such as Mexico, Turkey and Thailand, or even a Malaysia, when judged by this metric, will be on par with the bottom of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized nations. A significant testament to the distance that China has traveled developmentally, it is also a testament to the decline of some of the older industrial powers, and the shifting of the distribution of the world's industrial and economic power in the process.