Summary
At the Cop29 climate talks, delegates from poorer nations argue that China and India should no longer be classified as developing countries due to their economic growth and ability to contribute to climate finance.
They believe that these countries should take on additional responsibility for providing financial assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable nations.
However, China and India reject these suggestions, citing their lower per capita incomes and historic emissions.
I think its critical is realize the outward appearance of “development” is not a true state of a country, but usually a sign of huge wealth disparity between the richest and poorest. India certainly is a victim of this where there are essentially two societies within the country. I’m not sure of China since no news coming from can be considered trustworthy.
In fact, the “developing country” tag is usually used for marketing to attract investment.
I’ve spent months travelling all over China.
It’s got amazing infrastructure everywhere and more going up everywhere. Streets are clean. People are healthy. No beggars. Certainly not “developing country” in the sense that Laos or Cambodia are “developing country”.
Seems like a binary distinction between developed and developing is too clunky. We need at least 3 categories, maybe 4.
That’s very interesting, thank you. I’d heard about Chinas progress but GDPs & mega projects aside, its good to know regular people are doing better too.
However, I’d argue we need fewer categories, if at all. Developed & Under-developed, either you’re doing well or not. Keeping it simple might make it actionable: you need hit certain basic metrics to be considered developed.
“No beggars”, yeah because they get shipped away. China is nothing if not very careful on how it presents an image to the world. Let’s look at the metric of “can you drink the tap water” if we’re picking random metrics. By that metric, no, China is not developed.
China is the best in the world when it comes to window dressing. They still have a lot of rural poverty.
For sure it’s a scale and it should be one that goes down not just up. Would be great for everyone to be honest on this but its anything but honest especially within