The ‘China model’ is not a model for Pakistan to replicate

Recently, one increasingly hears in policy circles in Islamabad that Pakistan is emulating the “China model.” The ambition is admirable, but slogans are poor substitutes for understanding. If Pakistan wishes to emulate China’s success, it must first reckon with what China actually did, and did not do.

Consider the scale of China’s achievement. In 1990, according to the World Bank, nearly two-thirds of China’s population lived in extreme poverty. By 2022, that figure had fallen to effectively zero by international poverty standards. No country in history has lifted so many people, more than 800 million, out of extreme deprivation in so short a time. This was not a statistical sleight of hand. It was a social transformation visible in longer life expectancy, improved education, rapid urbanization and the expansion of a substantial middle class.

The economic ascent is equally striking. In 1990, China’s GDP was smaller than Italy’s. Today it is the world’s second-largest economy, having overtaken Japan in 2010. Per capita income has risen 40-fold, from roughly $300 in 1990 to over $12,000 in current dollars. Chinese universities now feature prominently in global rankings, and the country produces more STEM graduates annually than the United States and Europe combined. Its firms dominate manufacturing supply chains and are increasingly competitive in advanced technologies.

This is, by any reasonable standard, remarkable governance.

If one seeks a contemporary example of capability building, consider Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. 

Javed Hassan

Yet China’s trajectory was neither linear nor preordained. The catastrophes of the Maoist era remain a stark warning. The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, produced one of the worst famines in human history. Tens of millions died. The Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, tore through institutions, shuttered universities and devastated an entire generation of intellectuals. A decade of ideological fervor left the country economically weakened and socially scarred.

The transformation that followed did not emerge from prophetic certainty. It began in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping, whose contribution lay not in drafting a grand blueprint but in permitting experimentation. Reform was incremental and often bottom up.

Farmers in Anhui dismantled collective farming through the household responsibility system before Beijing formally endorsed it. Township and village enterprises operated in institutional grey zones. Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen were established as policy laboratories.

Deng’s oft-quoted remark about black and white cats captured the governing ethos. Pragmatism, not prophecy, defined the reform era. Local initiatives were tolerated first and formalized later. Failure was contained; success was scaled up. The Chinese state learned by doing, a trait sometimes obscured by portrayals of an omniscient center issuing flawless directives.

Equally misunderstood is the nature of political authority in China. The Chinese Communist Party continuously seeks legitimacy. Economic performance has been central, but so too have nationalism, organizational discipline and structured consultation within party channels. Recruitment and promotion are formally meritocratic and subject to evaluation. Policy debates, while bounded, occur within party institutions, academia, and increasingly on social media. At its core, the governance structure recognizes that authority must work to sustain consent.

Strikingly, few in Beijing claim that China offers a universal export model. Officials emphasize historical circumstance and national specificity. They speak of socialism with Chinese characteristics, not a template for others. It is often outsiders who are most eager to universalize the experience.

Here the work of Ricardo Hausmann is instructive. Development, he argues, rests on the accumulation of productive capabilities, the tacit knowledge embedded in firms, workers and institutions. Such capabilities are context-specific. They cannot simply be imported wholesale. Countries grow by discovering what they can do well given their endowments and constraints, and by gradually expanding that frontier.

The search for a single model is therefore misguided. South Korea’s path differed from China’s; Vietnam’s differs from both. Each navigated distinct political bargains and institutional constraints. Pakistan’s binding constraints, fiscal fragility, energy insecurity and elite capture, are not identical to China’s in 1978.

If one seeks a contemporary example of capability building, consider Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. The kingdom has invested heavily in logistics, tourism, renewable energy and entertainment. Female labor force participation has risen markedly. Regulatory reforms have eased business formation. Yet the effort has encountered friction. Mega-projects have raised questions of sequencing, cost and absorptive capacity. Oil revenues remain central to fiscal stability. The process is ambitious and uneven, yet adaptive, much as China’s early reforms were.

The lesson is not that Pakistan should mimic Saudi Arabia any more than it should replicate China. The deeper principle is that transformation requires disciplined experimentation, institutional learning, and sustained political commitment. It requires tolerating mistakes without allowing them to become systemic failures. And it requires a governance system that prioritizes long-term capability building over short-term patronage.

China’s rise demonstrates that even a vast, poor country with daunting initial conditions can change within a generation. It also reminds us that catastrophe is possible when ideology overwhelms feedback. The so-called China model is not a script to be photocopied. It is a story of adaptation by a state that stumbled, recalibrated and learned.

Pakistan does not need to import a model. It needs to cultivate its own, grounded in its geography, its institutions and the aspirations of its people.

– Javed Hassan has worked in senior executive positions both in the profit and non-profit sector in Pakistan and internationally. He was Senior Visiting fellow at Fudan University, Shanghai.

X: @javedhassan