"Nihon Keizai Shimbun" pointed out in its report that despite its many years of sustained and fast development, China's current economic development level is only equivalent to that of Japan's in the early 1960s. The Japan-led Asian "wild geese flying" economic development model has been shifted to China, with Shanghai as the pioneer of economic development.

The report of the said newspaper came to the above conclusion through a comparative analysis of a whole series of data. Under the circumstance that the "theory of Chinese economic threat" is currently heard without end in Japan, this news report shows the large gap between Chinese and Japanese economies.

The report noted China's per-capita GDP averaged US$855 in 2000, equivalent only to Japan's 1964 level; the rapidly growing per-capita annual power consumption, resulted from the fast popularization of household electrical appliances, is approaching Japan's 1960 level; China's male and female average life span, and the infant mortality rate, which both represent the nutrition condition and medical care level, are same as Japan's 1965 and 1960 levels respectively.

Last year, Japan's Trade White Paper noted for the first time that China's development had caused the collapse of the Asian "wild geese flying" model. However, the report quoted Guan Zhixiong, a researcher with Japan's economic industry research institute, as saying that the "wild geese flying" model has been shifted to China. Like Asian countries and regions following closely Japan's "wild geese flying" development, China has formed a Shanghai-led "wild geese flying" model of development from the coastal areas to the inland.

The report compared the Chinese and Japanese economies to show the gap between the two in the form of a table. In 2000. China's GDP was only one-fourth of Japan's, its per-capita GDP, one-44th, and its per-capita power consumption, one-sixth of Japan's.

( January 11, 2002)