Case Study: China's Sustainable Strategies

3. What are the common grounds on which economic growth and environmental sustainability can be achieved together?
‘[There are] no great limits to growth because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder’. -US President Ronald Reagan, 1983.
It is hard to say that unlimited growth is possible or desirable, though by providing a better framework for balancing the costs and benefits of growth and for directing goods and services to ends that best reflect society’s values can be used to achieve economic growth in a more effective & a less negating way. Humans have the ability to innovate new ideas & technology advancement to enable human progress in a more environment way. We cannot entirely neglect the fact that better policy framework & human capabilities to convert high carbon level growth into low carbon level can help us achieve the desired growth in more sustainable way. Here is the case study of China which states the policies that the developing country is using to achieve a better quality of life.
3.1 Case Study: China’s Sustainable Strategies

By 2010, China had overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest single-country economy. Its GDP reached $7.3 trillion U.S. dollars (USD) in 2011, roughly half the size of that of the United States (International Monetary Fund [IMF], 2012). However, because China has the world’s largest population (1.3 billion by the end of 2011), its per capita GDP was only $5,400, which is miniscule compared to $48,000 in the United States. At present, China ranks only 88th in the world on this scale. Nevertheless, considering that the per capita GDP was merely $182 in 1979 when China initiated reform and began opening economically, many researchers and international organizations regard the extraordinary increase in economic growth as the “China