2F CID Group 2

During the CID lesson last week, I learnt more about China's and Singapore's economic growth. China's economy has been being boosted because China is an evolving country and is growing fast.

China is the second in the world according to their GDP as businesses can be set up in China and has thine of the lowest rates of corporate tax in the world (25%) (Singapore's is 17%). China would also produce more in a shorter time because they have more land and more people which mean less money needed to get workers to work in the factory and thus higher productivity. China has more natural resources too such as coal, gas and steel.

China's economy has been on a boom for the past few years, in fact, decades.There are many factors that had contributed the fast growing economy in China.

Firstly because of the open door policy in China introduced by Deng Xiao Ping in 1978 to allow foreign businesses to be set up in China. As they opened up their country to international trade and allow foreign investors to invest in their country, this led China to the current strong economy it has. China ranks second in the world in terms of GDP(Gross Domestic Product),  since it allows foreign investors to set up business in China, at the corporate tax rate of 25%(one of the lowest in the world), and therefore with more people setting up businesses in China, China would produce more goods and services in a specific period of time. However due to China's big population, their GDP per capita would rank lower. And since the population in China is huge, cheap labour would also attract foreign businessman to set up businesses in China. Not only huge in population size, China is also huge in land mass, with 3,854,082 square miles, this would attract foreign businessmen as there would be more space for business to be operated at, for example office and factories. As compared to Singapore where land is expensive due to the little amount available, people would be attracted to China since it is cheaper to own land there. China also have several natural resources endowed with, such as coal, natural gas, steel, this would not involve import factors for production and easy access to these materials would save cost. The Chinese has also been accused of keeping the Chinese Yuan undervalued as by doing this Chinese exports would be cheaper and will cause more people importing from China. By doing this, ther would be more jobs available for the large population in China.

Singapore has a lot of investments in China, for example, the Suzhou Industrial Park, Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, Capitaland Malls in China, local brands such as Breadtalk, Osim. When the economy in China goes up, the economy in Singapore would be benefited due to the close partnership China has with Singapore. I agree that Singapore relies a lot on China's economy, as we have many Chinese tourists visiting Singapore, and if China's economy goes down, the amount of Chinese tourists would decrease and since China is one of the major tourists that visits Singapore, a decrease would impact the tourism business in Singapore, from hotels, retail stores, casinos and even the F&B business. With an impact at such impacts, the economy in Singapore would be impacted, since the consumption of Chinese tourists has decreased. Recently it had been reported that China is facing a slowdown from its rapid economic growth in the past few years, I think that even though this slow down might not be "fatal" to Singapore, we should be careful as if really one day the China economy goes down, it will bring trouble to Singapore as we would be impacted with a declining economy as well. However I believe that this will not be a problem as China is still attractive for businesses to be set up as with the factors that is mostly beneficial.

In this lesson, we learnt about one child policy(生育计划). Well I think that on child policy have advantages in a way but also disadvantages.

After the lesson on one child policy in China, I have learnt more about the one child policy in China and about how it affects the economy and people. Basically the one child policy only allows parents in China to give birth to only one child and there will be severe consequences if more than one child is given birth to. But in the recent years, China has easened the one child policy and allows parents to have a second child. Initially, when I first heard of the one child policy in China, I was very astonished and/or shocked and thought that it was quite cruel and restricted, unreasonable even. My thoughts then were: How can they do this? Even if the parents did not want to give birth to a second child, it was nature's will to give them a second one which couldn't be prevented. And if the authorities found out that the parent gave birth to a second child, the parent would be forced to abort the child, or if the parent had already given birth to the child, kill the child and sterilise the mom. But after knowing the reasons behind the one child policy, now I understand why they do these. But i still feel it is not a very good idea as, enforcing my point i made, mothers cannot control their birth rate and could give birth to a second one unwillingly. So i still feel that they should not do this to the baby and the mother.

After the week's CID lesson about the one-child policy in China, a one-word question ran through my mind. WHY? Just why?