"Japan loses world's No. 2 economy status to China," read the headline of an article by state-run news agency Xinhua that heralds that "Japan has now relinquished its position" and that Japan's GDP is "paling before China's figure." That boastful tone hardly reflects the self-deprecating remarks of most Chinese reactions to the news, as shown a series of interviews in the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time Report.
"There’s still the undeniably awkward fact that China still has yet to produce an enterprise with truly global influence commensurate with China’s rising power," said Robin Li, the CEO of China’s leading Internet search company.
Meanwhile in Hebei province, farmer and coal miner Sun Quan said: "We are not proud of this at all. As farmers, we have no sense that China’s economy has become so big.... Farmers earn more money than before, but they have to spend more, because of rising prices. Even the price of garlic and ginger has increased to nearly ten yuan per jin."
Indeed, worries over inflation seem to trump any rejoicing over the announcement, as China's per capita GDP ranks 124th in the world, between Tunisia and Angola, according to the World Bank. "I don’t think it’s anything to feel proud of. We don’t have enough food, and prices are outrageous," Yin Jianping, a cook at a university cafeteria in Lanzhou, told the Real Time Report.
The measured response from officials and citizens echoed reactions in August to the initial announcement that China's economy had surpassed Japan's. “One is struck by the lack of self-congratulation in the [Communist] party media,” Russell Leigh Moses, a political analyst in Beijing, told the Monitor at the time. “I admire the government’s retreat from hubris and its embrace of humility, and I don’t get any sense it is manufactured.”
