The rise of China's GDP ranking has not only led the world to rediscover China, but also reminded China to examine its own development. Both sides of the issue should be considered.

On the one hand, China topping Japan [the world's previous second largest economy] in terms of GDP marks the rising of China's economic status, which is a milestone in the modern world economic history since Japan replaced the former Federal Republic of Germany as the world's second largest economy in 1968. This achievement is made by generations of hard-working Chinese people over more than 30 years of reform and opening up, and it is a natural result of the country's long-term robust momentum of development. Around the year 2000, the size of the Chinese economy was only one fourth of that of Japan, and it was widely believed that it would take 25 years for China to catch up. But China achieved this within just 10 years. Over the past 30 years, China has kept an average annual GDP growth of 9.8 percent, more than 3 times the world average growth during the same period. For a developing country with a population of 1.3 billion, every leap forward in the GDP ranking creates miracle of economic development.

 On the other hand, Chinese people should be fully aware that even though China is now "second in the world," it's still at the primary stage of development. There's a long way for China to catch up with Japan. According to the statistics released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2010, China's per-capita GDP in 2009 was $3,566, while Japan's was $39,573, over 10 times that of China. Under the same purchasing power, the Japanese per-capita income is five times that of the Chinese. Besides, there's a wide gap between the two countries in fields such as research and development capabilities, overall quality of labor and energy consumption levels. The problems China has are as obvious as its achievements.

Behind China's high ranking is a difficult process of development. Struggling in a hard transition period, China hasn't completely got rid of its extensive development mode, and its high-speed development relies heavily on high-energy consumption, high pollution and labor-intensive industries. Besides, the economic structure needs to be optimized, the per-unit GDP energy and resource consumption is still quite high, and it is yet to be balanced between the economic development and the improvement of people's livelihood. People are looking forward to "making the cake bigger," but now they are more concerned with "how to divide the cake."

For China, the increase or decrease of GDP itself is meaningless. More importantly is the sustainable development of society and better livelihood of people. Pursuing sustainable development and making all efforts to make people share the fruits of development have become key issues in our development.

GDP is one of the core indicators of a nation's economic strength, but it's not the only one. According to the data of IMF and other international organizations, China's per-capita GDP is less than half of the world's average, ranking around 100th in the world. If judged by the UN poverty line - $1 per person per day, China still has 150 million people living in poverty. It is still a developing country and it's haunted by uneven, uncoordinated and unsustainable development.

The problem of population cannot be ignored either. During the recent 30 years, 27 percent of China's per-capita GDP growth was contributed by the demographic dividend. By 2015, the number of working age population from 16 to 64 years old will reach its peak and will then start to decline. China's demographic dividend will be phased out, and population aging will become a problem.

Increase of the aging population means the situation of adequate labor resources, high savings rate and low dependency ratio in the past will change, because the nearly 10 percent economic growth over the past 30 years partly results from full tapping of the demographic dividend. When it disappears, Chinese society will face the problem of "getting old before getting rich." In 2000, people over 65 accounted for 6.8 percent of the whole population, exactly the same as the world average. But in 2010 the proportion of China's aging population was 8.3 percent, higher than the world average of 7.5 percent.

Since the stage of economic and social development is irreversible, population aging will lead to a sharp decline in the number of young labor during the next five years, which means China will enter an aging stage at a relatively low level of development.

All in all, China has made some achievements of economic development, and we are well on the way to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. But there are both opportunities and challenges ahead, and we still have many problems in the process of development. China still has a long way to go.