Trends in Chinese and Russian GDP growth

According to World Bank data for 2019, China’s population stood at 1 408 million and Russia’s at 144.4 million (this latter figure being slightly lower than that of Germany and France combined, and constituting 44 % of the US figure of 323.33 million), meaning that China was almost 10 times more populous than Russia. Russia’s population started declining in 2019 and is very likely to continue to do so in the near future, while China’s population level seems to be heading towards ‘growth stagnation … before it starts to decline’. Other World Bank data for 2019 show that Russia had a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$1 687 billion (while China had a GDP of US$1 4280 billion, almost 8.5 times that of Russia. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (see Section on ‘Current developments’ below) this trend of China’s economy powering further ahead of the Russian one is likely to accelerate again.