2020 vision

Mike Bastin, visiting professor of brand management at China Agriculture University in Beijing, believes the next decade will see the likes of sports good manufacturer Li Ning, electronics goods maker Haier and computer giant Lenovo establishing a world presence.

"I expect brands such as Li Ning, Haier and Lenovo to take that next step up to global brand status, " he says.

"I think we will also see PetroChina establish a major name in the global petro-chemical industry and I think China will develop a reputation for innovation through the high-tech success stories of companies such as Huawei (the telecommunications solutions company)."

Whatever China's commercial advances, the Chinese economy will have to take the strain of a growing elderly population. 

Stuart Leckie, who runs Hong Kong-based consultancy Stirling Finance and is a leading pensions expert, says the next decade is going to see a marked shrinking of the working population since because there are not enough people to replace the numbers retiring.

"You going to see a lot of people born in the 1950s, of which there are a great number in China, move into the retirement community. China has benefited previously from having a very large number of people of working age but this is going to disappear."

"It is like a tsunami. You can see it coming but you certainly can't stop it and it is not clear what you can do to prepare for it."

Leckie says because of the huge size of the population even large-scale immigration will have little impact.

"In Hong Kong, 1 million people coming in would have a big effect but on the Chinese mainland, such numbers would be negligible. You would have to have something like 100 million and there aren't those numbers anywhere in the world."

An increasingly elderly population will also place increasing strains on China's healthcare system.

China is expected to have the highest spending growth in healthcare of any country in the world between 2010 and 2020, increasing by 166 percent, according to a report published earlier this month by business consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Roberta Lipson, chief executive officer of Chindex International, a leading private healthcare provider in China, says recent government reforms will pave the way for more private provision.

Currently, private hospitals account for 18 percent of healthcare institutions and see just 4 per cent of patients, according to Chindex.

"Recent reforms encouraging the participation of private providers of healthcare to supplement services available from public hospitals may give life to a whole new industry in China," Lipson says.

"Although healthcare services lag badly behind other service industries in China, these new reforms will encourage innovation in new models of care and competition will surely improve the level of the industry as a whole."

Innes-Ker at the Economist Intelligence Unit says the next decade could see some fundamental reforms of industry.

Stuart H. Leckie of Hong Kong-based consultancy Stirling Finance. Edmond Tang / China Daily

He says the reliance of the economy on State-owned enterprises, which he says are inefficient users of capital, risks holding back growth in the economy.

"Clearly, the government will want to retain control of the commanding heights of the economy but I think over the next decade many companies in telecom, car manufacturing, logistics and airlines will become fully private. If you look internationally, very few of these remain in the public sector anywhere," he says.

James McGregor, senior counselor at corporate advisory company APCO Worldwide in Beijing and author of One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Line of Doing Business in China, insists the next decade ahead will not be easy for China and it is vital its markets are open to foreign competition.

"Chinese companies will never be able to compete internationally unless they have an open market here and they compete with international companies at home," he says.

"That is the only way they will be efficient enough to be global winners, and Chinese companies are absolutely capable of being global winners."