The author Khalid Malik is United Nations Development Program resident representative and UN Resident Coordinator in China. The article is excerpted from his April 18 speech at Peking University

Before I first came to China a little over three years ago, I invested time in meeting with professors from Columbia and Harvard universities.

I was based in New York, and I'd been following China for some time.

When I got here I realized it was difficult to square what they were telling me with what I was seeing. That forced me to dig in and try to understand what was happening to get a structured way of looking at things.

China has become a different country in a single lifetime. It hasn't happened elsewhere. Those who are economists find it very difficult using traditional techniques.

So the question is, how to explain the change.

China has the largest sustained GDP growth ever witnessed. It has outperformed earlier tigers. Its share of world trade has tripled since 1990 and is still rising fast. China now has a per capita income of $1,700 which means China is no longer a low-income country.

China alone is responsible for the reduction in global poverty. If you took China out of the equation, global poverty actually rose. When you take a dollar a day as the poverty line, China reduced poverty by 422 million people from 1981 to 2001. Regardless of measure, it is the largest reduction in human history.

As a result China is regaining its place in the world.

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Part of the explanation can be found in a historical study of PPP (purchasing power parity) data from 1600 to 2003. By the 1820s, China had already enjoyed a long period of having one-third of world trade. It dropped to a low of 4 percent in 1920. The 2003 figures show China gaining its rightful place in the global economy.

Neoclassical economics generally sees growth and development as a simple form of adding more capital and labor. The emphasis is very much on standard policies and institutions regardless of the country-specific context.

And yet the Chinese bumblebee continues to defy the laws of neoclassical gravity because neoclassical economics has defined some of the rules of gravity.

Is this the beginning of something that could be called the "Beijing Consensus"? This new consensus could replace the discredited "Washington Consensus" formulated in the late 1980s. It defined the keys to success in developing countries as macro-stability, liberalization (lowering tariff barriers and market deregulation) and privatization.

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