Socio-Economic Сharacteristics of the Stages of China’s Economic Development from 1990 to 2023

Over the past thirty years, China has shown extremely outstanding economic development results, eliminating absolute poverty and moving to a middle level of development. Since the early 2010s, China's economy began to slow down after a long period of accelerated development, which aroused the interest of the world community. . The paper analyzes the factors influencing China's economic growth at different stages of its development, as well as the main problems as a result of the extremely rapid growth of the economy over several decades. The implementation of the cluster approach in analyzing China's movement over the given period and the assessment of socio-economic parameters allowed to compare the development path of the PRC with other countries. As a result, it was revealed that market socialism with Chinese specificity allows the PRC, which moved from the 6th to the 3rd cluster from 1990 to 2023, to move confidently towards the level of developed countries (1st and 2nd clusters), despite the negative consequences of the old growth model. An analysis of social disparities in the PRC based on population surveys (CHIP 2013, CHIP 2018) has found that rural-urban disparities contribute most to overall inequality, with the highest income growth of the top 5% of wealthiest citizens. The modeling of factors affecting energy intensity as an important energy indicator of the PRC revealed two effects. The negative dependence of energy intensity on per capita GDP reflects the effect of the country's development, and on the share of value added of the service sector in GDP reflects the effect of the structural shift in the Chinese economy from the secondary to the tertiary sector. The insignificance of the share of renewable energy resources and nuclear energy in total energy consumption gave us reason to believe that there is no significant change in the energy balance yet, as the share of coal and oil in total energy consumption is still extremely high due to the continued development of various types of infrastructure. Thus, the results of the study suggest that China is following a unique path of development, shaping its own norm, catching up with other countries in many parameters and at the same time solving pressing problems that are the consequences of accelerated growth and institutional features of the country.