BEIJING -- China is on the cusp of becoming a high-income country by the World Bank's classification. But Beijing would rather not be grouped with the world's wealthy nations.
As the U.S. and China battle for influence, Beijing has presented itself as a champion of Global South nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia. And it benefits from its current status in international groups as "developing," including by not having to contribute to some global funds to fight climate change.
"China will always be a member of the Global South and the developing world," leader Xi Jinping said in a video address at a United Nations event in 2024, according to an official readout.
Nonetheless, China is likely to reach the high-income category for 2026 when the World Bank releases its calculations next July.
The bank defines its categories using gross national income -- the total money earned by a country's residents and businesses both domestically and abroad. It translates other currencies into dollars using a method to smooth out exchange-rate fluctuations.
For 2025, the World Bank measured China's GNI per capita at $14,230, just below the high-income threshold of $14,375.
The high-income threshold is likely to rise to $14,554 for 2026, meaning China's GNI per capita would need to grow by 2.3% to cross it, well below its historical growth rate, according to an analysis by Philip Schellekens, chief economist for Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Development Program.
"High-income" by the World Bank's definition doesn't necessarily mean rich as Americans would perceive it. Last year, U.S. gross national income per capita was $88,810.
Each international body has its own system for classifying nations. The International Monetary Fund calls China an emerging and developing economy, and the U.N. also calls it developing. The World Trade Organization lets countries self-designate, and China puts itself into the developing category.
"I'm tempted to believe China will do its utmost not to be classified as a developed economy," said Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at the French bank Natixis.
By the World Bank's definition, China became an upper-middle-income country in 2010, when it also surpassed Japan as the world's second-largest economy by gross domestic product.
"It's just amazing how China managed to climb up the income ladder so quickly," said Schellekens, the U.N. economist.
In a nod to the reality that it is the world's largest exporter with an annual trade surplus topping $1 trillion, China said last year it wouldn't seek to use its developing status to get special treatment at the WTO, such as longer time periods for implementing agreements.
The World Bank, which doesn't use developed or developing country labels, has said it will phase out loans to China by 2031. Its annual lending to China fell to $750 million in 2025, down from $2.4 billion in 2017.
China has said it aims to attain the per-capita gross domestic product of a "midlevel developed country" by 2035, which state media has described as more than $20,000. It has positioned itself as a model for non-Western economic development and created alternatives to Western-led institutions for financing and aid.
Schellekens said the blanket labels could be misleading. Coastal Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen have been rich for years now by most standards, resembling wealthy capitals in other parts of Asia, while the poorest quintile of people in China lived on less than roughly $120 a month last year.
"In terms of what it means for people," Schellekens said, "there's still a lot of inequality."