After 40 years of reform and “opening up,” China has made remarkable economic progress. Such economic prosperity, however, has been coupled with environmental degradation. We analyze diverse long-term data to determine whether China is experiencing a decoupling of economic growth and environmental impacts, and where China stands with respect to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in terms of reducing regional division, urban-rural gap, social inequality, and land-based impacts on oceans. The results highlight that China’s desire to achieve “ecological civilization” has resulted in a decoupling trend for major pollutants since 2015, while strong coupling remains with CO 2 emissions. Progress has been made in health care provision, poverty reduction, and gender equity in education, while income disparity continues between regions and with rural-urban populations. There is a considerable way to go toward achieving delivery of the SDGs; however, China’s progress toward economic prosperity and concomitant sustainability provides important insights for other countries.

INTRODUCTION

The year 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up. Decades of rapid economic growth have put undeniable pressure on the environment and exacerbated several societal issues, but China now stands at the crossroad of a future development alternative. Decoupling economic growth from ecological impact has been central to the ambition of realizing national and United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (1, 2). The optimistic view suggests that improvement in science and technology, transformations in policy, and a shift in societal values will alleviate environmental impacts (3, 4). Relative decoupling has been achieved at both national and global levels (5). From 1900 to 2009, per capita use of resources increased by 119.5% globally, whereas the resources consumed in producing one unit of gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 62.7% (6). However, this relative decoupling is still insufficient to realize comprehensive global sustainability. Apart from challenges for environmental decoupling, the concept of sustainable development has also focused on poverty reduction, health care improvement, the provision of high-quality education, social inequality mitigation, and ocean sustainability (7–9). For example, globally, 783 million people live below the international poverty line and 57 million primary age children are out of school. Approximately 20% of large marine ecosystems are expected to suffer from eutrophication. Faced with these challenges, the UN SDGs set a systematic framework with 17 goals considering three dimensions of performance on sustainability—economic, social, and environmental (10).

In 1978, facing the disrupted economy following the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people desired to emancipate their minds and break with the traditional and constraining economic system. The reform was inspired by a group of farmers in Xiaogang village of Anhui province who created the Household Contract Responsibility System that replaced the People’s Commune System and stimulated farmers’ enthusiasm and innovation, which was gradually endorsed by different levels of the government (11). Special economic zones were first established as test beds in four coastal cities (Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shantou in Guangdong Province; Xiamen in Fujian Province) to explore the approach to opening up and to provide a platform for reform across the whole of China (12). After 40 years of development, China has become the world’s second largest economy. The contribution from China to the global GDP has increased from 2.4 to 14.8% (13), the per capita GDP from 380 to 54,000 CNY, the per capita disposable income from 170 to 24,000 CNY (14), and the outward foreign direct investment from 297 to 1,235,925 million CNY (15).

Economic prosperity, however, has resulted in notable environmental challenges. A hypothesis was proposed to present the relationship between environmental pressure and per capita income, which is an inverse U–shaped curve, beginning with a coupling stage where environmental pressure increases with per capita income to a certain level and then moving to a decoupling stage where environmental pressure decreases. In terms of China’s ambition to deliver the UN 2030 SDGs, the focus has been toward addressing social progress, especially inter-generation equity and intra-equity, poverty alleviation, health and well-being, equal education, and gender equality (16). In addition, both the SDGs and Future Earth have drawn increasing attention to the ocean, specifically conservation and sustainable utilization of marine resources (17).

In this study, a comprehensive analysis was conducted on the economic, social, and environmental performance of China to address the following questions: (i) Is China in the process of transforming from a coupled to a decoupled economy? (ii) What has been China’s performance in eliminating regional divisions in economic development, resource availability, and energy consumption? (iii) Is there still a rural-urban gap in income, education, and health care? (iv) What progress has been achieved in alleviating social inequality in education, job opportunity, and poverty? and (v) How far is China from achieving integrated land-ocean development in terms of the sufficiency and sustainability of marine resource utilization?

Here, we report spatial and statistical analyses of key performance metrics based on national statistical and survey data available for 31 provinces excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan (Supplementary Materials), and present large-scale overviews of China’s sustainability performance and an analysis of decoupling trends.