Is China a developing country? This is one of the many points of discussion which came out of the climate change talks in Copenhagen last month.

At first glance, the question is trivial. China qualifies. Its GDP per capita is not much over 3000 US dollars, and well over 100 million of its people still live on less than one US dollar per day. The pre-existing institutional framework for dealing with climate change, which shaped Copenhagen, classifies the PRC as a developing country. Beijing often insists on this status too.

On the other hand, the PRC is home to more millionaires than there are people in most European countries. Pay a brief visit to Shanghai, and you could be forgiven for questioning the ‘developing’ tag. , comment during and since Copenhagen has noted China’s distance from many developing countries, even though Beijing itself wanted to continue to act as a leader of the developing world at Copenhagen, seeking improved rules of the game for itself and other developing countries. One UK-based Chinese commentator coined the phrase ‘The Lonely Rising Power’. And the question has been articulated in China – for example, an article in last month’s ‘China Youth’ discussed how best to characterise China’s developmental position.

When it comes to climate change, the Kyoto legacy of dividing the world into developed and developing countries hung over Copenhagen. This was probably one of the structural reasons for the talks’ difficulties, though the more flexible Kyoto principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ should still provide a good basis for progress. In other contexts, this developed/developing dichotomy has been abandoned in favour of terms such as high, middle or low-income countries (China is middle income), though in practice this is only slightly more subtle.

The real problems are both our ideas of what ‘development’ means and the insistence on using aggregate categories to cover whole countries.

On the first point, the challenges which climate change brings should lead us to question our pre-existing notions of development. They highlight that the ‘developed’ state apparently enjoyed by the US and Europe has actually resulted in unsustainable use of resources; we are therefore far from having reached some sort of development goal or end state, as the word ‘developed’ itself might imply.

As far as the second issue is concerned, any aggregate or average disguises diversity. In the US, for example, there are major pockets of poverty which certainly require substantial further ‘development’, just as the so-called developing world - not just China by any means - contains peaks of wealth. A map of global development - if we take this to mean wealth, education and health - would show nodes or networks of prosperity, concentrated in the US, Europe and Japan, but actually not primarily reflecting the boundaries of nation states. Globalisation has complicated this pattern further, and China – or more accurately, many of the urban areas of China - is increasingly becoming integrated into this ‘developed’ network. This map is also relevant to reducing levels of the greenhouse gases which cause climate change.

Most emissions result from these nodes of economic activity spread across the globe, rather than countries as a whole. Neither does the “ownership” of these emissions necessarily lie with the geography of their emissions, but with businesses or consumers. This relates to the complex global supply chains which characterise global commerce. The efforts by a number of major multinationals to tackle emissions across their whole value chains is a welcome step towards tackling this, even if their voice was not given much of a hearing at Copenhagen.

Unfortunately, the terminology of developed and developing worlds is likely to stick. But Copenhagen, with its implicit unravelling of this simple division of the world into rich and poor countries, has again highlighted the problems and ambiguities inherent in this terminology. As far as climate change is concerned, it seems that this means others will increasingly want China to behave as a developed country even as it stresses its own developing status. The contradictions look set to continue.