REFORM CHINA: THE SLEEPING GIANT AWAKENS

With annual rates of growth in economic output and foreign trade that averaged nearly 10 and 16 percent, respectively, from 1978 to 2000, China's economic performance has in many ways become the envy of the developing world. Although the creation of wealth has been most pronounced in coastal areas, the number of Chinese living in absolute poverty nationwide has been reduced by more than 200 million during the reform era. While improvements in political life have been less signal, China has experienced a rise in material living standards that is, by most measures, unprecedented in the history of human civilization. According to the World Bank, China achieved the fastest doubling of economic output ever from 1978 to 1987, far outpacing both early industrializers (e.g., United Kingdom, United States, and Japan) and late industrializers (e.g., Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan) alike. It then repeated the feat from 1987–1996. While economic disparities have widened between both coastal and interior areas and urban and rural areas, it is also true that economic growth has been widely shared across China. In fact, the World Bank reported that if the thirty provinces of China (many of which would rank as average-size countries in both territory and population) were counted as individual economies, “the twenty fastest-growing economies in the world between 1978 and 1995 would have been Chinese.”