The Communist Party of China continually seeks to improve its governance capabilities, and this has enabled China’s rapid development in the past decades, as it has led China the path of the reform and opening-up.
For the first time, the National Bureau of Statistics has released a variety of information and data that shows China’s progress and development over the years. Even as China’s population has grown from 575 million in 1952 to nearly 1.4 billion in 2018, China’s GDP has risen from around 67.91 billion yuan ($ 9.59 billion) in 1952 to 90.03 trillion yuan ($ 12.71 trillion) at the end of last year. And from only 1.8 percent in 1952, China’s economy now accounts for 16 percent of the global GDP.
Moreover, China has gone from being an overwhelmingly rural economy to being the world’s largest manufacturing hub with 27 percent of worldwide manufacturing value added. In 1952, a large part of China’s population battled to nourish themselves, and starvation was common. At that point, the rural economy accounted for 50.5 percent of the country’s GDP, with farmers making up 83.5 percent of the work force.