China Has Proud 50-Year Record of Development

China's economy has grown to be the seventh-largest in the world since the founding of New China five decades ago.

According to statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), China's gross domestic product grew from 67.9 billion yuan in 1952 to 7,955.3 billion yuan in 1998. The average annual growth rate of the economy was 7.7 percent in the period, far higher than the world's average of around three percent.

China's economy follows those of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain and Italy in size.

China now produces the largest crops of grains, meat, cotton, peanuts, rape seed and fruits in the world, and the third-largest crops of tea, soybean and sugar cane. It is also the world's largest producer of steel, coal, cement, fertilizers and TV sets in the world, and the second-largest producer of electricity, cotton cloth and chemical fiber. Its outputs of sugar and crude oil rank fourth and fifth, respectively, in the world.

The country's continuously improving industrial layout has basically eliminated the bottlenecks in the economy over the past five decades. In that period, China increased its output of electricity 276 times, thus ending the history of electricity shortage in the country. At the same time, the total length of railway lines increased by 1.6 times to 57,600 km, and the total length of highways increased 14.8 times, to 1.279 million km. Meanwhile the country's telephone network has become the second- largest in the world.

Over the past five decades, China has fed 22 percent of the world's population with only ten percent of the world's arable land. In addition, it has doubled the per capita output of grain, tripled the per capita output of cotton and boosted the per capita output of oil-bearing crops 2.9 times. It has also increased its per capita output of aquatic products 36.6 times and per capita output of meat 7.7 times.

China has increased the added value of its industrial sector 157.7 times, to 3,354.1 billion yuan over the past five decades, and the output of a group of new electronic products has been skyrocketing. For example, the output of color TV sets has increased 190,000 times in the period.

In the meantime, the service industry has seen rapid growth. The annual added value of the transportation and telecommunications industries grew by an average of 42.5 times, to 502.9 billion yuan. The annual added value of the financial and insurance industries rose 68.3 times to 401.7 billion yuan, on average.

In the same period, China invested a total of 17,799.3 billion yuan in fixed assets, completing more than 1.3 million key construction projects. Some 6,200 of the projects are large-sized ones.

The average per capita consumption increased from 80 yuan a year in 1950 to 2,973 yuan in 1998. The portion of expenditures by urban residents on food and clothing decreased from 80 percent to 55.6 percent. At the same time, the ratio for rural residents dropped from over 90 percent to 59.6 percent.

At present, every 100 urban households have 105 color TV sets, 76 refrigerators, 91 washing machines and 36 cameras, on average.

Over the past five decades, China has grown to be one of the major trading partners in the world. The total value of its foreign trade has grown 286 times, to 323.9 billion US dollars a year. Its ranking in world trade partners rose from 32nd in 1978 to 11th in 1998. Moreover, its foreign exchange reserves grew from 2.15 billion US dollars to 145 billion US dollars, the second- largest in the world.

Over the past two decades, China has approved more than 300,000 foreign investment projects, receiving 406.9 billion US dollars- worth of foreign funds.

Since the founding of New China five decades ago, the country has trained more than 18 million undergraduate and graduate students, and increased the number of professional and technological personnel to over 20 million.

Nowadays, China publishes more than 130,000 book titles every year -- a total of 7.2 billion copies. It has 1,035 newspapers, with a total circulation of 19.6 billion copies. It also has nearly 8,000 magazines, with a total circulation of 2.5 billion copies.

Over the past five decades, China has reduced the death rate of the population from 30 per thousand to 6.5 per thousand. It has reduced the death rate of new-born babies from 200 per thousand to 33.1 per thousand. Meanwhile, the life expectancy of Chinese people has expanded from 35 to 71 years.