ABSTRACT
Economic reform has brought significant changes to China over the last 25 years. The reform started from rural areas in 1978 and dismantled the collective agricultural production of communes and introduced the household responsibility system. This liberated the rural workforce and resulted in a rapid increase in rural productivity and improvement of living conditions in the countryside. Rural success was followed by urban reform from 1984 (Croll, 1994). Since then the speed of economic growth and transformation of Chinese society has been remarkable. The old style of socialist economic planning has gradually given way to a socalled ‘Chinese-style socialist market economy’. Throughout the reform period, China’s GDP growth was maintained at around 10 per cent. Even during the late 1990s, while most Asian countries were in an
economic crisis, China still achieved an annual growth of more than seven per cent. Between 1996 and 2002, China’s GDP per capita increased by 69 per cent from 4,854 yuan to 8,184 yuan (State Statistics Bureau, 2003).
