ABSTRACT
The People’s Republic of China came into existence as the result of the victory of the armies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong and Zhu De against the Guomindang forces led by Jiang Jieshi (Tschiang Kai-shek), who with the help of the USA, found refuge on a former Japanese colony, the island of Taiwan. The poor, war-torn country of 400 million people, the majority of them illiterate peasants, started to develop a socialist national economy, isolated by the western countries and with some support from the Soviet Union in the first decade only. Independent attempts to jump-start the progress towards a communist society resulted in the major economic and humanitarian catastrophes of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. After a period of stagnation in the years before and after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the way towards the modern China of today started with the third plenary session of the eleventh congress of the Communist Party in December 1978. Under the slogan of ‘Reform and Opening’ the modernization of the Chinese economy and society was put on the agenda, ushering in a period of unprecedented economic growth for several decades. Agricultural reforms were followed by the acceptance of foreign investment into industries and services and the integration into the world economy as signalled by gaining membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. As the twenty-first century unfolds, China has developed into the ‘factory of the world’ – topping the list of manufacturers for such diverse products as cereals, cotton and meat, steel, coal and electricity, textiles, fridges, TV sets and telephones (China Statistical Bureau 2004) – and has become the largest domestic tourism market in the world in terms of travels. A comparison with India shows the different developments paths: in 1982, both countries reported an almost equal level of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), China with 222 billion US$ and India with 195 billion US$. After 20 years, China had reached in 2002 a level of 1,233 billion US$ GDP, compared to 510 billion US$ GDP for India (China Business Weekly 2004). Calculated per head the difference is even more striking, as China’s popula-
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reach the age of five, now 96 out of 100 children can celebrate their fifth birthday. Illiteracy has been reduced to below 10 per cent in a country where reading and writing abilities were traditionally restricted to the upper classes. The Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), taking into account life expectancy, education and income per person, gives China a middle-ranking eighty-fifth place out of 177 countries with an index of 0.76 of the ideal 1.0, well above the one hundred and twenty-seventh place for India (Economist 2005d).
