ABSTRACT
For the past twenty years, China has been engaged in the most sweeping, most dramatic economic reform in the history of the modern world. In 1978, the government announced a series of reform initiatives that included the relaxation of direct central planning, the decentralization of industrial decision making, increased reliance on market forces to determine prices, the development of privately owned business firms, and the opening up of China to the outside world through international trade and foreign investment. Since then, adding to the simple superlative of its sheer size—1.2 billion people—China has enjoyed the highest sustained rate of economic growth in the world. The average annual growth of gross domestic product (GDP) for the entire period—8 percent—resulted in a quadrupling of GDP per capita. At least 450 million people have been lifted from abject poverty.
