China has been experiencing very fast economic growth for three decades now. Surpassing other G-8 countries, China has become the second largest economy in the world in Purchasing Power Parity and she is already the world’s top exporter country. This fast economic growth has been associated with fundamental changes in China’s institutions. From a centrally planned economy and very egalitarian society, China has become by and large a market based economy and an unequal society. China has also become more integrated with the rest of the world.

The rise of China is having repercussions all across the world. On the one hand, China has become the workshop of the world, supplying low-cost manufacturing goods to almost every part, of the globe. On the other hand, China’s demand for energy and other industrial raw materials is affecting world prices. As a result of her success in export, China now has the largest foreign currency reserve, much of which is invested in the US securities market, so that the economies of the United States and China have become interdependent in more ways than are readily visible.

In the Middle Ages, China thought of herself as the center of the world, naming herself as the
Middle Kingdom, and the rest of the world was drawn to her because of her wealth, technology,
And culture. However, China stagnated later and, after losing out in the Opium Wars in the mid nineteenth past century, she found subject to a quasi-colonial rule by European powers. After a long period of wars and revolutions, China is now staging a spectacular comeback, and the question that is engaging the minds of scholars and policy makers alike is what lies ahead of this resurgent China, and how her resurgence will influence the world. Answers to these broad questions however depend on the resolution of a wide range of issues that have accompanied or arisen in the course of China’s growth.

The population and growth issue is in China has been around for a long time. In the 1950s China’s population was seven percent of the world’s population. Population policies in the 1950s and 1960s were fluctuating between pro and anti growth. The countries population continued to rise. The one child policy was instituted to further decrease population growth. The growth rate did merely slow down. The number of people living to old age also increased as life expectancy more than doubled from 35 to 74 years old. Educational investment cut adult illiteracy from 80 to 19 percent.

The industrialization of china was growing at a slow rate. The great leap forward of the late 1950. It was amid to increase Chinas rate of industrialization by producing basic products such as steel and iron. During this time a lot of Chinas community efforts were devoted to smelting iron in back yard Furnaces this cussed a lot of the farm land to be neglected. Because of this 25 to 30 million people died. The plan was devastating. China was forced to