Economy

Topics in this knowledge base concerning the economy of China — its development, institutions, reforms, and industries.

| Topic | Description | |——-|————-| | Economic Reform & Opening-up (1978 Onward) | Deng Xiaoping’s post-1978 transformation of China from a centrally planned socialist economy into a market-oriented global economic power, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. | | Belt and Road Initiative | China’s flagship global infrastructure and economic-integration program, launched by Xi Jinping in 2013; overland and maritime corridors across more than 150 countries financed by Chinese policy banks, with over $1 trillion committed by 2023. | | Special Economic Zones | Designated experimental zones opened from 1979 in Guangdong and Fujian to test market practices; Shenzhen’s transformation from fishing village to metropolis proved capitalist mechanisms could coexist with Party control and became the template for “the world’s factory.” | | State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) | State-controlled corporations dominating China’s strategic sectors—energy, telecommunications, banking, transport—that persist from the planned economy but have been repeatedly restructured under market reform while remaining instruments of Party control. | | The Tea Trade | One of history’s longest-running commodity trades, from Tang-era codification under Lu Yu to a global export; insatiable British demand drove a silver drain that fed the opium traffic and the Opium Wars, and British plant theft transplanted the industry to India and Ceylon. | | Agriculture and Land Reform | The foundation of China’s rural transformation—the 1947–1952 land redistribution, 1950s collectivization and people’s communes, the Great Leap famine, Deng-era decollectivization under the household-responsibility system, and today’s rural-urban divide, agribusiness, and Rural Vitalization Strategy. |

See also the master index and the timeline.