In a crisp:

• Adopting free-market reforms and dispensing the rigid communist policies.
• China stole the title of the biggest automotive market in the world from the US last year.
• The second largest importer of goods.
• The world’s biggest buyer of iron ore and copper.
• The biggest crude oil consumer.

In Brief:
The 30 years of free-market reforms were able to make China a superpower, where in the second quarter of 2010 the 1.3 billion people communist country was able to surpass Japan and become the second largest economy in the world.

• China recorded a nominal gross domestic product of 1.337 trillion dollars in this year’s second quarter
• Which is more than the 1.288 trillion dollars that Japan
• However, Japan maintained its second largest economy in the world title the first half of 2010.

China’s fast expansion and increased role in the global economy were able to make this developing country lead the global economic growth in 2009 while many other superpowers were trying to drag themselves out of recession.
“The resilience of China’s growth during the crisis enabled a number of other countries, particularly commodity-exporting economies, to ride on its coattails”, said Eswar Prased, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

• Since 1978 when leader Deng Xiaoping took command and started adopting free-market reforms and dispensing the rigid communist policies.
• China grew more than 90 times and now became the second largest trading nation in the world.
• Last year this fastest growing major economy in the world surpassed Germany
• Become the third largest economy in the world
• If it keeps growing at the current pace, China will take the throne as the world’s biggest economic power by 2027.

With an average growth rate of about 10% for the past 30 years, this country, which became the largest exporter in the world, might surpass the US (with an annual nominal GDP of about 14 trillion dollars) in less than 30 years.
China stole the title of the biggest automotive market in the world from the US last year, and is also considered the second largest importer of goods, the world’s biggest buyer of iron ore and copper and the biggest crude oil consumer.
China’s rising role in the global economy can’t be ignored, especially since four of the 10 biggest companies by market capitalization in the world are in China, and they are PetroChina Co., Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Mobile Ltd. and China Construction Bank Corp.
“Japan had a huge impact on the global commodities market and foreign direct investment flows in the 1980s, as China is doing now”, said head of China’s statistics bureau, Ma Jiantang.

Adding, “The major difference is that China’s population is 10-times bigger than Japan’s, its economy is still growing at above 9% per year, and Chinese investors are just beginning to invest abroad. You can imagine that China’s impact will be so much bigger.”