Industrial Growth in China
[i:c0f638c079] Industrial growth in China
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The Chinese have long since been a creative group of people. Long before the introduction of Western technologies and ideas, this country has had a history of local industry dating back some 2000 years. These innovative people, from an early time, produced paper, gunpowder, and silk, and printing with one of the first movable type. In all, the manufacture of luxury items, fine handcrafts, metal crafting and the manufacture of tools were all well established businesses long before the onset of western industrialists.
One of the first goals of the Communists, after 1949, was to develop the growth of heavy industry. They carried out and following the Soviet Union model. They challenged to attract industrial development in the interior sections of China.
The thought here was that there was already significant wealth in the old treaty port cities. New steel mills were constructed at Wuhan on the Yangtze and at Bantu in the Interior Magnolia. Other interior cities also grew at a rapid pace.
The communists took advantage, as well, of coastal cities, such as Shanghai. Shanghai and the like were attractive due to their location and transportation systems. These areas provided skilled labor and swift access to international markets.
During what the Chinese called "The Great Leap Forward", there were large investments in heavy industry. There were small-scale versions of these industries such as steel refining. The program was abandoned, however, when it caused great disruptions in the economic growth of the country. Ten years plan was established in which economic conditions improved through a greater use of privately owned enterprises, as opposed to the old state-owned businesses.
The idea for private enterprises proved to be a good one. The annual gross domestic product (GDP) has grown over the years to over 544.6 billion dollars by the early 1990s. Agriculture reached even the rural areas. The industrial output through manufacturing, mining, electricity generation and building and construction grew at an amazing rate.
Prior to WWII the area known as Manchuria was called Manchukuo, This prime area of land provides most of China's food and industrial wealth. In the center of this region sugar beets, soybeans and wheat are grown. This is China's largest and most fertile farming area totaling 140,000 square miles. For years the Chinese operated under a disputed system, whereby few who depended on their peasant farmers to pay their rents owned the...