BBC News Online's Steve Schifferes China was one of the world's poorest countries when the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Decades of war and civil conflict had damaged the infrastructure and choked off a nascent industrial revolution. Mao Zedong and his revolutionaries were determined to eliminate inequalities, promote self-reliance and develop China into a modern industrial state. But it was not until the post-Mao period, and the end of the political instability of the Cultural revolution, that the economy really took off. The new Chinese leadership, under Deng Xiaoping, resolved to push China on a course of economic reform and opening up to the West.
China now boasts the world's seventh largest economy - nearly the same size as the UK and Italy.
Some Western economists, most notably the US Treasury Secretary and former World Bank economist Lawrence Summers, have estimated that China will overtake the US and Japan early in the next century to become the world's biggest economy. Others dispute these figures, which are based on a method of comparing China with developed economies that may be suspect. But there is no doubt that the economic growth that began when China accepted a market economy has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and made China a major factor in world trade. Growth and foreign investment are slowing down, and modernisation of state-run industries has stalled. Poverty reduction China's President Jiang Zemin has made the eradication of poverty by the year 2000 his top priority.