Along with the coming of 2000, the PRC had undergone
a glorious yet tortuous course of 50 years, amid great
changes in Chinese society. Before the founding of New China
in 1949, China’s highest yearly outputs of major
industrial and agricultural products were 445,000 tons of
yarn, 2.79 billion meters of cloth, 61,880,000 tons of coal,
320,000 tons of crude oil, 6 billion kwh of electric energy
production, 150 million tons of grain, and 849,000 tons of
cotton. Since the founding of New China, especially in the
21 years after the start of the reform and opening to the
outside world in 1978, China has made great achievements in
economic construction and social development. In 1999, the
GDP was 8,205.4 billion yuan, an increase of 6.4 times over
1978, at constant prices; the outputs of some major
industrial and agricultural products, such as grain, cotton,
meat, edible oil, coal, steel, cement, cloth and TV sets,
leapt from a backward position to first place in the world.
In accordance with Deng
Xiaoping’s theory of building socialism with Chinese
characteristics, the 13th National Congress of the CPC, held
in 1987, adopted the strategy of three stages for
China’s economic construction: First, doubling the GNP
of 1980 to end shortages of food and clothing, which was
basically completed at the end of the 1980s; second,
quadrupling the GNP of 1980 by the end of the century, which
was achieved in 1995, ahead of schedule. Thus, the Chinese
government worked out the Ninth Five-Year Plan for National
Economic and Social Development and the Long-Term Objectives
for the Year 2010, which put forward new objectives: Those
for the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996-2000) were as
follows—Complete the second phase of the strategic
plan for the modernization drive in an all-round way and
quadruple the per capita GNP of 1980 in 2000, when the
population will have increased by about 300 million over
that of 1980; raise the people’s living standard to
that of a fairly comfortable life, with poverty practically
eradicated; and expedite the formulation of a modern
enterprise system and initially establish the basis of a
socialist market economy. Third, basically realizing
modernization in the mid 21st century, the GDP per capita
reaching the level of the moderately developed countries,
and people living a well-off life. The objectives for the
year 2010 are to double the GNP of 2000 so that the people
will enjoy even more comfortable lives, and bring a more or
less complete socialist market economy into being. With the
fulfillment of these goals, China’s productive forces,
overall national strength and the people’s living
standards will have gone a big step further, and the
country’s social and economic aspects will have
undergone historic changes, laying a solid foundation for
the realization of modernization
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