China: An Emerging Economic Force in Africa

Abstract

The last thirty years have witnessed fundamental changes of the Chinese economy, which has grown rapidly. China's achievements of accelerated development has brought her modernisation and a period of dramatic economic growth, with the consequences that China which has one of the world's longest continuous history, spanning five millennia, now has one of the largest economies in the world. Within a period of three decades after Deng Xiaoping started liberalising the Chinese economy from the late 1970s, China has evolved from a Third World country to position herself as one of the world's most influential economic powers with huge foreign reserves. For the past 30 years, China's economy has grown at an average annual rate of 9.6 percent, much higher than the world's average annual economic growth rate of 3.3 per cent. And it is this sustained economic growth that has transformed China into a middle-income country (Onunaiju, 2007).