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China Chapter 8. Trade and Transportation
TRADE AND TRANSPORTATION are the lifeblood of an economy. In the
twenty-five years that followed the founding of the People's
Republic of China in 1949, China's trade institutions and
transportation and communications networks were built into a
partially modern but somewhat inefficient system. The drive to
modernize the economy that began in 1978 required a sharp
acceleration in commodity flows and greatly improved efficiency in
economic transactions. In the ensuing years economic reforms were
adopted by the government to develop a "socialist planned commodity
economy" that combined central planning with market mechanisms.
These changes resulted in the decentralization and expansion of
domestic and foreign trade institutions, a greatly enlarged role
for free markets in the distribution of goods, and a prominent role
for foreign trade and investment in economic development. Despite
increased investment and development in the 1980s, the
transportation and communications sectors were strained by the
rapid expansion of production and the exchange of goods.
Transportation, postal services, communications, and trade,
including services, employed about 6.3 percent of the national
labor force in the mid-1980s--about 22 percent of the
nonagricultural labor force. Chinese statistics estimate that these
sectors produced about 7.4 percent of the gross national product in
1983.
Data as of July 1987
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