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 annual outputs of major industrial and agricultural products were 445,000 tons of yarn, 2.79 billion meters of cloth, 61.88 million 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.
Before 1978, China's economy had a weak foundation in agriculture, and the ratio between light and heavy industries was unbalanced. Since 1978, China has adopted a series of policies and measures giving priority to the development of light industry, expanding the import of top-quality consumer goods, strengthening the construction of basic industry and facilities, and devoting major efforts to developing tertiary industry, so as to make China's economic structure more coordinated, optimized and balanced. The relations between different industries and within industries in terms of proportion have clearly been improved; the proportion of primary industry has declined, while that of the secondary and tertiary industries has grown; the growth of the overall national economy was driven formerly by the primary and secondary industries, but now it is being driven by the secondary and tertiary industries. Actually the growth of secondary industry becomes the main engine of rapid development for China's economy.
