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The Chinese economy is a lie. Hello, my friends, Stakuya here, and welcome back to the History of Everything podcast

YouTube channel.

I know that for a lot of you that are probably listening to this here right now for

that opening statement, that this is something that may come as a little bit of a shock.

But the statement that we're talking about here is something that is absolutely true.

Prior to the initiation of economic reforms and trade liberalization nearly 40 years ago, China at the time had maintained

policies that kept the economy very poor, stagnant, and centrally controlled. It was something

that was vastly inefficient and relatively isolated from the global economy. To be fair,

this is something that has a tendency to happen in communist agrarian societies, but I digress.

But since opening up to foreign trade and

investment, as well as implementing free market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world's

fastest growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product, GDP growth averaging around 9.5%

all the way through 2018, a pace that has been described by the World Bank as, quote,

the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history. Such growth has enabled China,

on average, to double its GDP every eight years and has helped raise an estimated 800 million

...