by Aaron Dollhausen

Created on: July 25, 2009

China's economic growth does have the potential to increase indefinitely. However, there are major challenges which must be overcome in order for this momentum to continue. Once these challenges are overcome, China's economic expansion may be limitless. As rosy as things are for the economy, the same cannot be said for China's government. As China's economic growth continues, the economy and government will collide and the government of China will change to accommodate.

In 1979, government officials realized that the Soviet-style system, upon which China's economy was built upon, was inhibiting China's economic growth. To counter this, large numbers of economic reforms were enacted. Since that time China's economy has not only developed at a very high rate, but this trend is likely to continue for many decades to come. In fact, China has become the third largest trading nation after the United States and Germany, according to rankings published by the global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney in 2006.

Additionally, China's gowth domestic product grew to $3.4 trillion (United States dollars), making China's economy the third largest economy in the world in terms of GDP, according to a 2009 piece published by CNN.com entitled "China passes Germany in economic rankings." This growth rate lead economist Ting Lu of Merrill Lynch to project that within "three to four years" China's overall economy will overtake Japan, according to a MercoPress dispatch posted in January 2009.

With all of this, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development declared that by 2010, China has the potential to become the largest exporter in the world. Clearly, China's potential for economic growth shows no signs of slowing down any time in the near future.

Guiding the increases of China's economy are three objectives established in 1987's Three Step Development Strategy. The first step is to double the 1980 growth national product. This steo was met in the late 1980s. The second step when farther: to quadruple the 1980 GNP by 1999. This step was met four years ahead of schedule.

Finally, the last step sets a very high goal that mosty of the world's developing countries would be hard-pressed to achieve. China intends to increase the economy's per-capita growth national product to the levels of medium-developed countries- countries such as Brazil, Russia, and Saudi Arabia- by the year 2050. Again, with the remarkable performace of China's economies, I have no doubt

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