The fascinating Far East

• The U.S. economy is about eight times the size of China's. Our manufacturing sector is bigger than the entire Chinese economy. Americans, per capita, earn 36 times what the Chinese do.

• Since 1978, [China's] gross domestic product (GDP) has risen fourfold;

  in straight dollar terms, China's economy is the world's sixth largest with a GDP of around $1.4 trillion. Today, China is the world's third-most-active trading nation, behind the U.S. and Germany, and ahead of Japan.

• Because 12 percent of China's exports to the U.S. end up on Wal-Mart's shelves, and because Wal-Mart's trade with China accounts for one percent of the country's GDP, the company exerts tremendous downward pressure on prices.

• China currently has more than 15,000 highway projects in the works, which will add 162,000 kilometers of road to the country, enough to circle the planet at the equator four times.

• China recently passed Japan as the world's second-largest consumer of petroleum, and growing Chinese demand lately has been pushing up oil prices worldwide.

• China has 100 cities of more than a million people. By 2010, nearly half of all China's people will live in urban areas.

• Every month, five million new subscribers sign up for mobile-phone service in China. The country's 300 million mobile-phone users make China the largest such market in the world.

• Already the largest foreign investor in China's electronics industry, Motorola plans to triple its stake to more than $10 billion by 2006.

• China will produce 325,000 engineers this year. That's five times as many as in the U.S., where the number of engineering graduates has been declining since the early 1980s.

• In 2003, China spent $60 billion on research and development. The only countries that spent more were the U.S. and Japan, which spent $282 billion and $104 billion respectively. Thus, the U.S. spent nearly five times what China did, but had less than two times as many researchers (1.3 million compared to 743,000).

Taken from "The Chinese Century" by Ted C. Fishman, The New York Times Magazine , July 4, 2004