Overview

Leveraging its enormous human capital, China has truly become the worlds factory - in the past two decades manufacturing facilities for export goods as diverse as textiles, metals and computers have relocated to China from all over Asia, and China's share of global manufacturing output has doubled.

In becoming this industrial powerhouse, it has moved in less than twenty years roughly 400 million people from poverty into middle class - a rate and scale of economic advancement that no human economy or society has ever before achieved. Along the way the People's Bank of China has accumulated well over a trillion dollars worth of foreign exchange reserves.