Development Success Stories and Global Goals

China's economic transformation since 1978 is the largest poverty reduction episode in human history. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who consolidated power after Mao Zedong's death in 1976, China launched market-oriented reforms beginning with the household responsibility system in agriculture, followed by the creation of Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen from 1980, which offered tax incentives and lighter regulation to attract foreign investment. According to World Bank estimates, these reforms and the sustained growth that followed — averaging near 9 to 10 percent annually for over three decades — lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty between 1978 and the late 2010s, with the extreme poverty rate falling from around 88 percent of the population in 1981 to below 1 percent by 2019. China's accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001 further accelerated its integration into global manufacturing supply chains. The model combined gradual, experimental liberalization with continued one-party political control and heavy state direction of strategic industries and finance, a combination that does not fit neatly into either the free-market Washington Consensus framework or the earlier Soviet central-planning model.