Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a key indicator of a nation’s overall economic size and power. GDP is generally defined as the total market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period. GDP is by no means a perfect economic indicator. It lacks the complexity needed to provide a richer picture of economic health and productivity, and China’s official economic figures are known to be distorted. Nevertheless, GDP is among the most cited macroeconomic data points and warrants tracking.
When it comes to GDP, China is a global outlier in many respects. Its economy is far larger than that of developing countries, and it has sustained decades of rapid economic growth. Yet China’s economy also differs in many respects from the world’s leading, advanced economies. This ChinaPower tracker includes 10 charts with up-to-date data to help break down and compare key aspects of China’s GDP.
Measuring China’s GDP
For centuries, China and India each accounted for between one-fourth and one-third of global GDP, thanks in large part to their sprawling populations. This changed abruptly in the 19th century as industrialization enabled rapid increases in productivity in the United States and Europe. China and India correspondingly saw their relative share of the global economy shrink. This persisted until the late 1970s when China began initiating market-based reforms and opening to the outside world, which helped kickstart and sustain economic growth. Today, China’s share of global GDP stands at over 18 percent when adjusted for price differences—the largest of any country.
The methods used to measure and compare GDP can significantly alter the outcomes. One method, nominal GDP, measures the goods and services produced in each country and converts them to a common currency, such as the U.S. Dollar. This method is the most straightforward and the most useful for comparing relative economic power on the world stage. However, it does not account for distortions resulting from price differences between countries, which matter when assessing economic activity within a country. Measuring GDP at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) accounts for price level differences and typically has a large impact when comparing wealthy countries to developing countries. China’s nominal GDP is the second-largest after the United States, but measured at PPP, China’s GDP is larger than that of the United States.1
In many respects, China is an outlier among the world’s large economies. Most leading economies are in open, democratic societies, but China is an authoritarian state that significantly curtails individual freedoms. One way of showing China’s outlier status is by plotting GDP against Freedom Scores, a measure devised by Freedom House to assess political rights and civil liberties around the world. In 2025, China received a Freedom Score of 9—one of the lowest in the world, indicating “not free.” The other top-five largest economies (the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom) all had scores above 80, indicating “free.” The next largest economy to share a similar Freedom Score with China—Russia—has a GDP of $2.2 trillion—just 12 percent of the size of China’s.
China is also an outlier among many other leading economies in that it still labels itself a developing economy and seeks the accompanying benefits in international organizations. Yet the developing country label belies the more complex reality that development is highly uneven within China. Many of its coastal provinces are far wealthier than inland and western regions. Beijing, China’s wealthiest region, boasted a per capita GDP of about $31,760 in 2024, which was on par with many high-income, advanced economies. However, China’s poorest province, Gansu, has a per capita GDP of about $7,358, which is approximately that of Jamaica and Thailand.
Measuring China’s GDP Growth
China also distinguishes itself by achieving a much higher rate of GDP growth than much of the world. Even more notably, it has done so for decades. Since 1990, China has averaged breakneck GDP growth of almost 9 percent per year, at times peaking at over 14 percent. This is considerably faster than the average pace of most of its upper-middle income peers and much faster than the global average (excluding China). China’s GDP growth has cooled in recent years, plummeting to a recent low of just 2.2 percent in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. China continues to face economic headwinds linked to housing market troubles and other factors. In 2022, China’s GDP growth fell again to just 3 percent—below the average growth rate of the rest of the world for the first time in decades—before recovering to a reported growth rate of approximately 5 percent in 2023 and 2024.
Economic forecasters devote considerable attention to predicting China’s future economic growth, but unforeseen events can significantly shift the outcomes of forecasts.2 In April 2025, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that China’s GDP would reach $23.1 trillion by 2030, much more conservative than the $27.5 trillion in GDP from the April 2023 forecast. This is largely due to China’s slower-than-expected recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing real estate market slowdown. Per the IMF’s GDP projections, China is poised to widen its lead over other major economies but fall behind faster growth in the United States. Forecasts for U.S. GDP were revised upward, with the IMF projecting it to reach nearly $37 trillion by 2030, well ahead of China’s $25.8 trillion.
Studies have shown that China’s official self-reported GDP figures are not perfectly reflective of reality. Political motivations have frequently led Chinese officials to pad economic data. As a result, there have been numerous attempts to use other measures to track China’s economy. One tool is the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s China Cyclical Activity Tracker (CCAT), which measures fluctuations in Chinese economic activity by taking a weighted average of eight non-GDP indicators in order to measure deviations in year-over-year growth relative to trends.3 The index is produced quarterly and displayed in units of standard deviation from the expected trend. Notably, even the CCAT index has its limitations since its indicators are skewed toward measuring industrial activity, which does not correlate exactly with overall economic activity.
Breaking Down China’s GDP
China’s economic size and rapid growth are not the only thing that set it apart. It also relies on different drivers of growth than many large economies. China’s economic development has been fueled in large part by a sprawling industrial sector, which includes manufacturing, construction, mining, and utilities. In 2024, value-added industrial output accounted for nearly 37 percent of China’s GDP—more than double that of the United States (17.3 percent). Conversely, China’s service sector (56.7 percent of GDP) is much smaller than in the United States (79.7 percent) and most other advanced economies. This trend, however, is changing. In 2010, China’s service sector amounted to just 44 percent of GDP, considerably lower than today.
China’s massive industrial and manufacturing output has helped to fuel the country’s economic growth, but it has also left China heavily reliant on exports. Economic policymakers have hoped to ween China off export-driven growth toward an economy that is driven more by domestic consumption. Yet China’s GDP remains significantly linked to exports. Amid the Global Financial Crisis of 2009, plummeting global demand led to a stark drop in Chinese exports, which resulted in a steep decline in the share of Chinese GDP growth coming from net exports. Conversely, during the Covid-19 pandemic, large government stimulus measures in the United States and Europe boosted demand for Chinese exports. Sluggish global demand led Chinese exports to decline in 2023, which weighed on China’s GDP growth. However, a drastic rebound occurred in 2024, when 30 percent of GDP growth in China came from exports—the highest level since 1997. This was partly due to rebounded demand from Europe, growing appetite for Chinese goods from emerging markets like ASEAN and Brazil, and front-loading of imported goods from China in anticipation of higher U.S. tariffs
China’s export-heavy model of economic growth leaves less room for consumption-led growth. This is markedly different from most advanced economies, where domestic consumption is the main driver of economic growth. China has seen some success in boosting its consumption-driven growth since 2010, but the pandemic disrupted much of that progress. Since 2023, government stimulus plans have been modestly successful at encouraging domestic consumption, and consumption-driven growth has rebounded to account for nearly 57 percent of China’s GDP. That said, consumer confidence remains tepid and authorities have stopped short of major structural reforms that might strengthen domestic demand. In this respect, China remains well behind the United States and United Kingdom, where consumption contributes over 80 percent of GDP. 