Over the last 25 years, China successfully moved from agriculture to manufacturing activities and saw an annual trend of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth of just under 10 per cent (Ghosh, 2008a). China’s manufacturing sector doubled its share of the workforce and tripled its share of output. The rate of extreme poverty at the national level declined from a high of 84 per cent in 1981 to a low of 16 per cent in 2005.