(Bloomberg) -- China’s annual work report is littered with some eye popping numbers.
Here’s a few highlights that illustrate the enormity of the continent-sized economy and the transformation it’s undergoing.
- Gross domestic product grew by 6.6 percent last year to exceed 90 trillion yuan. That represents a 10-fold increase over the past 20 years
- A further 13.61 million new urban jobs were added last year. That’s more than the entire population of Belgium
- An average of over 18,000 new businesses opened DAILY last year, taking the total number of market entities past 100 million
- More than 6.2 million housing units were rebuilt in rundown urban areas and 1.9 million dilapidated rural houses were renovated
- Close to 14 million people originally from rural areas gained permanent urban residency
- Another 4,100 kilometers of high-speed railways opened to traffic -- that’s about a third the diameter of planet Earth. Over 6,000 kilometers of expressways and more than 300,000 kilometers of rural roads were built or improved -- add those together and you’ve almost reached the moon
- The number of people in China aged 60 and above has reached 250 million. If China’s grey population were a country, it would be the world’s fifth biggest by people.
