China became the second economy in the world

The volume of gross domestic product / GDP / China according to the results of the second quarter of 2010 surpassed a similar indicator of Japan. The PRC, thus, became the second largest economy in the world after the United States, ITAR-TASS agency reports citing local media.

According to published statistics, the volumes of GDP of Japan and China for the specified period amounted to 1.286 trillion and 1.335 trillion dollars respectively.

It is worth recalling that at the beginning of the week Wall Street Journal, based on data in the first half of the year, wrote that China was just preparing to take the second line in the world economic tables. In the nominal expression of Japan's GDP for the first half of this year, it amounted to 2.578 trillion dollars, and China - $ 2.532 trillion.

Chinese officials and government experts in their comments traditionally tried to belittle the importance of this fact, indicating that the absolute indicators of GDP in this case did not reflect the real economic power of the state.

“China is a developing country,” said the representative of the Ministry of Trade of China, Yao Jian. “The structure of Chinese economic development still needs to be improved, efforts are needed to improve the quality of the economy and the life of people.” He pointed out that in the country there are more than 40 million people behind the poverty line.

“We must first of all talk about the absolute indicators of GDP, but about the size of GDP per capita,” Yao Jian emphasized.

In 2009, the average per capita income in China amounted to 3.6 thousand dollars a year. In Japan, a similar indicator was 37.8 thousand dollars.