Over the last 25 years, China has undergone an absolute meteoric rise as an industrial and economic power, inadvertently dragging Australia along for the ride.
At the turn of the new millennium, China possessed the sixth-largest economy in the world, sandwiched between Italy and France in the rankings and possessing an economy just one-quarter the size of Japan’s.
Today, China is the world’s second-largest economy by a huge margin, with an economy more than four times the size of third-place Germany’s.