This fall occurred because agricultural output grew more slowly than output of other economic sectors.
At the same time, the share of tertiary industry grew from 24% to 40% as services sectors proliferated.
The share of the secondary sector has stayed level at around 48% over the period as a whole.

1992 Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour at the beginning of the year massively boosted foreign direct investment inflows into coastal areas and started a wave of government investment in Shanghai. Record trade and GDP growth and inflation followed.

1993 Zhu Rongji appointed to rein in the overheating economy, this time more selectively than in 1989-91. Growth rates subsided gradually in subsequent years, producing a so-called "soft landing". During the 1990s, living standards continued to rise, as evidenced by the proliferation of consumer durables, especially among the urban population. Continuing FDI inflows helped boost foreign exchange reserves to record heights in the late 1990s.

Especially after the publication of the 1998 GDP figures, economists, both in China and abroad, have raised serious doubts about the quality of China's national accounts, which appeared in the late 1990s to overstate economic growth and are now suspected of understating growth. This may be because the statistical system tends to overestimate output at the trough of the cycle and underestimate output at the peak.

However, the country's first production census discovered at the end of 2005 that GDP has recently been grossly underestimated as a result of a failure to take into account the rapid growth of the services sector. As a  result, growth rates for 2003-2005 are now recorded at around 10% per year in real terms.

  Despite efforts to cool the overheating economy, the officially recorded GDP growth rate was 11.4% in 2007.

In 2008 the global economic crisis began to reduce China's growth rate. In the face of forecasts that this might drop below the rate at which school leavers can be absorbed by the growing economy (7%-8%) the government decided to pump Rmb 4 trillion into the economy in the form of an economic stimulus package consisting largely of investment in fixed infrastucture and human capital.

The stimulus succeeded in preventing a dramatic fall in GDP growth in 2009 and in providing a sustained recovery in 2010, when the real annual GDP growth rate rose to 10.4%.

With stagnation in China's major markets in 2011, GDP growth is expected to subside to around 9.2% by the end of the year.

As global conditions continue to deteriorate in late 2011, it seems likely that economic growth will fall to around 8% in 2012. The government does not have the option of returning to stimulus on the massive scale of 2008-2009 and has to be careful not to stoke inflation.