WU PENG We celebrated the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on Tuesday, and I want to express my sincere gratitude to friends from all communities who have long cared about and supported China's development and China-South Africa relations. I also wish to extend festive greetings to all fellow Chinese working, studying and living in South Africa. The Communist Party of China united and led Chinese people of all ethnic groups to work diligently down the path of Chinese modernisation, and together achieved rapid economic development and long-term social stability.
In 1949, China's per capita national income was only $27. Our economic output was less than 5% of the world's total. In 2023, China's per capita national income reached $13000 and our economic output reached 17% of the world's total.
In the first half of this year, China's GDP grew by 5%, and our foreign trade grew by 6.1%. Over 70 years ago, China could not produce a single car.
Watches, bicycles, and sewing machines, nicknamed "the Big Three", were all luxury items for quite a long time for the Chinese people. By 2023, China's automobile production and sales both exceeded 30 million vehicles, and China's "New Big Three" products, namely electric vehicles, lithium batteries and solar cells combined, surpassed the milestone of one trillion yuan in the value of total exports. At the beginning of the founding of New China, 80 percent of the population were illiterate.
By 2023, the averag.