Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"China's integration into the world economy has seen significant economic achievements, including the eradication of extreme poverty, which stood at 500 million before WTO membership and is now basically zero as the value of the economy, in dollar terms, increased 12-fold. Foreign exchange reserves increased 16-fold to $2.3 trillion, as the world's purchases from China's workshops were banked by the Chinese state. . . . Container ships are the juggernauts of global trade. In the five years after China joined the WTO, the number of containers on ships coming in and out of China doubled from 40 million to more than 80 million. By 2011, a decade after the country became a WTO member, the number of containers going in and out of China had more than trebled to 129 million.
Last year it was 245 million, and while about half of the containers going into China were empty, nearly all those leaving China were full of exports.
There has also been a massive expansion in China's highway network, which increased from 4,700km in 1997 to 161,000km by 2020, making it the largest network in the world, connecting 99% of cities with populations of over 200,000." [BBC.com accessed on Jan. 11, 2021]