Today marks forty years since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reforms that would turn the relatively poor, agrarian People's Republic into what, by some measures, is the world's largest economy. To understand just how remarkable that transformation has been, compare the growth in China's per capita GDP (a rough measure of individual income that divides the size of the economy by the size of the population) with that of half a dozen other major developed and emerging economies during the same period.