Between 1978 and 2002, China rose worldwide as one of the most dynamic centers of capital accumulation. After a pragmatic reading of world political and economic events at the end of the 1970s, the Chinese state, led by Deng Xiaoping and his reformist group, promoted a break with the patterns of internal accumulation and external insertion of the Chinese economy.Internally, the sectorial reforms embodied in the "four modernizations" made possible the opening of unprecedented fronts of capital accumulation in the Chinese economy. The macroeconomic management was fully aligned and conditioned to the reform project, being accompanied by institutional and social transformations over the period, without which there would be no possibility of success for the reformist project.Externally, the rupture of isolation with the outside, the advent of the hegemonic crisis and the consequent financial expansion centered on the United States, the transformations of the Asian economies before and after the 1997 crisis and the planned opening of internal economic sectors by the State to the presence of foreign capital allowed the gradual Chinese advance over Asian and global networks of production, trade and investment, making the Chinese economy one of the most important centers of material expansion and capital accumulation in the capitalist world-economy at the beginning of the 21st century.