Is the PRC really the top economy????

If one accepts the PRC official size of the economy, in 元·and converts that to US$, the PRC economy is around $18 trillion, or a little more than about half the size of the US economy.

However, at PPP, the PRC economy is about 30% larger than the US economy.

How can that be when most of those in the PRC are farmers, farming a tiny plot with primitive implements?

Which was certainly true when Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth in the 1920s. When the rains failed, many died of starvation.

In 2001, the PRC still had a lot of farmers. The Chinese governments had always designated most citizens as 'farmers' who were supposed to farm, since the Chinese governments were afraid of famines coming because the PRC didn't have enough farmers working to provide a margin of safety in case of droughts or floods that reduced crop output, but actually, most of the work was done by electric machines that greatly reduced the manpower requirement. I saw many farmers, forced to be farmers by government policies, sitting around playing cards while the machines did most of the work that had once meant all day, every day of backbreaking labour that, in bad years, produced less food than the calories required to produce it. Not any more! By 2001, 90% of farmers had electricity and electric machines to do a lot of the work (I was unable to make it up to places high in the remote mountains where the Chinese government was still unable to provide electricity.)

And those farmers, forced to sit on their farms with not much to do, managed to sneak off and work in towns, in factories and offices and universities. They had to pay a penalty for not being at their farm every day, and they resented that, but their jobs paid enough they could afford the penalty for not being on the farm.

That was 20 years ago. Now those farm have almost no farmers, machines do all the work.

The US regularly reports of the poor Uyghur slaves in Xinjiang who have to pick cotton, just like American slaves before 1865. And here's a photo of one of those poor slaves hard at work:

 

As anyone can see, those slaves have a very hard life picking cotton: "When dem cotton balls get rotten you can't pick very much cotton in dem old, cotton fields back in Xinjiang."

(Actually, the PRC does have some people who pick cotton by hand, it's a very expensive kind of cotton that is not suitable for machine harvesting, and it is not very easy to get one of the very high-paying jobs picking that expensive cotton; I understand that, 30 years ago, all those high-paying cotton-picking jobs went to Han Chinese, the once favoured majority ethnic group before equal rights suddenly made their way into the Chinese government leadership, so now most of those jobs go to the Uyghurs who are the majority of the population of Xinjiang.)

Some farms are full of greenhouses producing strawberries all winter long. Also automated.

And one can see the sad state of how the poor Chinese have to get around:

 

So life is very hard in the PRC, having to go out and look for rickshaws to get around, like the ones provided by that rickshaw outlet in the photo (I believe the owner of that rickshaw factory is German, as is the name, but the rickshaws are produced in the PRC with some of the parts formerly shipped to the PRC from Germany before Germany lost access to cheap energy and had to move most of the German production to other countries).