China Manufacturing Value Added (% of GDP) (2025)

China's manufacturing sector contributed 24.7% of GDP in 2025, down 0.1 percentage points from 24.8% in 2024. That is the fourth consecutive annual decline, with the share falling every year since 2022, and it leaves the ratio 7.3 percentage points below the 32.0% peak recorded in 2006. Over the full 2004–2025 series the only interruption to the broader downward drift was 2021, when the share rose 1.0 percentage point before resuming its decline the following year.

A falling manufacturing share of GDP is routinely misread as deindustrialisation. In China's case the ratio has fallen for two decades even as manufacturing output has continued to grow in absolute terms — the share falls because services and other sectors of a maturing, richer economy tend to grow faster than manufacturing, not necessarily because factories are producing less. Reading the percentage alone, without the level of output behind it, will lead an analyst to the wrong conclusion.

This series measures manufacturing's share of China's own GDP, not China's share of world manufacturing output — a distinction worth stating plainly, since the two are frequently searched together and are not interchangeable. Key methodology points:

• Unit: Manufacturing value added, current-year, as a percentage of GDP
• Definition: Net output of the manufacturing sector after adding up outputs and subtracting intermediate inputs, per the UN System of National Accounts
• Coverage: Annual, 2004–2025, 22 observations
• Series code: World Bank NV.IND.MANF.ZS
• Publisher: World Bank, sourced from national accounts data
• Not the same as: China's share of global manufacturing value added, a separate cross-country comparison also published by bodies such as UNIDO using different valuation methodology; figures from that measure are not comparable to the percentages on this page

The trajectory has two distinct phases. From 2004 to roughly 2011 the ratio held in a narrow band around 31%, moving from 31.5% at the start of the series to 31.6% in 2011. From 2012 onward the decline became persistent and steep, falling from 31.0% to the current 24.7% over 13 years, a period that broadly coincides with China's stated push to rebalance growth away from investment and exports toward services and domestic consumption.

For an analyst, the level of the ratio matters less than its direction and pace. A steady multi-year decline of this kind is consistent with an economy shifting its GDP composition toward services and consumption, which Chinese policymakers have stated as a goal. It is a different signal from a sudden drop, which would more plausibly indicate a genuine contraction in industrial activity rather than a structural shift. Cross-referencing this series against China's household consumption share of GDP, the other side of the same rebalancing story, gives a fuller picture of whether that shift is actually taking hold.

Compare with: China Household Final Consumption (% of GDP) · China Population · China R&D Expenditure (% of GDP) · Germany Manufacturing Value Added (% of GDP) · United States Manufacturing Value Added (% of GDP) · Japan Manufacturing Value Added (% of GDP) · South Korea Manufacturing Value Added (% of GDP)