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Based on various originally constructed statistical series of stocks of productive physical capital and of firms’ fixed assets, and on a definition—as rigorous as possible—of the scope of the industrial sector, we calculate several indicators of profit rates at the levels of corporate accounts and of national accounts for China from 1952 to 2014. The results obtained by these two methods are quite similar and can be summarized as follows: i) a tendency of the profit rate to fall is observed over the long term, for the two levels of analysis; ii) at the macro level, the short-term fluctuations in the profit rates show a succession of (rarely complete) cycles whose amplitude decreases with time; iii) more than a third of the period covered is affected by recessive years for the cyclical component of the profit rate. The largest declines are recorded, in descending order, after the rupture between China and the Soviet Union (1961–1963), during the Cultural Revolution (1968), in the course of the 1950s, during the post-Mao transition (1976–1977), following the Tiananmen events (1989–1991), and with the spread of the crises of globalization (which affected China in 1998, 2001, 2009, and since 2012).