The term economic development is quite different from the economic growth, but both are closely related to the economic sustainability. Therefore, the quantification of growth and development is extremely important to assess the sustainable development of a country's economy. In this paper, we quantify the growth, development, and sustainability of Chinese economy by employing the Ecological Network Analysis (ENA) approach. This has been widely used to address the sustainability of ecological system, and subsequently being adopted in economic system for analysis and case study. In the case of China, using input-output table data, the economic system can be represented by a six sector currency network flow. The ENA indicators of the network are calculated from 1987 to 2010, to address the features and trends of growth, development, and sustainability of the Chinese economic system. The results show that, the Total System Throughput (TST) of the network grows exponentially from 1987 to 2010, which implies that the Chinese economic system grows rapidly from 1987 to 2010. During the same period, the trend in the efficiency of economic system is rather complex, by smaller degree of increase with fluctuations. From the perspective of later decade, the efficiency during 1997-2010 is certainly higher than the efficiency during 1987-1995. This implies that the Chinese economic system has obtained some degree of development in the latter half of our analysis. Contrastingly, the efficiency exhibits a declining trend from 2002 onwards, which needs to be paid special attention. Both the Ascendency (A) and the Development Capacity (C) of Chinese economic system continued to improve from 1987 to 2010, which is primarily due to the rapid growth of the TST in the same period. TST, contributes atleast 90% to the Chinese economic system between 1987 and 2010, whereas, the contribution of the efficiency is only 10% during the same period. This implies that growth and development attribute 90% and 10% to the Chinese economic system between 1987 and 2010, respectively. The average value of the Chinese economic system i.e. α is 0.138 during 1987-2010, which is far less than the Sustainability Optimal Value of 0.37 (or 0.33). This is indicative to the fact that the Chinese economic system is in unsustainable condition, and that is due to lack of efficiency. In order to improve the sustainability of the economic system, some measures need to be taken to improve the efficiency and organization of the economic system.In the six sectors currency network of China, the TST indicator exhibits more or less similar trend with the GDP of China. Average Mutual Information (AMI) indicator' change trend is also in accord with the reality change of the Chinese economy. But the average α value of the network during 1987-2010 is just 0.138 and that is much lower than the Sustainability Optimal Value of 0.37. This is from the observation in the theoretical experiments, and is uncertain whether this value suits appropriately to the economic system or not. Even through, we know that the Chinese currency network average α value (0.138) is lower than the global virtual water trade network (0.181) and the global petroleum trade network (0.199) average α value during 1896-2001 and 2007-2001, respectively. This further concludes that the Chinese economic system is in the low efficiency condition.