The list goes on and on. Yet for all the benefits economic reforms have brought, there is a daunting list of challenges faced by both China's Communist Party policymakers as well as by business and political leaders around the globe. How, for instance, can China adequately provide proper housing and infrastructure for the countless millions moving to their cities? How can they halt and begin to roll back the terrible environmental damage that has accompanied their fast development? Around the world, urgent questions about how to stanch wholesale job losses, prompted by companies moving operations to China, are being hotly debated.


AN UNLIKELY STORY
There's little doubt that China will be at the center of the world's attention in this century. But to understand how the country came to take on such an important global role, one has to go back to the 1970s and the aftermath of the leadership of China's authoritarian Communist ruler, Mao Zedong. For almost three decades, from 1949 until his death in 1976, Mao ruled China as a dictator, determining the shape and direction of the country's most important social and economic policies.

From an economic point of view, says ­David Lampton, dean of faculty and director of China studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Mao's rule was devastating. "Mao had some accomplishments, but he left a legacy of economic chaos," he says. In particular, the Great Leap Forward (the disastrous effort to industrialize China's economy) and the Cultural Revolution (Mao's attempt to affirm the dominance of his political ideology) caused widespread famine, death, and dislocation.