"Americans need not be hostile toward China's rise, but they should be wary about its eventual effects. The United States is the only nation with the scale and power to try to set the terms of its interaction with China rather than just succumb. So starting now, Americans need to consider the economic, environmental, political, and social goals they care about defending as Chinese influence grows." from "China Makes, the World Takes" Since December 2006,The Atlantic Magazine's James Fallows has been writing some of the most discerning accounts of the economic and political transformation occurring in China. The ten essays collected here cover a wide-range of topics: from visionary tycoons and TV-battling entrepreneurs, to environmental pollution and how China subsidizes our economy. Fallows expertly and lucidly explains the economic, political, social, and cultural forces at work turning China into a world superpower at breakneck speed. This eye-opening and cautionary account is essential reading for all concerned not only with China's but America's future role in the world. From the Trade Paperback edition.

James Fallows is The Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent, who has been based in China since 2006. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report and a former chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter. His previous books include Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq; Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy; Free Flight; Looking at the Sun; More Like Us; and National Defense, which won the American Book Award for nonfiction. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award four times, and his article about the consequences of victory in Iraq, “The Fifty- first State?” won that award in 2003.

Postcards from Tomorrow Square

December 2006

Twenty years ago, my wife and I moved with our two young sons to Tokyo. We expected to be there for three or four months. We ended up staying in Japan and Malaysia for nearly four years. We traveled frequently in China, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines, and we dodged visa rules to get into Burma and Vietnam. One year our children attended Japanese public school, which helped and hurt them in ways we're still hearing about. After our family moved back to Washington, I spent most of another year on reporting trips in Asia.

Not long ago [July 2006], my wife and I moved to Shanghai for an indefinite stay. You can't do the same thing twice, and we know that this experience will be different. Our children are twenty years older and on their own. We are, well, twenty years older. The last time, everything we saw in Japan and China was new to us. This time, we're looking at Shanghai to compare its skyscrapers and luxury-goods shopping malls with the tile-roofed shop houses and run-down bungalows we first saw here in 1986. The whole experience of expatriation has changed because of the Internet, which allows you to listen to radio programs via Webcast and talk daily with friends and family via Skype.

But it still means something to be away from the people you know and the scenes and texture of daily home-front life: the newspapers, the movies, the range of products in the stores. (Most of America's ubiquitous "Made in China" merchandise is hard to find in China itself, since it's generally destined straight for export.) And the overall exercise is similar in this way: The Japan of the 1980s was getting a lot of the world's attention; today's China is getting even more. My family and I saw Japan on the way up. During the first few months we were there, the dollar lost one-third of its value against the yen. On each trip to the money-changing office the teller's look seemed to become more pitying, and on each trip to the grocery store (forget about restaurants!) we ratcheted our buying targets another notch downward. The headlines trumpeted the yen's strength and the resulting astronomical valuation of Japan's land, companies, and holdings as signs of the nation's preeminence. The dollar's collapse made us acutely aware of the social bargain that affected everyone in Japan: high domestic prices that penalized consumers, rewarded producers, and subsidized the export success of big Japanese firms.

China has kept the value of its currency artificially low (as Japan did until 1985, just before we got there), and because it's generally so much poorer than Japan, the daily surprise is how inexpensive, rather than expensive, the basics of life can be. Starbucks coffee shops are widespread and wildly popular in big cities, even though the prices are equivalent to their U.S. levels. But for the same 24 yuan, or just over $3, that a young Shanghai office worker pays for a latte, a construction worker could feed himself for a day or two from the noodle shop likely to be found around the corner from Starbucks. Pizza Hut is also very popular, and is in the "fine dining" category. My wife and I walked into one on a Wednesday evening and were turned away because we hadn't made reservations. Taco Bell Grande is similarly popular and prestigious; the waiters wear enormous joke-like sombreros that would probably lead to lawsuits from the National Council of La Raza if worn in stateside Taco Bells. Kentucky Fried Chicken is less fancy but is a runaway success in China, as it is in most of Asia.

Through my own experiment in the economics of staple foods, I have been surprised to learn that there is such a thing as beer that is too cheap, at least for my taste. On each of my first few days on scene, I kept discovering an acceptable brand of beer that cost half as much as the beer I'd had the previous day. It was the Shanghai version

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Excerpted from Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China by James Fallows
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