China Alone

Abstract

This book represents an attempt to make sense of the financial and political change that is starting to wash across China, change that represents a turning point in the most recent cycle of glorious expansion, wealth creation, and hope over the last thirty years. Those years followed thirty of crabbed contraction, mistrust, and isolationism. The intensity of these cycles in China’s state of affairs demonstrates how those who manage to command this enormous, diverse, yet unified nation exercise control of a scale inconceivable elsewhere, and find themselves able, intentionally or not, to create both economic miracles and tragedies of unrivaled scale. I argue that the current, utopian overbuild of cities measures against the Great Leap Forward as one of the great follies of history, and one that will have unfortunate consequences for China as an economy and for its people.