Excerpt
China One: The Sleeping Giant Awakens

By Nate Hendley

In 1989, tanks and soldiers mowed down thousands of students and workers in Beijing who were protesting for democracy and against corruption. That same year, an American-born Beijing-based rock musician named Kaiser Kuo introduced heavy-metal music to China. While the protest movement was snuffed out, Kaiser went on to sell millions of albums and kick-start a Chinese musical revolution.

Between these two extremes lies much of what you need to know about modern China. A land of contrasts, China is a place where political dissent is crushed, the economy keeps getting larger and personal freedom—such as the right to rock—is on the rise.

Theoretically a Communist state, China currently boasts the world’s biggest population (1.3 billion people) and fastest growing economy (9.5 percent annual growth). Though a political dictatorship, China, with its burgeoning economic sector, offers unheard of opportunities. Millions of Chinese citizens have opted to get-rich-quick rather than stick to the socialist path forged by Chairman Mao Zedong.

Some experts predict China’s economy might soon overtake that of the United States.

This is quite an achievement for a country that was a basket case for decades. War and revolution racked China during the first half of the century. From the late 1940s through the late 1970s, Communist state planners did their best to ruin the economy. The “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution”—ill-fated government initiatives designed, respectively, to industrialize and indoctrinate the nation—brought chaos, misery, and death to millions.