ABSTRACT
During the last three decades, no other country and political organization has benefitted more from globalization than China and its ruling Communist Party (CCP). China’s re-emergence as a global economic (and political) power is widely recognized around the world as one of the most monumental power shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even more stunning is the fact that it was just in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping launched China’s economic “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) policies and transformed it from a dispirited and isolated underdeveloped country into a dynamic and globalized modern state. From Shanghai to Beijing to Chengdu to Chongqing, cranes dot the skyline of these rapidly sprawling cities, while in the remote hinterlands, ancient towns and villages are being demolished to make way for new peri-urban centers. To put Beijing’s accomplishments in perspective, the Chinese have been able to achieve in a mere 30 years what took the Europeans two centuries.
