ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at China's political authoritarianism, asking how much China in the first decade of the twenty-first century is itself "one world," and how much the state and its citizens are "one world." It treats China's global relations and the vibrant Chinese nationalism, growing since the mid-1990s. China was increasingly seen as one of East Asia's and the world's key leaders. In 2001, Premier Zhu Rongji, at the meeting of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Plus 3 (China, Japan, and South Korea), took the lead in negotiating an agreement to create a regional free trade zone of over 1.7 billion people by 2010. In 2001, work began on the Qinghai-Tibet railway, Tibet's first and the world's highest, reaching an altitude of 15,640 feet. Finally, China's "new world" is one filled with excitingly positive possibilities but burdened with immense problems.
