Issue 522 of New Internationalist

October 2019

China in charge

Since 1980, China has lifted over 800 million people out of absolute poverty. The four biggest banks in the world are Chinese. Between 2011 and 2013, China poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. The rise of China is perhaps the most important fact of our lifetimes. But what happens next? There are more than enough ‘red scare’ stories in the Western press that treat this nation of 1.4 billion people as a terrifying monolith. With the collection of articles below, we’ve tried to do something different.