For the past twenty-seven years China, according to official estimates, has enjoyed an average GDP growth rate of 9.4 percent per year.¹ GDP per capita in 2005 was eight times what it was in 1978. Some analysts argue that these official growth rates may overstate China’s true rate of development, but there is also evidence that in some sectors they understate the true rate. No serious analyst, however, doubts that the pace of economic change has been rapid and that China has gone from being a very poor and economically weak nation in the 1970s to a still relatively low...