As any recent visitor knows, 21st-century China has a way of dazzling visitors with its prodigious energy, hyperdevelopment, and hell-bent rush into the future.

The new urban tableaux of glass curtain-wall high-rises, shopping malls, apartment buildings, restaurants complexes, museums, concert halls, and hotels topped by tiaras of construction cranes and ringed by tangles of highway flyovers—almost all of which have appeared over the last decade—supercharge China with a palpable air of irrepressible dynamism and invincibility.

In the wake of our thrall with Japan’s seemingly unstoppable economic march in the 1980s and our 1990s infatuation with the high-speed development of the so-called Five Dragons—Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia—we have now designated China as the latest Asian “economic miracle.” In each decade we have allowed ourselves to be tantalized by a beguiling mixture of mysterious Asian otherness, provocative economic challenge, and a hint of menace to our dominance that has always had a way of exciting our deeply rooted alpha-male sense of global competitiveness.

That this land, once known as the “sick man of Asia” for its famines, floods, poverty, pestilence, warlords, and foreign occupation, could have been reborn as the militantly socialist epicenter of Maoist revolution was unimaginable enough. That it then managed to molt its Maoist carapace to become an exemplar of boomtown market capitalism was even more unimaginable. China has undergone perhaps the most dramatic serial transformations of any country in modern memory.

From being at odds with almost every nation around it and being a cauldron of fratricidal factional struggle at home, China has now managed to negotiate tranquil borders with such countries as Russia, Vietnam, and India, and to undergo three changes in its top leadership without overt struggle. At the same time, it has transcended the humiliation of the Tiananmen Square Massacre to march forth economically around the world with growing confidence and pride—exactly the qualities that for so long eluded its people.

Underlying the extraordinary reincarnation of this People’s Republic is a huge fault line of contradictions. The fault line is not as readily evident to visitors, who tend to flock to the great, booming cities and never see the vast and often poor hinterland. On the one hand, the dazzling cityscapes suggest a vibrant country that has pioneered a new and hopeful development model, a model that has enabled China to escape the surly bonds of backwardness and that can perhaps be an example for others in the world to follow. On the other is the mirror image of the miracles—the host of seemingly intractable problems that lurk just beneath the glitzy surface and suggest a country in a state perilously close to unsustainability, if not disequilibrium.

All of this is visible in the work of Mark Leong, who has been photographing China for many years. As his illuminating photographs show, this is a country not only in transition and on the move but one of the most unresolved countries in the world, suspended between starkly different economic and social systems with no clear road map of where it intends to go.

Leong’s photographs include images of China’s new bourgeois lifestyle, such as the pudgy child in a supermarket being proffered a cereal sample by a saleswoman, and the late-night bar in Beijing littered with empties. The images depict the nouveau riche enjoying the heady, often decadent, pleasures of a booming consumer culture. At the same time, Leong opens a porthole onto an entirely different world, that of the poor and dispossessed, where immigrant laborers sleep in a disorderly pile in a train station and a street urchin survives uncared for. Like China itself, his portfolio is one of glaring social contrasts.

We are left to integrate parallel universes—universes that evoke modernity and backwardness, hedonism and deprivation, optimism and pessimism, order and chaos, hope and despair, stability and instability—into a general view of China. Even for someone such as myself, who has been to China scores of times over many decades to chronicle its unpredictable odyssey, this most counterintuitive of countries leaves the visitor to confront an equation embracing almost unintegratable factors. The scenarios it implies for the future are confoundingly equal and opposite.

Start with the “miracle.” Consider the following:
• China’s growth rate—almost 11 percent in 2006, more than 9 percent over the past two decades—has created an economy almost 10 times larger (now the fourth largest in the world, behind the U.S., Japan, and Germany) than it was in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping initiated his post-Mao reforms.
• With four-fifths of America’s Fortune 500 companies invested in China, last year China garnered one third, or $80 billion, of the world’s foreign direct investment, known as FDI—a stark comparison to India’s mere $7 billion. (The labor productivity of foreign-invested companies is about nine times that of state-invested companies; they grow at an annual rate of 18 percent, while state-invested companies grow at only five to six percent.)
• Beijing’s foreign exchange reserves have grown to approximately $1 trillion, with China’s investment in U.S. T-bills second only to Japan’s.
• China is now doing some $1.4 trillion worth of foreign trade each year.
• With a growth rate exceeding 25 percent, China’s exports could reach $1 trillion by the end of 2006. China is now positioned to become the largest exporter in the world sometime before 2010.
• Seventy percent of Wal-Mart products are now manufactured in China.
• China will have a projected trade surplus with the United States this year of over $200 billion and an estimated global surplus of $150 billion, up from $102 billion in 2005.
• China is now the second-largest importer of petroleum in the world.
• Some 400 million Chinese have a cell phone.
• More than 200 million Chinese are regular on-line users.
• Chinese universities graduate around 350,000 engineers a year, roughly five times more than the United States.
• China is the largest producer of cement, steel, and coal.
• China’s new automotive industry had a 47 percent growth rate during the first six months of 2006, and is now poised to enter the American market.
• Per-capita income has risen by a multiple of six. Upwards of 400 million people are reported to have been elevated from poverty.
• Shanghai boasts the world’s largest shipyard, Asia’s first magnetic-levitation train, and the largest Ferris wheel on the globe; it will soon have the world’s tallest building.
• The worlds of culture, especially in art—film, fashion, music, rap, and other performing arts—now have a new edge and excitement, even if they are not always welcomed by the Party.
• In 2008, Beijing will play host to the Summer Olympics, an event that is transforming the capital into a much greener and cleaner city.

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