The China Century

TIME’s cover article on China treats the emerging giant as the dominant 21st Century power, a potential threat to a declining U.S. The article also notes that:

China is still a poor country whose leaders face so many problems that it is reasonable to wonder how they ever sleep. The country's urban labor market recently exceeded by 20% the number of new jobs created. Its pension system is nonexistent. China is an environmental dystopia, its cities' air foul beyond imagination and its clean water scarce. Corruption is endemic and growing. Protests and riots by rural workers are measured in the tens of thousands each year. The most immediate priority for China's leadership is less how to project itself internationally than how to maintain stability in a society that is going through the sort of social and economic change that, in the past, has led to chaos and violence.

To repeat myself, we can’t be certain about China’s future, but “China’s leadership” more easily manages the country’s “social and economic change” because of the rapid, yearly growth capitalism has brought to China.