Guest Editor's Introduction

China has the third-largest economy in the world, with a gross domestic product of U.S.$748 billion in 2000 and an economic growth rate of 8.2 percent. By as early as 2007, it is projected that it will have the world's largest economy, outstripping in gross terms both the United States and the European Union. Second only to Japan, China is currently running a huge trade surplus with the United States while prices at home remain relatively stable. In 1997-98, during the Asian financial crisis, the semiconvertible yuan was largely unaffected while the currencies of China's regional neigbors were clobbered. These and other impressive data indicate an economy that by any measure has witnessed more than twenty years of unbridled success and has nothing but smooth sailing ahead. But wait just a minute, says the renowned economist and journalist, He Qinglian. While China's leaders persistently and, some would say, ad nauseam promote the country's economic prowess, she sees a darker side of the Chinese "miracle" This was evident in the first two chapters of her book that were published in >i>The Chinese Economy>/i>, vol. 33, no. 3 (May-June 2000). Is He Qinglian simply a Chinese naysayer? A Beijing "nabob of negativism"? Someone too willing to throw cold water on what by all accounts has been two remarkable decades and more of economic progress for possibly the largest segment of humankind in history? Perhaps. But then, consider the points made in the following three chapters of He Qinglian's monumental work, which has been influential among China's leaders and regime critics alike, and which the translators, Nancy Yang Liu and Lawrence R. Sullivan, have rendered in English as >i>China's Descent into a Quagmire.>/i>