What Strikes a China Traveler …

This chapter takes up the final thoughts and thrust of the previous chapter on learning to learn about China in one’s own interest. It also continues the thought-provoking stance with a collection of new material and surprising facts, e.g., on the “Beijing miracle” re. Beijing’s radical air improvement within a decade, the major spatial decentralization in the larger capital region, rural developments, the management of 25-million cities, traffic and social infrastructures, and impressive ecological efforts. It also sorts things with a view to thousands of years of history, showing that what we experience is rather a departure from a special historical period—European and Anglo-Saxon colonialism, imperialism, and global hegemony—and a return to a thousand-year-long historical normal. The chapter discusses in what sense China is already (and again) the new “No. 1”, re. GDP and its leverage into major areas of development, including investment, education, science and technology, income, and social security. This chapter gives an overview and further sets the stage for the rest of the book (following the introduction in Chap. 1 ).