What should one make of China—of its extraordinary rise, its enormous global ambitions, and its future—now that the breathtaking first phase of its ascendance seems to have ended and forces of gravity linked to its aging population and increasingly outdated economic and political models are taking over? There are few more important questions in today’s world and few, moreover, that are harder to answer.
One of the most impressive attempts to address these questions that I’ve come across in years is a slim new book that isn’t the product, as one might expect, of an economist, a historian, or a political scientist. This work, China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, is of course informed by all of these fields but is written by Wang Feng, a Chinese-born sociologist at the University of California, Irvine.
Reading Wang’s new book was humbling for me. I lived in China during the booming first decade of this century, covering it for the New York Times, and I’ve continued to visit the country, write books about it, and read innumerable works on its affairs, often reviewing them. Yet China’s Age of Abundance astounded me—not least for this argument, made indirectly in the book but stated squarely in a recent public talk that Wang gave at my university, Columbia: China’s economic takeoff since Mao Zedong died in 1976 is an event of human importance that deserves consideration alongside the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most impactful phenomena of the past millennium.
In light of the evidence that Wang, who was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, marshals for this argument, I am a little embarrassed not just for myself but also for my own profession that this frame hasn’t taken hold in the public imagination before. How many other events have affected for the better such a large swath of humanity? Throughout its recent period of reform, which began in 1978, China accounted for roughly one-fifth of the world’s population. And when one considers the speed of the country’s ascent, including a 25-fold increase in per capita income, even those Western historical
