INTRODUCTION

It could be the best of times; it could be the worst of times. Far away from Dickensian England or France, the tale of this book is set about two hundred years later in China. After a tumultuous century of foreign domination, dynastic cessation, Japanese occupation, Communist ascension, socialist transformation, and the Cultural Revolution, the ancient Middle Kingdom was finally on a path to economic modernization. In the late 1970s, the country's reformist leaders began to revamp an economy defined by rigid central planning. Shunning decades of self-imposed autarky, they also opened up to the international markets in a belated quest for foreign trade, investment, and advanced technology from the West.

Soon, the Chinese economy was booming, catapulting the country into the ranks of the world's fastest-growing club, where it has stayed for more than three decades. As living standards were rapidly soaring, the economic success might have breathed new life and legitimacy into the rule by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Not all, however, was going well. The litany of domestic troubles was long; by the late 1990s, some problems had reached crisis proportions. Periodic inflation and rampant official corruption fueled urban protests and eroded public faith in the government (Stavis 1989; Walder 1991). Hefty agricultural burdens led to mounting rural unrest (Bernstein and Lü 2003). The emergence and flourishing of pseudoreligious sects and a nationwide criminal underworld posed new problems of governance (Chung et al. 2006).