Bryan Walsh

  • culture June/July/Aug 2008

    OLD CHINA HAND

    The preeminent story of our time will not be the occupation of Iraq or the war on terror, but the shift of economic, technological, and geopolitical power to the East—specifically, China. Newspaper editors have coined a name for this story—“the rise of China”—but that’s not quite right. China isn’t rising the way the United States rose from a scattering of rustic colonies to a global superpower in two centuries, or the way Japan rose from an isolated island to the world’s second-largest economy in little more than half that time. Home to 1.3 billion people, with a history measured in millennia,

  • fiction Apr/May 2008

    The sheer size of China’s population is the nation’s blessing and its curse. The hundreds of millions of workers who can produce goods cheaper and faster than anywhere else drive its rise as an economic superpower, but this astounding human density has taken a toll on the environment: The needs of 1.3 billion people have left little room for unspoiled wilderness. Then there is the psychological cost. Let’s just put it this way: If you’re one in a million in China, there are 1,299 others—and counting—just like you.

    Those facts might help explain the amazing success of Jiang Rong’s debut novel,