China should be seen today as two nations, one along the coastal cities which is prospering, getting wired up, and ready to make a great leap forward into a post-modern world with its focus on cyberspace, and another, mainly rural China where hundreds of millions live in poverty. China's big eastern cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are in a fever of upgrading. Old buildings are being replaced by cavernous palaces clad in glass and marble and a new business class is thriving. But beggars are also becoming a feature of Chinese city life as social divisions deepen. In the provinces the construction boom has disfigured many cities, where blackened concrete shells of half-constructed buildings remain as evidence of failed investments.
Many Western analysts worry about China becoming successful.
If half of the Chinese population of 1.26 billion achieves the lifestyle of an average American and acquired a car, said one expert, the strain on the world's resources would be unbearable. But the argument may be spurious. Much of the dynamism of China and its Asian neighbours comes from a unique resource - the 50 million overseas Chinese who live in countries scattered around Asia, with the exceptions of Korea and Japan. The economy of the overseas Chinese is reckoned to be the third-largest in the world after the US and Japan. The six million Chinese in Indonesia, forming only three per cent of the population, control an estimated 70 per cent of the economy.