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The article looks at how China's economic expansion will affect growth and jobs around the globe. "What you cannot avoid, welcome," says an old Chinese proverb. The world would be wise to bear it in mind in its dealings with China. The country's global integration will have a bigger impact on the world economy than that of any previous emerging economy. Fortunately, though, it will be mostly a force for good, boosting overall prosperity. China's ascent will affect the outside world more than Japan's did in its time, not only because of the potential size of its economy but also because of two distinct features. First, for such a big economy it is unusually open to trade and investment. The second feature is that Chinese manufacturers have access to an almost unlimited supply of cheap labour. By some estimates, there are almost 200m underemployed workers in rural areas that could move into industry. The idea that China may become the world's biggest economy, with an enormous army of cheap workers, fills many in the rich western world with dread. Yet China's combination of rapid growth, vast size and openness could deliver a big boost to incomes outside China as well as at home. Rather like America when it entered the world economy in the late 19th century, China will be giving a huge boost to both global demand and supply.

The article discusses the benefits China and its neighbors have enjoyed since joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). Initially, many feared that China's entry to the WTO would make it even more attractive to foreign investment and manufacturing, but the article reports that ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries saw $37 billion investment in 2005. WTO membership has bound China more tightly to a pan Asian production network and regional trade with its neighbors.

The article speculates that if reforms continue, China's economy could surge ahead for many more years. The official figures may slightly overstate the growth rate, but China is still likely one day to overtake America and become the world's number one economy. In fact, China was the largest economy for much of recorded history. Until the 15th century, China had the highest income per head and was the technological leader. But then it suddenly turned its back on the world. Now China is making up lost ground. Even if its economy slows sharply over the next couple of years, its long-term prospects remain bright. Most of China's growth over the past quarter-century can be explained by high rates of investment and the movement of workers from subsistence farming, where their marginal productivity is close to zero, to more productive use in industry. But China's growth is not based simply on cheap labour: wages are lower in India and Vietnam. It also has the advantages of good infrastructure, an educated workforce, a high rate of saving available to finance investment and, most important of all, an extremely open economy. Moreover, China has welcomed foreign direct investment, which has bolstered growth by increasing the stock of fixed capital and by providing new technology and management know-how. China faces many obstacles to growth: its fragile banking system, the lack of a transparent legal system, corruption, the risk of social and political unrest caused by widening income inequalities or the abuse of human rights, and severe environmental pollution. Yet if reforms continue, there are good reasons to believe that rapid growth can be sustained.

The article, part of a special section on the growing demand in China for natural resources, reports on the soaring energy costs of China's return to heavy industry. Rapid economic growth fuels demand from Chinese state-owned companies for continual financing from Chinese-state-owned banks, at artificially low interest rates. Financial sector reform is seen as necessary.

The article reports that China's economy has continued to grow in 2006, despite predictions to the contrary. Economists fear the economic expansion is moving too rapidly to be sustained. Investment in fixed assets and consumer credit helped growth rates stay at over 10%. China's trade surplus continues to increase, to the delight of the country's leaders. The government's attempts to ensure stability for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the Communist Party Congress have been unsuccessful.

The article examines relations between China and its Central Asian neighbours. The success of Central Asia's leaders in getting closer to China is viewed with considerable suspicion by their own people. Although there is no concrete reason to suspect China of bad intentions towards Central Asia since the region broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, ancient fears of Chinese expansionism still persist. The fears are strengthened by the growing number of Chinese in Central Asia. The worries about what China might one day do are partly based on Soviet-era propaganda. Both Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan are now nervously watching the flood of ethnic Chinese moving to Xinjiang, and the economic boom in that part of China.

The article examines whether or not the world has enough resources for China to keep growing at its present pace. China was overheating this summer in more ways than one. China's rapid growth is putting huge demands on world supplies of energy and other raw materials. What will this mean for commodity prices? China is already the world's biggest consumer of many commodities, such as steel, copper, coal and cement, and the second-biggest consumer of oil, after America, so changes in Chinese demand have a big impact on world prices. China's demand for energy is bound to rise further, but Scott Roberts, the director of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) in Beijing, thinks that over the next few years China's main effect on energy markets could be to increase price volatility. Moreover, what happens to oil and many commodity prices over the next year or so will depend largely on whether China's economy can engineer a soft landing. In around 20 years' time, China's income per person could be close to South Korea's today. If its energy consumption per person also rose to current South Korean levels, its energy demand would quadruple. The increase alone would be greater than America's total consumption today, yet China's energy use per person would still be only half that in America. At present there is only one car for every 70 people in China, against one car for every two Americans. If car ownership were eventually to rise to American levels, there would be 650m cars on Chinese roads-more than all the cars in the world today. Such forecasts have scary implications both for energy prices and for China's environment. But things may not be quite as bad as they look, not least because there is enormous scope for China to use energy more efficiently.

The article focuses on Xi Jinping, future president of China, and how he will govern in the rapidly changing China. Topics include his promotion of Chinese nationalism, if he will continue authoritarian policies, and the economic development of China between 2000 and 2013. Information is provided on how he will deal with the wealth gap among Chinese citizens.

The article looks at the Chinese economy as of April 2013. It reports the country's economic growth has slowed and discusses various possible explanatory factors, including tax changes and Chinese President Xi Jinping's campaign against conspicuous consumption. It says the country's economic growth has become more balanced, with a rising share stemming from domestic consumer spending and a shift from manufacturing to services.

The article looks at the state of the world economy and economic forecasts as of 2012. It reports on the mood at the September 2012 World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, dubbed the "summer Davos," which it says was gloomy. It focuses on concerns about economic growth in China, which has slowed, noting that Western countries with relatively stagnant economies have been relying on strong demand from emerging markets, especially China.

The article examines how China's growth is expanding inland. China is indeed getting more unequal as it develops, and public order is a genuine problem. Two aspects of that are a product of the extraordinary level of mobility that the Chinese workforce has exhibited over the past two decades--the more remarkable since government policy has often attempted to restrict people's freedom to move. One kind has been from interior to coast, so that the privileged growth seen there is spreading its benefits more widely than might at first appear. A second kind, visible across the whole country, has been what may rank as the most rapid rate of urbanisation ever recorded. The creation of a successful integrated free-trade area will need co-operation between bureaucracy and enterprise. As prosperity spreads, and more Chinese people are able to start affording luxuries, China's domestic economy is starting to become a powerful engine of growth in its own right, just as happened earlier in Japan and, indeed, in America before that.

The article compares China's expanding economy to other emerging economies in the world. China is only one of the world economy's emerging giants, along with India, Brazil and Russia. But it deserves special attention, because it has a bigger GDP than those three countries combined and, more importantly, it is much more integrated into the world economy, so its impact on other economies will inevitably be larger. India's population is almost as big as China's (the two together account for 38% of the world total), and its long-term economic potential is promising, but at present its economic weight in the world is still relatively modest. China's GDP is more than twice the size of India's, and its share of the growth in global GDP since 2000 has been three times larger. But the main difference is that China's exports of goods and services are about six times bigger than India's, and growing faster. Over the past 20 years, China's real GDP growth has averaged 9.5% a year, compared with India's 5.7%, and it is likely to outpace India's for at least another decade. Looking two decades ahead, India will probably overtake China in the growth stakes because its population is younger and growing faster, so its workforce will continue to expand when China's ageing population will start to slow it down.

The article reports that China's economy is larger than it looks, and discusses how comparing China's economy to that of the United States depends on how one converts the yuan value of China's output into dollars. How big is China's economy in relation to America's? The answer depends on how you convert the yuan value of China's output. Converting countries' GDPs into dollars at market exchange rates can be misleading, not least because currencies may be grossly under or overvalued and can swing wildly. A better method is to use purchasing-power parities (PPP), which take account of differences in the prices of the same goods and services between countries. Because of lower prices, converting a poor country's GDP into dollars at market exchange rates will significantly understate the true size of its economy as well as its living standards. Measured at market exchange rates, China's GDP accounts for only 4% of global output, making its economy the world's seventh-largest. But using PPP to revalue its output at American prices, China moves into second place behind America, with 13% of world output. Likewise, using GDP converted at market exchange rates, China has accounted for only 17% of the total increase in global real GDP over the past three years; but measured on a PPP basis, it has contributed almost one-third of global GDP growth, much more than America's 13%. But PPPs are not appropriate for everything. Trade and capital flows, unlike the bulk of GDP, are actually transacted at market exchange rates, and should be converted into dollars at those rates. PPP is useful in showing how much a country's money is worth in its home market, but it does not measure effective purchasing power across borders.