Passage 1
Beijing Rising
If there is a road to China's future. Highway 204 out of Shanghai is it. Along its two dusty lanes, local tracks and buses jockey with Cadillacs driven by financiers from Taiwan and Hong Kong investors. Migrant workers crowd the narrow shoulders. Factories line the highway, producing sneakers, toys, plastics, clothes, aircraft components and medical equipment. Eventually industry gives way to ricefields, which is being dug up to build still more factories. Cranes tur overhead as dump trucks and cement mixers nose onto the road. Outside the town of Jiading, one tractor-trailer leaves Asia's largest container plant every three minutes, carrying goods bound for the Shanghai docks. The traffic on Highway 204 is so thick that the trip from Shanghai to Zhangiiagang-only 115 kilometers away-takes five hours.
Zhangjiagang is a commercial hub of Jiangsu, the fastest-growing province in China. China has the most dynamic economy in the world tod Its boom radiates from Guangdong, ts richest province, but it has spread as far west as Xinjiang, where foreign investors are searching for oil and other natural resources. It is creeping inland, Irom Jiangsu to the cities of Chongqing and Wuhan where businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan are starting to spend billions of dollars to builld factonies. And it has penetrated the northeast, where the city of Shenyang, long moribund center of state industry, is bustling with new private business, from trading companies to prostitution. Back in Beijing, officials at China's state council, or cabinet, are giddy with excitement-and exhaustion. "We don't have people. we don't have time, "says one. "Things are moving too fast.
Former World Bank chief economist Larry Summers recently argued that China could surpass both Japan and the United States to become the world's largest economy by 2020.
A farfetched prediction? The new American administration doesn't think so. Bill Clinton has appointed China hands to top Asia posts at the State and Treasury departments. When critics called the appointments slight to Japan, the leading Pacific economic power, U. S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman explained the administration's reasoning: by early in the next century, he said, China may replace Japan in importance to the U. S. as an economic partner.

The n of China from an agricultural nation to an industrial country will be very slow.