Stand on the Bund in Shanghai looking over at the spectacular outline of the Pudong financial district on the other side of the water, as increasing numbers of tourists now do, and you are looking at a global icon. This is where Tom Cruise jumped off the skyscraper in Mission Impossible III; James Bond was also here in Skyfall. This is the 21st century’s equivalent of Manhattan in the 1920s – an awe-inspiring testament to the power of money and the confidence of a country that feels it embodies the future. Yet if you had stood on the Bund and looked over the water as recently as 1990 not one of those skyscrapers would have been there.
The transformation of China in the space of a generation is one of human history’s great stories – it has involved the biggest mass migration in history, of peasants to the thrusting megacities, especially on the east coast; it has turned an inward-looking sleeping giant into the engine room of world trade; it has, almost at a stroke, created the next global superpower out of what is still manifestly a developing country; and it has asked new questions about the impact of such vertiginous growth on the planet that are far from answered.
