Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children.

I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Okay, why am I devoting this

program to China? Is it because China is extremely important in the world today? Partly. Is it because

China is kind of the new thing changing the world today? Yep, that's another part of it.

Is it because China is poorly understood, particularly in the United States, but in the West generally?

Yes, yet, that's yet another reason.

China is changing and shaking the world in ways that are going to be central to our experience

for the foreseeable future. It deserves a great deal more attention than it's getting,

or to be a bit more precise, it deserves attention that is balanced, that is trying to understand what's going on, and

that is not propagandistic painting them bad so that we in the West look better by comparison.

It's a childish game, it's dangerous, and it's not what we're here to do. What we're trying to do is get an overview

that makes some sense. Whether you then end up supporting China, criticizing China,

or some mixture that's left to you. Okay. First of all, let's begin by saying it really is a phenomena what China has done. It deserves

everyone's awesome recognition of that fact. What do I mean? Well, it's this is the greatest story of

economic growth that we probably have in the history

of the human race.

Here was a country over the last 70 years, the largest by population in the world, with well over a billion and approaching a billion and a half people

in unspeakable poverty as little as 70 years ago. One of the great horror stories of poverty

in the world. And in those 70 years, this country has raised a billion or more

of those people out of abject poverty and into the modern world. With that sized population,

that's never been done before.

If you take all of Europe together, which is a quarter of the population of China,

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