The Chinese Challenge

By Richard Stengel / Managing Editor

At the moment that Henry Luce, TIME's co-founder, wrote his great essay "The American Century," the world was looking very dark. It was 1941, before the U.S. entered World War II, and Luce was trying to inspire Americans with the resolve and confidence to take up the great battles of the day. Luce was passionate about America's role in the world and about the American ideals of freedom and equal opportunity, but he was also passionate about the hopes and dreams of another great nation--China. The son of missionaries in China, Luce came to school in America, yet never lost his love and fascination for the country of his birth.

This week's cover story on the rise of China's power and its prospects for the 21st century blends two of Luce's--and TIME's--treasured subjects, America and China, and explores not only China's extraordinary rise but also how America and China will interact in the 21st century. There is no bigger story than this, and our cover story this week inaugurates a regular section in the magazine that will focus exclusively on China.

In the coming months and years, we plan to devote a great deal of energy and reporting to covering China's remarkable transformation. We're fortunate that TIME's Asia edition is headquartered in Hong Kong; our reporters and editors there have long used their vantage point to assess how a changing China is changing the world. As Michael Elliott, editor of TIME International and author of this week's cover story, says, "Watching China now is like being in one of those science-fiction movies where you can see a whole new planet take shape before your eyes." It's a story that could have many different outcomes: China could fulfill its sense of destiny and become the next great superpower, or it could succumb to internal strife, as it has many times in its long history. What happens to China--and what happens within China--will affect all of us in one way or another, and we will be there reporting it for you.

We are lucky to have a deep pool of talent directing our China coverage. Our Beijing bureau chief, Simon Elegant, was born in Hong Kong, has degrees in Chinese history and language, and has written two novels about China. Bill Powell, who lives in Shanghai with his wife, a native Shanghainese, was formerly Newsweek's bureau chief in Moscow, Berlin and Tokyo and FORTUNE's man in Beijing. Hannah Beech, another fluent Chinese speaker who was born in Hong Kong, recently moved from Shanghai to Bangkok but will continue to report on China's influence throughout Asia. Adi Ignatius, a TIME executive editor who helped produce this week's package, is a Chinese speaker and a former Wall Street Journal bureau chief in Beijing; and Howard Chua-Eoan, a Filipino Chinese by birth, is our long-standing news director and an old China hand. It's his calligraphy that accompanies this week's cover story.

In the coming weeks and months, look for articles on China's Me generation, on its daring group of activist lawyers, on preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and the challenges this showcase will pose to China's political system, on how suburbia is transforming the nation and how China is fast becoming a synonym for international chic. And we will continue to write and report on how America and China must interact in the 21st century. Henry Luce's great passions of the 20th century remain ours today.

Richard Stengel, Managing Editor