in 2005 the Chicago Tribune asked if I wanted to return to China. I packed up an apartment in Cairo, and landed in Beijing on an airless night in June. China still had a quarter of a billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. The fact that this population, nearly the size of the United States, was often left out of descriptions of the new China was a mistake, but it was an understandable one, given the scale and pace of change going on around it.
