Being granted the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games has been both a headache and a triumph for China.

Authored by John Lee, Managing Director of L21, and published by the Australian Institute of International Affairs, this paper will look at the major economic and social tensions within China. It will highlight the most serious problems within the country, look at why China's problems are worsening, and whether Beijing can solve them without the prospect of enormous turmoil.

China's transformation from the backward, autocratic economy of just three decades ago is probably the most spectacular and rapid in history. The belief was that a rising, affluent middle class would sooner or later demand political reform and even democracy.

However, since the Tiananmen protests in 1989, China is now three times as rich but seemingly further away from political reform than it was then. Published by CIS, L21 Managing Director John Lee argues that we should reject the blind and deterministic logic that a rising China will inevitably become a democratic one.

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