An economic miracle has turned China into the darling of the Western media.

Shaping up as the hottest economy in the world, China can do no wrong in the eyes of many newspaper, magazine or television journalists and commentators in the US and Europe.

The latest accolade comes from Fortune, Time Inc's bi-weekly magazine, which is publishing a special issue entitled "Inside the New China". The last time the magazine published a special issue on a country was way back in 1947 and that country was Japan.

In an interview with China Daily, Clay Chandler, Fortune's Asia editor, says that the China issue takes a look at the world's fastest growing economy from many different angles.

"We brought in a special correspondent to write about the auto industry and we had someone interviewing Intel to get a foreign investor's perspective on the country," Chandler says. There is another story which tracks the daily life of an expatriate in Beijing and Shanghai. Chandler says he also did a story on the children who were born after 1980, when the "one-child policy" was introduced. He says that this generation of children, who are commonly called "little emperors", are very different from those who are older than 25 years of age.

"For the 'little emperors', it must have been an incredible time to grow up because of the huge improvement in the quality of life on the mainland in general and in the cities in particular," Chandler says.

"These young people, many of them who are still in their teens, are super confident," he says.

The special issue of the magazine also features a photo essay on water, which, according to Chandler, is probably the most "vital" element on the mainland. "Our photographer roamed the land to capture different images of water, in black and white", Chandler says.

In the centre-spread, a picture of 700-year-old rice terraces which employ ancient irrigation technology, contrasts sharply with another image of a section of the US$25 billion Yangtze River dam scheduled for completion in 2009.

Water, or the control of it, has been a constant challenge to China since the dawn of history, Chandler says. In this long, drawn-out battle, which is now being won by 21st century technology, Chinese ingenuity is shown at its most potent in a US$60 billion water project that aims to divert the precious resource from the flood-prone south to the drought-stricken north through an intricate system of canals and pipelines, says Chandler.

Another photographer compiled a collection of photographs showing five women in different walks of life. They include Yue-sai Kan, the mainland's undisputed cosmetics queen, Zhang Xin, reputedly its wealthiest woman, Xie Qihua, the mainland's highest-ranking woman executive, publisher Hong Huan and Li Hong, a factory worker in Shenzhen.

Chandler, who was in charge of the project, says that "the special issue is designed as a lens to look at the world's fastest growing economy".

He says that there is a growing interest among the world's leading business people in understanding and learning more about the mainland and its economic progress. He recalls that a top executive of international management consultancy firm McKinsey once told him that China was the one topic everyone wanted to talk to him about. It's hardly surprising.

The development taking place in China now is nothing short of spectacular, he says. It'll take foreigners a "long time to figure out" what is actually happening, he adds.

In the past year, at least 40 chief executive officers of major global corporations visited Shanghai, Chandler says. This premier commercial city, he says, has become a popular venue for annual corporate meetings and other gatherings of multinational companies.

Despite this increased exposure, many foreign executives are still "seeing nothing more than just snapshots" of China, Chandler says. One of the common misconceptions people have is that the economic development that has been going on in China over the past two decades is a "replica" of Japan or South Korea, he says. That perception, of course, is not exactly correct. There are at least three or four distinct differences between the mainland's economy and that of Japan or South Korea, Chandler says.

The fact that the mainland has "lifted 250 million people out of poverty" in so short a time is in itself a "remarkable achievement", Chandler says. But unlike Japan and South Korea, the mainland accomplished this feat by "throwing open its doors" to foreign investors, he says. The opening up of the mainland's economy has been gathering pace year by year, ever since it began to allow foreign direct investment in key industrial areas, like automobiles and consumer electronics, in 1992.

This move has greatly shortened the time it has taken to develop a wide range of industries. Such development is particularly relevant to the auto industry which produces some of the world's most recognized brands in joint ventures between leading auto companies in the US, Europe and Japan. By comparison, the auto markets of Japan and South Korea continue to be dominated by domestic brands.

However, the mainland's approach to economic development is far from perfect, Chandler says. He notes that while Japan and South Korea have, from the very beginning, ceded control of most of their major industrial conglomerates to the private sector, the mainland continues to maintain many inefficient State-owned enterprises that "destroy value", a term favoured by stock analysts in reference to persistent money losers, especially those that sit on mountains of valuable assets.

The more successful mainland enterprises, such as Tsingtao, Haier and Lenovo, tend to share one common trait - their management is allowed a relatively free hand in running their operations, Chandler says. As a result, they are more responsive to changing market demands than many other State-owned enterprises, he adds.

Another major difference is that in Japan and South Korea, economic planning is highly centralized and the governments of those two countries use banks to guide the development of various industries, Chandler notes. The mainland, of course, has its five-year plans which, according to Chandler, are more about setting general growth targets than focusing on particular sectors.

Despite having reservations about the apparent lack of a clear overall plan for the economy, Chandler remains optimistic about China as a whole. It has been persistent in maintaining growth and generating jobs, Chandler says.

To be sure, the mainland could have done a better job in addressing the imbalance in growth between its prosperous coastal regions and the under-developed inner provinces and addressing the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in the cities and special economic zones. But, he believes, the central government seems to have a firm grasp on the more immediate issues of maintaining stability and is pushing hard for rising employment and wages.

(HK Edition 09/30/2004 page18)