China's economic performance over the past three decades--its rapid growth, economic opening, and strides in poverty alleviation--marks an historic turn that may qualify as one of the great "success stories" of modern economic development. China seems poised for further rapid growth today--but questions and uncertainties cloud the longer-term horizon. Can China make the institutional changes and policy reforms that will be required to reach significantly higher general levels of productivity and income? Will continuing economic growth unleash unpredictable social or political forces within China? And what will "an economically rising China"--potentially, a China with the world's largest GDP--mean for the security of China’s neighbors and the international community?  Dwight Perkins analyzes these questions and what their resolution will mean for the United States in The Challenges of Chinese Growth, which he delivered as the 2006 Henry Wendt Distinguished Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute.

Dwight H. Perkins is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, whose faculty he joined in 1963. He is the author or editor of twelve books and over a hundred articles on economic history and economic development.

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