A fourteen-member American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) delegation visited China from October 28th to November 5th. The delegation, led by former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, included William Schneider,  Jr., Chairman of the Defense Department’s Defense Science Board, former Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security Susan Neely, AFPC President Herman Pirchner, Jr. and AFPC Vice President John Wobensmith.

During their ten day visit, delegation participants traveled to Beijing, Xian and Shanghai. Their high-level meetings included sessions with Zhou Yongkang, one of the twenty-four members of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo and the Chinese Government’s Minister of Public Security; controversial General Xiong Guangkai, deputy commander of the People Liberation Army; State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, China’s top foreign policy official; and, Zhang Zhijun, Vice Minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Community Party of China.

The trip, the twelfth such fact-finding mission carried out by AFPC since 1994, found China in the midst of a profound political and economic transformation.

Despite visible improvements to domestic conditions and a palpable economic dynamism, serious problems remain. Twenty-six million citizens live in what the Chinese consider “extreme poverty.” Tens of millions of citizens are still stuck in the country’s old state-sector smokestack industrial regions. Stark contrasts between the rich and poor remain, as do huge problems in public finance and the state-dominated banking sector, as well as some of the world’s worst pollution.

In addition, there remains the obvious problem of governance; China is a one-party political system dedicated to the preservation of real power in the hands of a concentrated political elite. Basic individual liberties are still constrained, while underlying ethnic and social tensions are immense. By their own admission, China experiences two hundred “mass events” (riots, strikes, unauthorized demonstrations of more than two hundred people, etc.) every day – 74,000 in the previous year. This is a political system trying to keep the lid on and use its great success in the global economy to rectify some of the massive problems caused by decades of Maoist misrule.

At the same time, China faces issues all around its periphery, including: Taiwan, Korea, Central Asia, India, Burma, Japan, and sea-bed disputes. Finally, as party of a globalized economy, China remains intensely concerned about its relations with its larges trading partner/rival on the far side of the Pacific. This relationship – between America and China – will likely determine much of the history of the new Century.