An Emerging Superpower

BEIJING, China, Aug. 1, 2008— -- In the last few years, the buzz about China's rise has become deafening. We have heard so much about China's unparalleled economic growth, its population explosion and its increasing presence on the world stage that it seems like a foregone conclusion that China will overtake the United States as the dominant economic superpower of the 21st century.

While these reports have often been received in the U.S. with a great deal of fear, and while many Americans wonder, especially in this economy, whether they'll lose their jobs overseas or how China's boom will affect democracy in the world, it is becoming more and more clear that our relationship with China will be critical to both of our nations' futures, and that it is much more complicated than it seems.

My addiction to China began 20 years ago. After graduating from law school in 1987, I began practicing business law in New York, but just months after I began working the market collapsed.

For months there was very little work to do in New York, leaving us bored and restless. I had studied Chinese in college and had a lot of Chinese friends, so I asked them to help me find a job teaching in China.

I was drawn to China because I saw that country as perhaps the next global power, so in 1988 I married my wife Lee and we moved to Beijing, where I began to teach law at the Chinese University of Politics and Law.

Looking back on it now, China was so different then, it is unbelievable. At the time, everyone rode bicycles -- Lee and I had them too -- and there were hardly any cars. Hardly any Chinese people had met an American, even in Beijing. People lived in tiny rooms, and there was little access to the Western world.

We spent a year there, and as you may have heard me say before, it was there that I was bitten by the journalism bug, when I began to work as a translator for CBS News and saw Tiananmen Square happen in front of my eyes. After that, I was never the same.

For the past 19 years I have been back to China only a few times, but every trip has shown me a new country. My producers and I had been talking for years about doing a documentary about China's influence around the world -- originally, the idea was that we could do it without even going to China, because China's footprint is everywhere.