Beijing today looks much like Chicago, Toronto, Brussels, or any other modern city – high-rise office buildings clad in glass, streets packed with automobiles and trucks, and billboards, many of them in English, advertising name-brand products, many of them U.S. name brands, though that, of course, does not necessarily mean they were manufactured in the United States. The same can be said of Shanghai, Nanjing, and a number of other Chinese cities.

The U.S presence in China, which is apparent even to the most casual observer, is growing rapidly. From 1993 to 2002, direct investment in China by U.S. companies increased by a factor of ten, making the United States the second largest foreign investor in China. (Hong Kong, though nominally a part of China but with a separate economic and political structure, is the largest foreign investor.) A substantial portion of the U.S. investment (approximately 60 percent) is in the manufacturing sector, which turns out vast quantities of merchandise, some of it sold in the rapidly expanding Chinese market, some of it exported for sale in the United States and elsewhere.