5. Look over the Horizon

The energy that so many outsiders feel when they are in China and that President Obama may see when he is there comes not just from the frenetic 狂热的activity that is visible everywhere. It comes also from a sense that it's harnessed治理 to something bigger. The government isn't frantically 疯狂地building all this infrastructure just to create make-work jobs. And kids aren't studying themselves sleepless because it's a lot of fun.

A few years ago, I interviewed Zhang Xin, a young man from a deeply poor agricultural province in central China. His parents were wheat 小麦farmers and lived in a tiny one-room house next to the fields. He had graduated from Tsinghua University — China's MIT — and gotten a job as a software engineer at Huawei, the Cisco of China. His success, Zhang told me one day, had changed his family forever. None of his descendants would "ever work in the wheat fields again. Not my children. Not their children. That life is over." (And neither would his parents. They moved to prosperous Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, soon after he started his new job.)

Multiply that young man's story by millions, and you get a sense of what a forward-looking country this once very backward society has become. A smart American who lived in China for years and who wants to avoid being identified publicly (perhaps because he'd be labeled a "panda hugger,熊猫拥抱者" the timeworn陈旧的 epithet 词语tossed at anyone who has anything good to say about China) puts it this way:

 "China is striving努力奋斗 to become what it has not yet become. It is upwardly上升的 mobile, consciously, avowedly 公然地and — as its track record continues to strengthen — proudly so."

Proudly so, because as Zhang understood, hard work today means a much better life decades from now for those who will inherit what he helped create. And if that sounds familiar to Americans — marooned, for the moment, in the deepest recession in 26 years — it should.