The “rise of China” is a cliché that resonates in China as in the rest of the world. It is now more than a century and a half since China’s self-sufficient economy was forced by gunboats and treaties to open up to an incipient global interest in a fabled market offering the vista of innumerable consumers for endless commodities. By the same token, the prospect of an “awakening” China also conjured up a fearfully racist specter of a “yellow peril” flooding the world with inscrutably industrious Chinese. The political breakdown of the country and its nationalist and socialist revolutionary struggles through much of the twentieth century deferred the market dreams. However, China has now been reconstituted as a bastion of cheap labor and manufacturing for the global market. In place of earlier communist fantasies, the present reality is variously viewed as a model of globalization or as an ugly capitalist dystopia.