"Vast, unidentified, structures have been spotted by satellites in the barren Gobi desert, raising questions about what China might be building in a region it uses for its military, space and nuclear programmes."
These are good times indeed for Chongqing, home to 32 million people and growing so quickly its maps are already out of date by the time they are printed. The bursting municipality -- a dense urban core ringed by rapidly changing rural districts that together are about the size of Austria and now have more people than Iraq -- is the gateway to China's fast-filling west. Ambitions and limitations collide there at the same spectacular speed with which the city has exploded and, along with it, the prospects of its luckier residents.
Foreign Policy on the rise of Chongqing.
For what great idea will each country be known? What counterweights will each poise against the pull of money? Who will be their new heroes? What kind of world will they summon? What will be, when the hot growth cools and the deeper reckoning comes, the meaning of their rise?
CCJRNL is my freeform journal of notes, links, pictures, and videos. A subset of this content will appear on chriscoldewey.com.
