Special Report: The Year of Living Dangerously

"The library of doomsday books and articles about China's impending demise is crowded. The country is, no, not going to collapse, yet ignoring the warning signs is perilous too. China's leaders know how tricky a course they have to chart, and a populace empowered by the Internet is speaking up and acting out. The structural problems of modern China — a corrupt political system, an inefficient state capitalism — cannot be solved by a flick of the dragon's tail. More than anything, 2012 marks a change in the Chinese psyche. The easy hubris of the early years of this century has been replaced by a wariness of the future."