And the notion of a challenge is two-sided: it is as much about the one who is on the receiving end of the challenge as about the one who is doing the challenging.

This is an apt nuance in considering China’s present and future role in the world. The challenge of China is as much about how the rest of the world responds to the rise of China as about the massive tasks of economic and social development in China itself. We focus more explicitly on the latter question than on the former but the former question is what the collection of essays we shall publish over the next two weeks really seeks to illuminate.

The challenge of China is not just a matter of the scale of China’s growth and its role in the world although certainly scale is one dimension. The scale of what is happening in China is without historical precedent. Within less than a few decades, China has transformed itself from being a ‘small’ economy to being a ‘big’ economy, in terms of its impact on the world economy and the notice which the rest of the world has to take of China in managing global affairs. The size of its population base always meant that China was politically important, but its economic growth now magnifies its political impact.

The contributions to this discussion present analysis from leading thinkers on these issues from around our region – a region that has more at stake in the success of China’s rise than any other. We hope their essays make a modest contribution to identifying some of the priorities that the rise of China’s role in regional and global affairs presents to policy leaders in China and around the world. Only by getting these priorities right will it be possible to frame policies and approaches, or at least provide the best possible advice to the policy-makers in China and around the world, that will enable us to meet the challenge that today’s – and tomorrow’s – China poses, to us, and for itself.