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Li decided to write about their plight, and his accounts of the rural poor resonate with Chinese readers. This year he was nominated for the country's top literary award for debut authors. But China's publishers, wary of offending the censors, haven't been as encouraging. The first edition of Li's 2004 coming-of-age novel, Red X, quickly sold out, but there has not been a second printing. Li, 23, has refused the publisher's request to edit out what it called "morally offensive" passages. Li can't yet support his parents so that they can quit their factory jobs. "Maybe this year I can make enough money for them to retire," says Li. Then two ghosts will leave the city, but there will always be millions more to take their place. --By Hannah Beech/ Guangzhou
A LEADER WHO LISTENS
With its forest of neon-emblazoned high-rises, Shanghai's Xuhui district embodies the country's dazzling economic development. But Xuhui is profiting from an even rarer commodity: political reform. Led by district Mayor Sun Chao, Xuhui's nearly 1 million inhabitants can participate in town-hall-style meetings to discuss a wide range of concerns, such as an innovative parole program and the location of a new garbage dump. "Before, leaders just made decisions," Sun says. "Now we have public hearings to allow ordinary people to debate things." That idea may sound suspiciously like democracy. But Sun, a smooth-talking constitutional-law expert who has lectured at Yale, isn't going that far. "It is science," he says, deftly sidestepping the issue. "We shouldn't trust ourselves, even if we have power. We should listen to others' opinions."
That is not your usual local Chinese politics. Sun, 49, with impeccable English and a press-the-flesh attitude, represents a new crop of Chinese leaders who are different from the previous, Soviet-trained generation, which issued edicts from behind a bamboo curtain. Although Sun and his brethren are hardly harbingers of a democratic revolution, they are aware that an increasingly economically savvy populace will demand more accountability. Hence Sun's pledge that his budgets will undergo an anti-corruption audit and his proud declaration that he has personally answered 10,000 e-mails from the public since taking office last year. The change is remarkable. Five years ago, many government offices didn't even have a phone number that citizens could call. There is no guarantee that leaders like Sun will one day rule China. But Sun is already making history. --By Hannah Beech/Shanghai
BILLION-DOLLAR GAMER
Five years ago, Chen Tianqiao started a bare-bones online gaming company with five employees, two of whom were his wife and brother. Today, after a dazzling IPO, the 31-year-old is one of China's richest men, worth more than $1 billion, with a staff of more than 1,000 and building an interactive-media empire that soon could turn him into a local Rupert Murdoch. Even in the turbo-charged world of Chinese business, Chen's firm, Shanda Networking, has posted stunning growth, expanding 20% each quarter, with $73 million in net income last year. "China has a business history of not much more than 20 years," says Chen. "We live in a completely different world from our parents, where you can achieve success very quickly."
Shanda first courted success with a concept that's bigger in Asia than in the U.S.: online games, a $370 million industry in China in which players interact with each other via the Internet in a virtual world of dragons, maidens and sword fights. Chen has bought majority stakes in Sina, the country's largest portal, and a host of other online gaming companies. Next up, Shanda, in collaboration with Intel, hopes to introduce a set-top box that will enable users to access everything from news, music and movies to games and online auction sites. Currently, only 20 million Chinese own computers, but 330 million have TVs. Will interactive TV catch on? "The Chinese are very fast learners," he says. His own history is proof of that. —By Hannah Beech/Shanghai
OLYMPIAN MASTER PLANNER
If you can picture Washington, New York City and the Silicon Valley rolled into one, a city that has hosted the best-ever Olympics, managed severe water and land shortages and built 11 new suburbs, five subway lines and miles of highways, all while preserving its unique history without exhausting its finances, then maybe you can begin to imagine what it's like to be Huang Yan. It's her job to create that city out of present-day Beijing. As Deputy Head of the city's Urban Planning Commission and a key player in preparations for the 2008 Olympics, Huang is taking on the country's stickiest development problems—migration, pollution, corruption—and its deepest ambitions: to be modern, prosperous and globally respected. Huang, 40, is a new kind of bureaucrat. The English-speaking architect, trained in Belgium, Germany and China, is not a Communist Party member. She is striving "to bring fresh air" to China's musty, Soviet-style planning dogmas, which have left much of the capital grim, dusty and clogged with traffic. Huang argues for more attention to how humans actually live, what makes sense for the environment and how to adapt to China's racing real estate market.
Huang, who helped clinch Beijing's Olympic bid, wooed top foreign architects like Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog to outfit the city for the Games-—a move some criticized as unpatriotic and others lauded as visionary. "In China it can be hard to get people to think past the next week, or what's good for a certain neighborhood," she says, "But planning a city like Beijing requires a much longer view." That, and no small amount of imagination. —By Susan Jakes