Repeatability is the very essence of a sign.
- Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

0. Preliminary One
By the time this issue of Afterall hits the newsstands, the Shanghai World Expo 2010, titled 'Better City, Better Life', will have been committed to memory, restoring the balance of power among China's leading cities after the 2008 Olympic extravaganza thrust Beijing onto the world stage as a so-called 'alpha world city'. This will (almost certainly) not signal the end, however, of the steady stream of publications with titles such as China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (Columbia University Press, 2009); China Rising: Will the West Be Able to Cope? (World Scientific Publishing Company, 2009); China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009); China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power (Random House, 2007); China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (Scribner, 2005); The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job (Wharton School Publishing, 2006); The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (W.W. Norton & Company, 1994); The Rise of China: Essays on the Future Competition (Encounter Books, 2009); The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2009); China Shakes the World: A -tan's Rise and Troubled Future (Mariner Books, 2007); and Dragon Rising: An Inside Look at China Today (National Geographic, 2007). The first thing to observe here is the obvious lack of imagination among Western authors in capturing the global phenomenon of 'China rising'. More