Professor Zhiqun Zhu deserves enormous credit for convening the

October 2009 conference at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania entitled

“The People’s Republic of China at 60: Internal and External Challenges,”

and thereafter integrating selected conference papers and several other

scholarly articles into this volume.

The chapters that follow “delve” into many of the key challenges that

will preoccupy China’s leaders for the first half of the 21st century —

DELVE standing for Demographics; Environment and resources;

Legitimacy and political institutions; Values in society; and the External

world. Indeed, so extensive and daunting is the agenda facing the People’s

Republic of China (PRC) that one wonders how its leaders have the

courage to get up in the morning. Using the leadership typology developed

by James David Barber decades ago in his classic entitled The Presidential

Character, China will need a long line of “active-positive” leaders in its

future to address the agenda this volume describes and analyzes. This book describes not only the agenda facing Chinese leaders, it also offers insight into the research concerns of China scholars around the world.

The sheer diversity, scale, and complexity of the PRC’s challenges

should be a sober reminder to those who project in straight-line fashion

China’s success in the last two decades of the 20th century and the first

decade of the 21st into the indefinite future. This volume is an admonition

to those who suggest China is destined to “rule the world.”2 Rather, this

compendium suggests a more measured conclusion, namely that China

likely will continue to make progress, that its growing strength will have

many implications for the world, but that for decades into the future

leaders in Beijing will be concerned with challenges at home and seek to

minimize draining entanglements abroad — success at home is not

assured. China will become more involved in, and important to, global

decisions with each passing day, but ever present in the front of Chinese

minds will be the staggering and persistent problems they confront

domestically. The reticence this creates in China’s leaders (and in its

citizenry) in assuming major external commitments was starkly indicated

at the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in

Copenhagen.