China enters the 21st century as the world's largest surviving empire, a vast bureaucratic dictatorship with close to 1.3 billion people drawn from 56 different races. This text provides a general introduction to the Chinese, taking the reader on a journey from the poorest, those living in remote mountainous regions, to the most powerful families in the capital. In between it looks at how workers in state-owned enterprises and the new capitalists are navigating the transition from a planned to a market economy, and at who are the winners and losers in the scramble to make this new consumer market yield golden profits.