Following the Sixteenth National Congress of the Central Communist Party (CPC) in November 2002, the pace of reform for China's enterprises of all kinds has quickened as they seek to cope with the challenges of self-determination - strategic, financial and governance - and to do this in the context of difficult social and welfare changes and the realities of increasing international competition. This book explores these challenges from the perspective of the enterprise. The enterprises operate in a macro environment, conditioned by the state of the economy, external relations, politics, laws, institutions, resource constraints, demography, income distribution and the potential for social unrest and this is where our book begins. No economy can achieve phenomenal growth for over twenty years without meeting serious challenges. For a country as big as China, sheer size not only exacerbates some of the problems but also creates problems for the rest of the world. Whether China can overcome the challenges and maintain high and sustained growth will profoundly influence the prospects for enterprises, in China, East Asia and elsewhere. This chapter and the one that follows, seek to survey how these factors will influence the prospects for the successful development of China's enterprises. They set the scene for Chapters 3-10 in which Chinese and Western scholars, specialising in the economic resurgence of China, offer an insight into some of the institutional, cultural and management issues of enterprise development.