China: The Dramatic Rise-video

Although no other country in history has risen so quickly from poverty to prosperity as China has, for many in the world's most populous nation, those advances have come at a price.

The economic reforms that made the People's Republic's rise possible have also led to a harshly divided China. Divisions whose impacts could easily spread from disenfranchised indviduals to threaten the economic growth contemporary Chinese society has come to be based upon.

In the opening episode of this four-part series, we tell the stories behind these divisions, from the rising urban middle class to impoverished rural areas and the precarious existence of hundreds of millions of migrant workers on the fringes of some of the world's fastest growing cities.