Introduction

The following papers, by Ahmed Bawa and John Douglass, on South Africa and China respectively, offer cross-sectional looks at two important and rapidly changing societies that enter the twenty-first century with radically different histories, politics, and cultural profiles. It is thus neither easy nor necessarily appropriate to treat them as especially useful for a narrow comparison. Nonetheless, it is clear that both national societies and governments face similar challenges posed by the rapid globalization of the last few decades of the twentieth century.