China is a peculiar case. As a nominally state-run society it has, by reducing family size, recently pulled off the largest drop in poverty ever recorded:

• from 648 million people in poverty in 1981
• to 218 million people in poverty in 2001.

So 430 million people escaped poverty in twenty years!
This demonstrates China's extraordinary power to change course.

Yet the ecological and agricultural situation is dire; China will be a net importer of grain soon, if not already. Much of China's topsoil is carried away in dust storms which loft it across the Pacific (to, among other places, Seattle). The Yellow River is destroying huge swaths of agriculture by periodic flooding due to upstream deforestation. China has realized that trees are more valuable standing than cut, and it has banned tree cutting in many upland areas.