China's economic rise dominates headlines by the early 2000s, but journalist Jonathan Miller looks past the GDP figures to ask what the boom costs the people living through it. He reports from factory floors where workers describe long shifts, thin wages, and safety measures that lag behind production targets, and from cities expanding fast enough to leave rural areas behind in schooling, healthcare, and basic services. The film treats the urban-rural gap as a direct consequence of the growth model rather than an unfortunate side effect, and it links the same industrial expansion to mounting pollution and strain on natural resources. Miller does not dispute that millions have been lifted out of poverty; the film's argument is that the statistics used to sell China's transformation to the world obscure a harder, more uneven story underneath. It is a portrait of a country being asked, implicitly, to handle its own success with more care than it has so far shown.