The Moment

What's in a number? If it's $586 billion — about 20% of China's GDP in the first three quarters of 2008 and the size of a giant economic-stimulus plan for just the next two years — then the number is a figure of considerable value, real as well as symbolic. The money, Beijing announced on Nov. 9, would go mainly to new infrastructure, homes, schools and clinics, especially in the country's poorer regions. Taken together with the recent alleviation of taxes plus changes to the rural-land law that will allow farmers to lease their land and free them to work elsewhere, the initiatives amount to what Jing Ulrich, the head of JP Morgan's China equities business, calls "a New Deal with Chinese characteristics."

For years the Chinese people have been willing to put up with an authoritarian government so long as it generated jobs and opportunities. Now, with the economy slowing, growth needs to be maintained, goes conventional wisdom, at a minimum of about 8% — in part to forestall the labor unrest that Beijing fears could spread and turn into protests against the ruling Communist Party. Despite its domestic agenda, the stimulus package has been warmly welcomed overseas, too. The day after it was revealed, share prices from Hong Kong to London surged. And by again taking action along with the rest of the world (Beijing had previously cut its interest rates in tandem with central banks in other capitals), China is reinforcing its stated willingness to step up and help rebuild the global financial system.

Stock markets are fickle, of course, and soon they returned to their downward drift. But the impact of the stimulus will last far longer because it marks the shift of China's economy away from manufacturing and exports to other means of growth. Says Ben Simpfendorfer, a China economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong: "In a decade we'll be looking back at this moment and saying, 'This was it, this was when things really changed.'" The number doesn't lie.