BEIJING

There is nothing like it anywhere else, nothing resembling this relentless attempt to fast-forward some 20 percent of humanity into the modern age, this extraordinary Chinese experiment.

After a week in China, as the giddying growth statistics mount and the images of the past are ripped down to make way for the future, there is no mistaking the sense of standing at the cusp of the 21st-century drama. The United States appears troubled, entangled in wars and the angst that goes with them; Europe seems staid and peripheral.

Here, only the future counts. The past has been suppressed by the Communist Party with a few faint acknowledgments of the worst crimes. In its place stand development and more development, the key to social stability, with the goal of creating a modern society by 2020. After three decades of near double-digit growth, who is to say this objective is unattainable?

I said “experiment” because the combination here of rollercoaster capitalism and authoritarian direction is without precedent in its scale, and of course the question arises of whether money can satisfy a society to the point that the human urge to have a say in who runs things is suppressed.

Up to now, the Chinese leadership has proved ruthless where necessary - the suppression of the 1989 student uprising at Tiananmen - and, since then, extraordinarily adept in taking the country forward at a pace that contains disgruntlement. As Russell Moses, a Beijing-based political analyst, told me, “There is brilliance here, a kind of brilliance in the way they handle things.”

So China, with a vast stimulus package that helped it overtake the United States as the world’s largest auto market, navigated the Great Recession of 2008. Prodded by public outrage at tainted water and toxic discharges, it is now moving fast to address environmental concerns, satisfying people’s demand for information about polluters and racing ahead in the solar-heating and electric-car industries. Worried by growing income disparities, the Chinese leadership is beginning to introduce some social security in the provinces.

For a party with some 80 million members engaged in the attempt to push forward a society of 1.3 billion people, most of them still eking out a living on the land, there is a notable nimbleness here. The leadership knows stability, its most prized word, is about staying one step ahead of the game.

Still, there are rumblings. Anger at rampant corruption is everywhere, and it’s hard for me to see how you tackle that as long as there is no significant countervailing power in a one-party state.

There’s also anger at the summary expropriations that accompany all the gargantuan infrastructure projects . The very concentration of power that enables China to push through these projects at breakneck speed also spurs deep resentment at the absence of legal recourse for loss of property.

Anger is also growing, as education spreads, at the various attempts to control the internet by blocking sites like Facebook and suppressing blogs. Freedom of expression is not part of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Anyone under 25 should be learning Mandarin. The future, whether stable or turbulent, is here, and the fate of the 21st century will be determined in significant measure by this breathtaking Chinese experiment.