Seven continents.  Seven Chinese kings.  A benevolent rule and a stable, sensual, high-tech society.  But the T'ang overlords no longer control all three hundred levels of City Earth.  Revolution is brewing.  As the all-powerful Seven plot the boldest imaginable counterstrike, a plan to control the minds of all humankind, Chung Kuo speeds toward cataclysm, and the final game between East and West, between the privileged Above and the downtrodden Below--a monumental confrontation with forty billion lives in the balance.  An epic that draws us into an alternative world so read that we become true denizens of the new Middle Kingdom, touched by tomorrow's longings . . . driven by forces as ancient as the first human breath.