We’ve all, in the past generation, grown up with a sense that there is a single superpower in the world, the United States, and most of the issues have been defined as for or against American interests around the world, like radical Islamist terrorism. That’s changing, and it’s time to just pause and make a statement that it’s changing.

We spent a big part of the initial effort just gathering data, looking for some of the harder metrics on very broad issues like social mobility or export power or the size of the Chinese internet, to see whether that could help us make some broader statements. It was an attempt, rather than looking for the usual newsy development that allows us to say something broader in the middle of the story, to broaden from the start and tell this in a more explanatory way. So we really set out to put some bigger conclusions and data-driven analysis first, and then figure out the story.

The tricky part is that, when you take on a big project like that early in 2018 and try to land it late in 2018, you don’t know what the macro news environment is going to be. For all we knew at that time, we could be at war in the South China Sea, or on the Korean Peninsula, or Trump and Xi could become best friends and resolve the trade war. It kind of worked out, timing-wise, but we couldn’t have known that.

Is there anything surprising we’ve learned about what kinds of China stories will pull people in? We tried something similar to this when I was an editor at The Atlantic seven or eight years ago, but it was hard to get people into it.

It’s still hard to get people into it. We have a giant investment in a really high-quality China staff, we translate a lot of things into Chinese, we have everyone from the science desk to Washington paying attention to it.