Michael Walden has monitored changes in North Carolina’s economy since joining N.C. State University’s faculty in 1978. A professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, he prepares The North Carolina Economic Outlook, a semiannual forecast. In 2008, the University of North Carolina Press will publish The Modern North Carolina Economy: Origins and Prospects, his analysis of how it has evolved over the last 30 years.

Anniversaries come and go, sometimes coinciding and even colliding. We’re putting this, our 25th anniversary issue of Business North Carolina, to bed three days after the nation commemorated the fifth anniversary of 9/11. I had asked Alex McMillan, who was on our editorial staff from 1994 to 1999 and is now a freelance writer in Hong Kong, to do a piece on Chinese workers as part of the package. He filled me in on what he’s been up to.