"They thought it would last three to six months but it was never just an anti-corruption campaign, it was a party rectification campaign, and it was to be sustained forever," says Professor Steve Tsang who heads the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Mark Francois says Rishi Sunak did not commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence when he met the group earlier. Mao had closed China's economy off from the world. Now his successors were throwing it open. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation. Along the southeast coast new cities mushroomed. Some specialised in buttons and zippers, others made cigarette lighters. In Zhejiang I found one that only made socks, tens of billions of them. http://irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru In 2005 I was handed a DVD smuggled out of a village called Dingzhou in Hebei province. It showed a pitched battle between local farmers and dozens of armed thugs, hired by a state-owned power company, to force them off their land. The farmers had dug deep trenches in their fields. The thugs attacked at dawn opening fire with shotguns and beating the farmers with steel bars. Six were killed. "My first introduction to China was in the 1980s, when the debates about China's future were huge, significant, and consequential," Prof Karl says. "The party itself was involved in those debates. But 1989 shut that down." "All this military stuff is fun and games until it's not fun and games. My back is hurting already because of all the equipment!" This is starkly different from Mao's idea of a multi-ethnic state where, in theory, different groups had more autonomy. Xi's father too had a reputation for conciliation and respect for China's ethnic minorities. Economic growth has shrunk to 2%, the lowest in more than three decades. China's property market is in free fall. Youth unemployment is running at around 20%. A trade war with the US is not helping. And anger has been brewing.

Edit
Pub: 24 Oct 2022 14:20 UTC
Views: 100