The Two Faces of China

Walter Lohman / July 07, 2009

China has two faces. There is the face of Chinese economic success, the managers of China’s reserves, the CEOs of China’s quasi-private enterprises, the English-speaking, tailored diplomats everywhere from Beijing to Washington. And then there is the face of the People’s Armed Police and the crackdown in Xinjiang.

There is a modernizing China sending bright and optimistic students out into the world, packing the best graduate programs. There are people in China making for themselves material lives that generations of their forbearers could not dream of. Then there is the China where political freedoms have stymied over the last 20 years, and in fact, in some ways, deteriorated. Chinese authorities may no longer be committed Marxists, but they have not yet shaken their bias for the purely material. Spirituality in China is so distrusted and devalued that Christian pastors are arrested as a matter of course, and authorities view Buddhist monks with unfiltered contempt. (more…)