Two articles on China worth reading. They provide a curious contrast.

First a good stirring piece by Jonathan Mirsky, reviewing the secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang. Zhao was the apparatchik who took the side of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators in May-June 1989, and was purged for it. Then this interesting piece by Simon Winchester, on doing a book tour in China. The book is Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, which I reviewed for The New Atlantis.

At the end of Simon Winchester’s piece comes this:

Perhaps the most memorable moment of the tour came on the evening in Shanghai, when I quoted a signboard I had seen in western China. It was outside the national space launch centre and it proclaimed: “Without Haste, Without Fear. We Will Conquer the World.”
There was a brief silence as the interpreter translated. Then she smiled broadly, and first the three professors beside me, and then the entire audience, stood up and began cheering. After a few seconds I realised it wasn’t me that they were cheering. It was China, and the future they all want for her, which all believe she is now on the verge of attaining and which a line from my book had happily confirmed.

These two pieces point up the paradox of modern China. On the one hand (Simon Winchester), a mighty ethnonationalist will to be the world’s foremost nation, combined with the human and cultural capital to pull it off. On the other hand (Jonathan Mirsky), a brutish and corrupt governmental system that would disgrace a Third World banana republic, enforcing its arbitrary will via goon squads clubbing dissenters into silence.

Those Chinese at the end of Winchester’s article, cheering emotionally for their country’s future greatness, should ask themselves whether that greatness can really come to pass while the nation’s affairs are controlled by a clique of bone-headed mafiosi.