Two Chinas

I keep being struck, whenever I travel between China and Australia, of the strange sense of two worlds or two planets … and two Chinas.

Let me put it in terms of a couple of conversations I had during the last few months in China.

The first was held in Shanghai, with someone who spent some time in Canada a while back. She reflected on reading local newspaper stories about China. They depicted a terrible, dystopian place, with a ‘totalitarian’ government hell-bent on suppressing its people. At...