You have major new investments in the countryside, you have a commitment to waive school fees for the first nine years for rural children, because there were 87,000 protests in China last year -- an unbelievable statistic -- so clearly someone's not happy with how things are going in China.
At the same time we're starting to see the extraordinary ways in which China is becoming a laboratory for new technologies to put people under a level of surveillance that would have been impossible under Mao. There was just an article in the New York Times about how Shenzhen -- the port city where the export processing zone model was born -- is now this testing ground for biometric identification cards that have everything from your landlord's phone number to your reproductive history to your credit history to your police record. They are leading the way in terms of networking CCTV cameras -- there are 200,000 of them in one city -- and all the police are equipped with GPS. I mean, it is totally sci-fi what is going on there.
Friday
Naomi Klein on China
Naomi Klein in an interview published this week :
