The New York Times
WORLD
China Rules
They didn’t like the West’s
playbook. So they wrote their own.
PART 2
How China’s Rulers
Control Society: Opportunity,
Nationalism, Fear
阅读简体中文版 閱讀繁體中文版
At Huining No. 1 High School, the pressure is on to excel on college entrance exams. Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
As China grew richer, the West assumed, political freedoms would follow.
Now it is an economic superpower — and the opposite has happened.
By AMY QIN and JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ NOV. 25, 2018
In the dusty hillsides of one of China’s poorest regions, Gong Wanping rises each day at 5:10 a.m. to fetch well water and cook her son’s breakfast. She washes his feet while he keeps his nose in English and chemistry books. She hits him if he peeks at her cellphone.
To Ms. Gong, 51, who dropped out of school, the future of her son, Li Qiucai, 17, is paramount. If Qiucai does well on the college entrance exam, if he gets a spot at a top university, if he can achieve his dream of becoming a tech executive — then everything will change.
“He is our way out of poverty,” she said.
To achieve all this, Ms. Gong and millions of other Chinese like her have an unspoken bargain with the ruling Communist Party. The government promises a good life to anyone who works hard, even the children of peasants. In exchange, they stay out of politics, look away when protesters climb onto rooftops to denounce the forced demolition of their homes, and accept the propaganda posters plastered across the city.
Ms. Gong is proud of China’s economic success and wants a piece of it. Politics, she said, doesn’t matter in her life. “I don’t care about the leaders,” she said, “and the leaders don’t care about me.”
How China became a superpower
沒有留言:
張貼留言