All this fuss about what everyone thinks about each other. In my world we all have warts and a wart is a wart. It is ugly and unsightly. Stop trying to compare warts and accept that it is far more valuable looking inwards at ourselves and understanding our own nations and what we can do to make a difference at home. Perhaps this is why the very odd author of the column in the periodical, Prospect, (Mark Kitto) remains in China so as not to have to return home and begin moaning about his home. Smart thinking i would imagine. Its far more fun moaning about others :-)

All countries fear the growing power of China, which will be the only world superpower by 2030.And they have every right to fear a vile and brutal Chinese regime,one which commits genocide in Tibet against a very spiritual people who want to be left alone; and which treats Han Chinese dissidents nearly as brutally, just because they criticise
peacefully. David Cameron, and other major world democratic leaders should start to tell China that its record is too appalling for them to be treated as a civilised country.Instead of taking 50 businessmen with him, he should be warning the Chinese regime that no civilised country will do business until China stops behaving like the evil and brutal and uncivilised state that it is.
But go on, Cameron---forget what the UK used to stand for : go and get business for products made free in China by political prisoners, including imprisoned innocent Tibetan monks and nuns, whose plight Amnesty International has continually highlighted.
Remember Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s ?????

Cameron is not interested in the ordinary people in his own country, so he will be indifferent to the Chinese.
Camerons' ambition is to privatise everything and to see growth soar, because of HIS actions, but as most people who post on this site know, he is such a deluded man.
China, can you keep him cause we don't want him.

Yes, I HAVE visited China ( refused entry to Tibet !!)----and ordinary people were too scared to talk to me about what had happened in "The Square" ( have people forgotten??); and "minders " and secret police harassed me and people who I talked to----and took constant video film.
How can people be expected to live like this ? Thank God we live in a civilised and democratic country where WE can criticise Govt policy, verbally abuse our PM, carry out protests. One Chinese did tell me that her husband had criticised lack of press freedom and she had never seen him again. Where is the rightful Panchen Lama----the youngest political prisoner in the world when he was taken to nowhere-knows by the vicious Peking regime ?
How can we deal with such people as those that govern China. I have nothing against the Chinese people .....except that they seem to allow the lack of freedom , the genocide of their ethnic minorities, the ban on religion ( it is a death penalty to own a photo of HH The Dalai Lama ). What sort of country has such "laws" ???
And somebody actually thinks that Europeans and Americans are jealous of China-------are you out of your mind ?????????????????????????????
I am leaving this blog and concentrating on the civilised world: countries unlike China, Burma, North Korea, Iran, etc.
They are a disgrace to the map of the world. I wonder if Cameron will raise human rights issues with the Chinese "leaders" ; and also ask why every country has been threatened by China to boycott the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony , which is being held to honour an outstandingly brave man.

Socialism with Chinese characteristics? China has Totalitarian Capitalism. We should hope is isn't a successful combination.

@ConcernedCitizen

"Chinese communists do not export terrorism no because the Korean War or the Maoist Insurgency in India don't come to mind"

Chinese involvement in the Korean war was fought on an open field of battle alongside North Korea against the armies of the UN, just because they had a different ideology than the west does not mean they are "terrorists", which you seem to think is a blanket term for "anti-American." Also, what proof do you have for Maoist rebels in India being supported by the Chinese aside from their "Maoist" ideology? In fact, China recently signed a huge arms deal with the Philippines armed forces to help them combat Maoist and Islamic rebels which you would know about if you actually paid attention to current events as opposed to spitting out the same threat sensing anti-China drivel in the guise of being "concerned." More importantly, which of the events you listed less Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment are still relevant in the present tense?

@sasha
"What China lacks is cynicism towards their leaders."

If you actually live in China then you must have somehow not met any Chinese people there. At any cab ride, restaurant table, or mahjong table you can hear people discussing politics and expressing the same sort of disgust and derision you would hear in a politics talk in the West. Essentially all Chinese KNOW that all their officials are corrupt. And since when is cynicism a good thing? Part of the reason so many Chinese put up with restriction on political freedom is because they don't think they can do anything about it, not because they don't know it exists.

@suffolk
"I am leaving this blog and concentrating on the civilised world"

Good riddance to a bad troll, sorry we Chinese are so primitive and lowly compared to you but we just can't help it you know.

One phenomenon I've been noticing is the instant tendency to call any dissent toward China-bashing "Wu mao dang." Although it is certainly applicable at times, it acts as a tool to instantly nullify the validity of the commentator's words, and as an excuse to ignore their opinion, genuine or not, by plugging one's own ears. Westerners like to think they care about the developing world, and some of them may really do, but from experience I find most to be typical bandwagoneers jumping on the "free tibet" or "human rights" train so they can feel like they aren't consumerist exploitative leeches on the developing world. Being Chinese, trust that I DO care about China. I'm the one that sees kids losing their educations because they have to work in a factory or make bricks or collect rubbish so they can support their families. I'm the one that sees the ill denied medical care and thrown out of hospitals because they had no money, I'm the one that sees corrupt officials and developers rob land away from locals to build massive projects and apartments on top of a real-estate bubble, I see my grandmother whose landowning family was utterly shattered by the communists' land-reforms and the anti-capitalist policies decades ago. I see my father who was paraded through the streets as a child with a board proclaiming "Landlord's offspring" chained to his neck and spat on for the first 20 years of his life.

But I also see China and its people exponentially better off every couple of years, I see people organizing demonstrations and rallying on the internet that has managed to bend and influence government actions from sheer populist demand, I see new highways, power plants, railroads, airports, hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, and streets full of private cars and housed full of modern amenities.

What I feel is much sorrow, but simultaneously much optimism for China. Demand for personal freedoms come along with wealth, as the poor are more worried about getting by. This can be evidenced by Taiwan's democratization in the mid-1980s following a period of rapid economic growth and becoming prosperous as a society; this process is what Mainland China must strive toward and so far it looks to be on the right track.

China can be a brutal and terrible country, but it is dynamic and progressive. It needs a lot of things at the moment, but one group it can do without are idle Westerners who know nothing about the country crying crocodile tears about supposed "genocides of minorities" and "bans on religion" and other lies, and then try to sell it back to us Chinese. We know what's wrong with our own country, and most of the criticism from Westerners I've seen are not, and are not meant to be helpful, just insulting. Let the Chinese fix China.

As a chinese, i don't want to argue about whether China is demoncratic or not. We have less civil rights on the surface indeed camparing to the western contries indeed. But, we are moving forward. 30 years ago, you may be sent to prison because of what you have said about the govenment' weekness, and now as you can see we are focusing on the domestic affairs more and more. lots of people are concerning about the polictics and human rights, and they are able to talk about it and question it. you need to think about where we were 30 years ago before you judge us restlessly.