From Guardian Unlimited: It is inevitable that just as they are embracing capitalism so the Chinese will have to address their political system
After the sack of Nanjing in 1841, then imperial capital of China, the British secured what the Chinese still call the unequal treaty; Britain won control of Hong Kong and the right to trade freely in opium; the Chinese got nothing. And it was at Nanjing in 1937 that the Chinese were again and more bloodily humiliated by foreigners. The Japanese murdered an estimated 300,000 civilians and soldiers in an atrocity whose calculated, indifferent cruelty rivalled a Nazi death camp, but to which the world has been curiously indifferent.
Yet today this once decaying symbol of China’s century-long weakness is at one end of a booming 250-mile-long corridor of factories and worker flats; at the other end sits the throbbing mega-sprawl of Shanghai.
