The Economist adds its voice to the swelling China coverage on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics with an analysis of national political conditions:
The government-organised vigilantes in their baseball caps and “Good luck Beijing” T-shirts patrolling the streets in search of potential troublemakers might look like a throwback to a China of the distant past: an era when no one was safe from the prying eyes of neighbourhood spies. But few people seem to resent their presence, or even the party’s relentlessly upbeat rhetoric about an event that has disrupted, sometimes massively, the lives of hundreds of thousands. Most Beijing citizens still seem proud and delighted that their country is staging the Olympics.
More recent China coverage in The Economist:
