Outside this stark, but pastoral monument to the victims of Cambodia’s gory Khmer Rouge years southwest of Phnom Penh, a group of young men played cards recently and listened to Chinese pop music.
Music from China seemed a bit incongruous, given that China, along with the United States and the Soviet Union, helped create Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Beijing, indeed, was the group’s chief patron when it held power from 1975 through 1978 and killed more than 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia’s population, in its quest to create an agrarian Maoist utopia.
But China’s role in this nation’s grim experience now lies in the past – deep and more or less undisturbed, which is how both Beijing and many Cambodians prefer it.
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