India makes it to the cover of The Economist, Hillary to Time’s but there’s something about China which makes the media see red. Newsweek examines ‘The Rise of China’s Neocons’: “(They) argue that China should be less focused on appeasing Washington and more concerned with Beijing’s own priorities. These include resisting democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention abroad” as well as forging an EU community of nations in Asia, one led, naturally, by China. Newsweek’s worry? “The richer and more powerful China grows, the more attractive the “Chinese model” is likely to become—and the more real the threat it will pose to the liberal democratic example.”

Coincidentally, The New Republic raises the possible threat of new ‘Chinese Nationalism’, fuelled by, ironically, the Internet. Shanghai-based Mara Hvistendahl says the younger, Internet savvy generation of Chinese twenty-thirtysomethings, instead of “guiding China into better relations with the West... seem to have glanced toward the rest of the world and turned back, appalled.” This fenqing (literally, angry youth) is “critical of the government’s Japan policy and relative openness toward the West”. Hvistendahl says popular jingoistic and xenophobic web forums flourish among young Chinese and although China’s rulers are worried, “with patriotism just about the only ideological underpinning the Communist Party can still cling to, it can’t afford to quash the movement outright.”

Time finds another potentially scorching problem in ‘The Bitter Earth’. Chinese farmers, whose land has been acquired for ‘development’ are up in arms. They want their ancestral properties back and are prepared to fight for them legally and violently. The portends have a worrisome parallel with the past: “It was Mao Zedong who famously said a “single spark can light a prairie fire”... (the farmers) may not know it, but they are holding burning brands in their hands.”

... contd.