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Thread: USA Today news article "Two Faces of China"

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[quote=LEONARDO,267191]Two faces of China

The West views this Asian country as a new world economic dynamo, but also as a closed society captive to its dated Communist structure.

By Juan Williams 
SHANGHAI — The year 2008 is likely to be the Year of China.
The Olympics will move China to the front of world attention, much as its rapid economic rise has already allowed it to surpass the United States in generating global economic growth. But the China the world will see this summer is one that is jampacked with contradictions. I visited China for the first time in December, and the two faces of this country jumped out at me every turn.

(Illustration by Keith Simmons, USA TODAY)

On a street corner here was a small old house where Mao Zedong met with fellow revolutionaries in 1921 to start the Communist Party. When the party's founders conspired here secretly, pretending to be students, the house was in a run-down area behind warehouses.

Nearly 100 years later, the house is a tourist attraction anchoring an upscale shopping mall, complete with $4 coffee at Starbucks and $8 beers at a faux Irish bar. And next to the Xintiandi mall — the name translates into English as "new heaven on earth" — are skyscrapers filled with multinational corporations drawn to Shanghai as the booming financial center of China's super-heated economy.

The ironic location of the cornerstone of Chinese communism next to glossy shrines to capitalism is just one of many sharp contradictions.

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