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China is not so much another country as another world. Cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the Himalayas to the south and the Siberian steppe to the north, it has grown up alone and aloof. The only foreigners it saw were visiting merchants from far-flung shores or uncivilized nomads from the wild steppe: peripheral, unimportant and unreal. Apart from a few ruling elites of Mongol and Manchu origin, who quickly became assimilated, China did not experience a significant influx of foreigners until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, something which still colours the experience of today's visitors to China.
While empires, languages, nations and entire peoples in the rest of the world have risen and blossomed - then disappeared without trace - China has spent the past two millennia largely recycling itself. The ferocious dragons and lions of Chinese statuary have been produced by Chinese craftsmen, with the same essentially Chinese characteristics, for 25 centuries or more, and the script still used today reached perfection at the time of the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago. It is as though the Roman empire had survived intact into the twenty-first century, with a billion people speaking a language as old as classical Latin.
To say that the Chinese are presently enjoying better government than at any time in their recent history may not be saying much, but it is surely true. There is little sign of the Communist Party relinquishing power, or its control over the media. However, the negative stories surrounding today's China, the oppression of dissidents, the harsh treatment of criminal suspects and the imperialist behaviour towards Tibet and other minority regions, are only one part of the picture. Away from politics, the country is undergoing a huge commercial and creative upheaval. A country the size of ten Japans has entered the world market: Hong Kong-style skylines are being constructed in cities all across China, and tens of millions of people are finding jobs that earn them a spending power they have never known. The colossal historic fact of Hong Kong and Macau, the last European colonies, being returned to China in time for the new millennium, as though by celestial injunction, only adds to the sense that Chinese destiny is being restored to its rightful place at the centre of the world.
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