Day: August 15, 2024

IN CHINA’S TOP-GROSSING summer film, “Successor”, a rich businessman seeks to motivate his son by raising him in poverty. Young Jiye believes his family is truly poor. He is told to “change his fate” by studying hard and doing well in China’s university-entrance exam, known as the gaokao. But just in case, his father also hires undercover tutors. Fake street peddlers test Jiye’s English. The neighbourhood butcher gives him maths puzzles. A tutor posing as the family’s grandmother tells the boy that her dying wish is for him to study…

“WHEN A PROPER respect towards the dead is shown at the end and continued after they are far away, the moral force of a people has reached its highest point.” That precept appears in the “Analects”, a collection of sayings attributed to Confucius. What, then, to make of the news that from 2015 to 2023 a Chinese crime ring stole, dismembered and sold more than 4,000 corpses for use in manufacturing bone grafts? The Economist

Listen to this story Your browser does not support the <audio> element. MODERN CHINA is a superpower with its roots in a guerrilla army. This helps explain its self-interested responses to crises, including the turmoil now raging in the Middle East. To hear America and other long-established powers tell it, China has unique influence over that region’s worst agents of disorder, starting with Iran, and an unusual need for stability in the Middle East. China is the world’s largest importer of both oil and liquefied natural gas, buying vast quantities…