The New Left

A great piece from the NY TImes magazine: China's New Left Calls For Social Alternative by Pankaj Mishra. It's funny how China's principled, reasonable Left gets such little press.

Instead, Western readers are treated to an extended (two-decades now!) collective cry of surpise that--shock!--China is a capitalist country run by a Leninist government (like the Leninist governments that once ruled Taiwan and plenty of other places that were anything but socialist, but that's another story). That story is old.

It is time to move beyond marveling at the contradictions of China and look to the people with prescriptions.