A love-hate story… still. Jason Wordie on the perennial perplexity

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When I first went to China in the seventies, to study Chinese, students who had lived there for a while already, told me that I would come to love China and to hate China. 

They were right. That’s how I ended up relating to China. Loving so much of its history, arts and culture, loving so many of its people, some very closely… and hating so much of it, its capricious apparatchiks, its indifference to basic rights, and the whole dreary panoply of authoritarian socialism that we read about every day. 

Clip above is a well-written piece by the SCMP's Jason Wordie about how this has ever been so. 

[Ive done a photo of the page because I can’t find a link at the site]