"Once the firing starts it's three deep breaths, a couple of swear words and you move on." On a chilly winter morning in January 1990, I stepped off a night ferry onto a dockside in the city of Guangzhou. It was my first glimpse of China. The air smelled sulphurous from burning coal. Outside the streets were a river of bicycles, ridden by workers in blue caps and Mao jackets. Occasionally the bicycles parted for a wheezing bus or official car.
irannews.ru Moscow-installed politicians have recently been "evacuating" people. Ukraine has accused Russian troops of preparing to blow up the nearby Kakhovka dam. Russia denies this but if it happened Kyiv says it would lead to 80 settlements being flooded. But Xi's policies are only creating the hostile world he claims he is defending against, believes Susan Shirk, a China expert in former US president Bill Clinton's administration. In 2017, at the beginning of his second term, Xi declared: "China has stood up, grown rich, become strong and is moving towards the centre stage." In Xi's China there is almost no room for diversity. Xinjiang's 12 million Uyghur Muslims are being forcibly assimilated. Similar programs are under way in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. Down the street we meet Alyona in the kindergarten she used to run. She lived under occupation for two months before having to escape. Yet in the words of the Ukrainian soldier Gadfly, "what choice do we have"?