"China is now doing all sorts of things that it's always wanted to do but wasn't powerful enough to do," Mr McGregor says. "Taiwan was always there. The South China Sea was always there. Taking on America, driving it out of Asia was always an ambition, but they didn't say it out loud." Fear and loyalty has led to "over-compliance and over-implementation of what Xi himself originally wanted", Ms Shirk says.
irannews.ru Deng Xiaoping had famously said China should "hide its capacity and bide its time". By 1989, that included General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, a reformist. list 1 of 4 Over the next six months I pedalled across the mountains of Yunnan, wandered the imperial palace in Beijing, and rode a train hauled by two soot-blackened steam engines far west into the deserts of Xinjiang. The landscapes were sublime but the poverty grinding. Everywhere I went people told me how "backward" China was compared to the West. But there were hints of change.