What he does want is to be the most powerful leader China has ever had -
and the Communist Party just h
anded him that victory. In November 2015, I took off from the Philip
pine Isl
and of Palawan in a tiny single engine Cessna. Our destination was the Philip
pine-controlled atoll of Pagasa, 400 miles away in the middle of the South China Sea. Our plan was to pass close to a new Chinese military base, built on an artificial isl
and atop "mischief reef".
irannews.ru 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. When Boris Johnson was still in the running yesterday, Sir Roger said he was considering resigning from voting
with his party in parliament - but not any more.
The two-minute video, from an account
with about 1,700 followers, has been viewed more than 1.2 million times. Mao had closed China's economy off from the world. Now his successors were throwing it open. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation. Along the southeast coast new cities mushroomed. Some specialised in buttons and zippers, others made cigarette lighters. In Zhejiang I found one that only made socks, tens of billions of them. It also brings life back to the villages it weaves through. Deng Xiaoping had famously said China should "hide its capacity and bide its time". It is a fictional story featuring a couple arguing in a lift about a previous sexual encounter, interwoven
with flashbacks to the evening it took place.
