"If you're going to compare two people, it has to reveal something. It's like comparing Putin to Stalin or Liz Truss to Margaret Thatcher." Students at one college in Legazpi City were asked to wear headgear that would prevent them peeking at others' papers. irannews.ru In 1989 - as the Soviet Union was breaking up - China's hopes for change were crushed by tanks and automatic gunfire. “The Saudis have emphasised in recent years that they seek to avoid entanglement in what is referred to in the US as ‘great power competition’,” Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen and the Middle East Institute’s senior vice president, told Al Jazeera. “Their interests, the Saudis have made clear, have focused on maintaining strong relations with their main security partner, the US; their number one economic partner, China; and their key partner in OPEC+, Russia.” In 1992, Deng - who had remained China's "paramount leader" - declared that the party should allow "some people to get rich first". It does not sound too dramatic, but it was another decisive break from Maoism. Revolutionary austerity had been shown the door. 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." That was just the tip of an immense iceberg, says Richard McGregor, the former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times. "Everything and everybody got a cut, but it got out of control," he adds. "It was becoming more like Suharto's Indonesia, where it was corroding the foundations of the system."