All over Rovers.

[graingrover]

My group of friends in Shanghai and occasional connection with the interpreters faculty at Shanghai normal uni is the spectrum through which I view and analyse China's extraordinary social explosion . The efforts the gov has made to protect the Internet wall and block all western social media such as Facebook , YouTube, Twitter and Instagram is SLOWLY being dismantled brick by brick by the use of Vpns i. In my view the breakthrough will take a few more years and meanwhile maybe harsh repression and detention of Vpns users will ensue but the inevitable breakthrough will be as significant as the fall of the Berlin WAll. I agree BST the new freedoms will not bring only good changes to their society . Extremist views are the first that will be propagated through social media .

[BillyStubbsTears]

I was in Tianjin a couple of years ago.

Three things blew me away.

1) Train from Beijing to Tianjin. It's roughly as far as from Doncaster to Liverpool. Maybe a few miles shorter. The train took 26 minutes. And cost £7 for 1st class.

2) A couple of miles from my hotel window in Tianjin, they were building a skyscraper almost twice the height of The Shard. One of three of that height that were under construction in the city at the time. But that wasn't the impressive thing. In a 1km radius around that tower, I counted FIFTY-SEVEN smaller tower blocks under construction, each of which was taller than anything ever built in the UK outside London.

3) When we got off the train at Tianjin and were walking through the concourse, my colleague pointed out the number of poorly dressed people walking alongside us with huge poly bags on their shoulders. Maybe 20, maybe 30 of them. And when we looked at some of the transparent poly bags, they had boots and cooking pots and sleeping bags stuffed in them. And we realised that these were the economic migrants - the peasant farmers coming to the city for their future. I knew about the size of the mass migration to the cities, but seeing it like that with my own eyes. Two dozen of them. On one train. On one day. In one city. And this has been going on day after day in 100 cities for a quarter of a century.

We are a tiny speck of a place by comparison. Our importance and our effort and our problems are minuscule compared to what is going on over there. I hope to God that they get it right, for all our sakes.