Document Number Nine John Lanchester The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet by James Griffiths We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter The People’s Republic of China had its seventieth birthday on 1 October. ‘Sheng ri kuai le’ to the world’s biggest and most populous example of … of … well, actually, that sentence is hard to finish. There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred term, but the s-word makes an odd fit with a country that is the world’s most important market for luxury goods, has the second largest number of billionaires, stages the world’s biggest one-day shopping event, ‘Singles’ Day’, and is home to the world’s biggest, fastest-expanding, spendiest, most materially aspirational middle class. Look at the UN’s Human Development Index: after seventy years of communist rule, China’s inequality figures are dramatically worse than those of the UK and even the US. Can we call that ‘socialism’? https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n19/john-lanchester/document-number-nine (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))