Je ne crois pas avoir lu ces dernières années un article sur la Chine qui ne soit pas vertigineux. The Great Leap: Scenes from China’s industrial revolution ne fait pas exception, tout en relativisant quelques idées reçues.

The problem with actually reporting about a place, however, is that you start collecting stories, and they never quite fit. It’s not that any of these angles are wrong – there are countless well documented stories of nightmarish factory conditions, human-rights violations, local corruption, and environmental folly – but even taken together they don’t come close to adding up to China. And they allow us to ignore what might be most crucial about the emerging nation: the ways it is starting to resemble our own.

[merci jm]