Talking about the many Chinas

Jeffrey Wasserstrom offers in Open Democracy a good perspective on how to deal with the complexity of China in a class room situation, or in any situation where you have to deal with all too simple viewpoints on China.

The simplest things can help; for example, offering information that reveals the limits of monolithic images and simple binary divides. The news stories about largely middle-class protests in Xiamen (where people rallied against a chemical plant being built near their homes) and Shanghai (where people demonstrated to stop an extension of a Maglev railway) provide an opportunity to expose the limits of a dissident/non-dissident divide. Some of these protesters are people who, on the whole, are quite satisfied with where their country is headed, but are still ready to take action to assert their right to a greater say in things that directly affected the quality of their lives and value of their property.