Word: zhou
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...Zhou Shuguang wanted to visit his mother. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem for the 28-year-old vegetable seller, blogger and self-described occasional "citizen reporter." He'd jump on a bus and ride the twenty kilometers from Meitanba, the village deep in rural central China where he lives, to his mother's place. But Zhou, who sometimes highlights cases on his blog that pit ordinary citizens against local government authorities, hadn't considered one vital fact: the Olympic Games being held in Beijing, some 1000 kilometers away. Soon after he arrived at his parents house...
...Bequelin remains optimistic about China?s nascent civil society, whose development was temporarily put on ice in the lead up to the Games. "It's a battle in which Chinese are trying to get government off their backs," he says. And what's being fought for by people like Zhou is access to information and the right to organize. Those are "fundamental tools Chinese people need to organize their lives in a market economy," he says. "I don't see how progress on those fronts can be reversed or slowed down in the long term...
...That's what Zhou Qiang was doing this past April, at a playground not far from the Xujiahui area in central Shanghai. Dressed in a gold Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey, a baseball hat worn slightly askew and Nike high-tops, he's got the American hip-hop look of a baller down pat. He's 16 years old and started playing four years ago. "I come here sometimes four times a week," he says. "I like the game, I like the fact that it's a team game but that individual skills matter a lot. You can be creative...
...high school Zhou attends doesn't have a team yet - though the number of schools that do is increasing - so he says the best players from his class come to this playground "all the time" to test themselves against other kids (and the occasional stray foreigner). Zhou smiles a little slyly when asked what his parents think of him spending all his time on the basketball court. After all, at about 5 ft. 9 in. (1.75 m), he's not exactly a Yao Ming-like freak of nature destined for the NBA. "They wonder what I am doing...
...There is, in this Saturday morning tableau, the hint of a little freedom, of individual preferences expressed, plucked from a global menu of possibilities. Chinese kids Zhou's age don't have political freedom, but they are a lot freer in many ways than their parents ever were. Think of it: hordes of Chinese kids on a spring Saturday, mimicking the moves not only of their local hoop heroes, but also of Kobe and D-Wade and T-Mac, vigorously debating whether China has any chance to beat the U.S. at this summer's Olympics in Beijing (Zhou shakes...