The China Complex (Part 1) | The Big Picture

What is China? Where is it going? What is it going to do?

The world's most populous country, an economy set to become the biggest in the world, a communist state, a developing nation, the world's oldest surviving civilisation at the cutting edge of a technological revolution.

An authoritarian regime brutally suppressing its minority groups - China is many things to many people, but running through its core, like a continuous silk thread, is one central principle: order.

The China Complex examines how they have been applied by ruling dynasties, nationalist republicans, communist revolutionaries all the way through to today's Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. And at the heart of any leader's authority, we find a higher ideal: the Mandate of Heaven (tianming), legitimising the rule of emperors and paramount leaders alike.

The suppression of Tibetan Buddhists and majority-Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang have been uncompromising. Viewed through the prism of order, new light is shed on how such oppression serves the greater Chinese interest.

Source: Al Jazeera
Chinese Cultural Revolution images by Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images from "Red Color News Soldier"

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