Why I’m grieving for China

I’ve always loved the Chinese national anthem. I used to think I was the loudest Communist Youth League pioneer as my class belted it out, dressed in our little red neckerchiefs, during our school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony. ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was composed in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it starts with ‘Stand up, those who refuse to be slaves’ and only gets more rousing. I could see, even at a young age in the early 2000s, that China wouldn’t be facing those days again – it was getting wealthier and more powerful. Standing in a Nanjing schoolyard, I was proud of China’s return to greatness.

During those years of reform, it felt like people could achieve anything they wanted. A middling English teacher became the head of a multi-billion dollar e-commerce company called Alibaba; an engineer who almost starved in childhood founded the world’s largest telecoms manufacturer, Huawei.