Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
A Little Leap Forward
By Nicholas D. Kristof
China's Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead
by Bruce Gilley
Columbia University Press, 297 pp., $29.50
The Communist dynasty is collapsing in China, and in retrospect one of the first signs was a Chinese-language computer virus that began spreading when I was a reporter in Beijing in the early 1990s. The virus would pop up on your screen and ask a question about the hard-line prime minister, Li Peng, who had presided over the massacres that ended the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement. 'Do you think,' the virus pop-up asked, 'that Li Peng is a good prime minister or a bad prime minister?'
Review, 4673 words
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