What kind of freedoms do Chinese people enjoy in their personal lives?
“Nothing we do today was possible 25 years ago. Compared with then, the human rights situation in China has improved like never before.” And that enthusiastic assessment comes from a man who was fired from his job in 2006 as editor of a Communist youth newspaper for publishing an article thatcontradicted the party line, Li Datong. But the baseline, he points out, was pretty low. “In 1983, I would probably have been arrested.” Twenty-five years ago, Chinese citizens were not free to choose their jobs: The authorities assigned them work for life. Farmers were forbidden to live anywhere but the village where they were born. Nobody was allowed to travel abroad, except on government-authorized business. Nobody could dream of owning a car, let alone a house. Food was rationed. Nobody was allowed to set up a business. Western movies and books were banned. Today, all that has changed. And as the state has relaxed its control over the minutiae of daily life, citizens have also felt freer to exp
