Circles and Squares

If you walk through any city in China today, you will observe that the battle is not between a “Communist” China and a “Democratic” Hong Kong and Taiwan but rather an internal battle between a consumer-based, globalized China which is not all that Chinese and a China based around government institutions that still thinks that encouraging personal virtue in the socialist tradition is the paramount.

Just look at the competing images and advertising in China and you will understand.

Here are the ads put up by the consumer-obsessed global China

Here are the competing images

Here are the images put out by the government which draw less attention but are remarkable in that no such advertising exists in South Korea, Hong Kong or Japan any more. These are ads that encourage virtue.