Restrain The Riffraff

This prospect of higher office links Wang to Giuliani. Yet what worked in the Big Apple won't sell in the Big Cabbage. In New York and around the United States, the flamboyant Giuliani likes to boast of how he shrank the city's welfare rolls and cracked down on "quality of life" offenders; he even once tried to block Chinese immigrants from setting off New Year's fireworks. Wang, by contrast—who worked on a farm doing manual labor during the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution—must show far more concern for the little guy. He'd love to expand Beijing's welfare programs, or at least be seen trying. And he's not above populist feel-good measures; last year municipal authorities overturned a longstanding ban on New Year's firecrackers in the city center, reasoning that they are a "Chinese tradition." Even in an increasingly global city such as Beijing, it seems, all politics remain stubbornly local.

With Jonathan Ansfield in Beijing

© 2007