Friedman Winks at Green Guangzhou

(Photo of Haizhu Square subway construction by kou.)
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"Dichotomy runs through a lot of what is going on here in Guangdong Province," said Thomas Friedman in his "Postcard from South China." Friedman, New York Times' columnist and author of such works as The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, describes the "emergence of Chinese clean-tech companies" and their Goliath task of powering and sustaining South China's development. He writes that officials, like Party Secretary Wang Yang, say China "has to move from 'made in China' to 'designed in China' to 'imagined in China.'" Friedman ends his postcard with this positive paragraph about Guangzhou:

So my postcard from Guangzhou would read like this: “Dear Mom and Dad, this place is so much more interesting than it looks from abroad. I met wind and solar companies eager for Western investment and Chinese college students who were organizing a boycott of an Indonesian paper company for despoiling their forest. An ‘Institute of Civil Society’ has quietly opened at the local Sun Yat-sen University. The Communist Party is trying to break the old mold without breaking its hold. It’s quite a drama. Can’t wait to come back next summer and see how they’re doing ...”