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The economy is booming but behind the successes lurk some uncomfortable questions – about poverty, pollution, censorship and a catalogue of human rights abuses. How the government answers them may define China’s image for decades to come <!-proximic_content_off->

The images of the "Beijing Internet Police", one male and one female dressed in uniform and saluting, will from 01 September 2007 start appearing every 30 minutes on computer screens run by 13 major portals based in Beijing. Virtual police officers will soon begin visible patrols on Chinese Internet sites to warn surfers they are being monitored

China's rise in the early 21st century is the headiest tale of development the world has ever seen. A drive through Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen or Guangdong gives you all the evidence that you could ever want of the 66 per cent expansion of the Chinese economy in the past five years. But it doesn't take long in China to see the problems that the country faces as it enters this new stage of development – and how managing these issues is the Communist Party's main challenge.

Pollution
Some problems that China faces are under the surface – particularly the political conundrums – but the issues of pollution and the rural-urban split are obvious even as you look out of the window of a cab whizzing you from the airport to your hotel. A glance at the sky, combined with a casual sniff of the air, and you start to see that China's rise has not been without its consequences. Cities are enveloped in a white haze for much of the time, any signs of the sky blocked out by the effects of manufacturing nearly half the world's finished industrial goods.

When the capital disappears inside yellow clouds – a mix of coal smoke, sand, particulate matter and ozone – people leave their bicycles at home and opt for an air-conditioned car instead.

The internet
China is freer now than it has been at any point in its history. At the same time, the mechanisms of state control have never been so finely honed and the view of the world from behind the Great Firewall of China remains distant, blurred, filled with huge gaps and all too often simply wrong.

The internet is generally slower in China, and trying to access anything at all controversial is maddening. Trying to access forbidden terms produces a message telling you the website cannot be accessed, and you have to restart your browser to start searching again – time-consuming and annoying.

At times of great stress, such as the immediate aftermath of the violence in Tibet, sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and those of most Western newspapers are blocked by the net nannies, who toil for "Operation Golden Shield", which stops free access to the internet. This sinister project has made blogging a dangerous occupation. It is difficult to open politically sensitive blogs. Most are hosted by big web companies, but they unilaterally block risky content to avoid getting shut down. There are tens of thousands of spooks working for the Great Firewall, blocking e-mails, monitoring websites and reporting back to superiors.

Tibet
Tibet is rapidly emerging as a central theme in the Olympic Games, because only if the Tibetan issue is resolved in some way can the Games be seen as an unqualified success. If the issue isn't at all resolved by the time the Games start, the event will leave a sour taste. Tibet has become the focus for anti-Chinese sentiment around the world since the March riots when Lhasa residents took years of frustration at Beijing rules out on Han Chinese living in Tibet and monks demonstrated in the streets.

It's hard to overstate just how important Tibet is to China. You feel that China would sooner invade the United States than give ground on Tibet. The Chinese see the Dalai Lama as a dangerous separatist, who wants to divide Tibet from China and establish an independent country. He has become the focus of Chinese anger over the violent protests in Tibet. They accuse "the Dalai clique" of masterminding the riots and say he wants to destroy all the work Beijing has done to improve its international image ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer.

Execution
China executes more prisoners than anywhere else in world, usually by a bullet in the head, though increasingly lethal injections are being used.

Exact figures are a secret, but a report published by the official Xinhua news agency last year said there were 8,000 in 2006. The following year, after the beginning of a new review system, about 5-6,000 executions took place, says John Kamm of the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights dialogue group.

This is one area where China is dealing actively with the issue. Since 1 January 2007 all death penalties must be reviewed by the Supreme Court; last year, the first year of implementation, an average of 15 per cent of convictions were rejected and returned to lower courts for re-sentencing.

Gender imbalance
You can see it on the streets of the rural towns, where all the kids running up and down the road seem to be boys, girls standing forlornly by as they watch the favoured male children play. Boys outnumber girls eight to five in some parts of China, posing a threat to social stability. A report by the China Family Planning Association said the entire island province of Hainan now had 136 newborn boys for every 100 girls, while nationwide the figure is 119 to 100. In one place, Lianyungang, in eastern Jiangsu province, the ratio is 165 boys to 100 girls. According to the United Nations, the gender ratio should be around 107 to 100.

The statistics make for crazy reading. There are 37 million more men than women in China, giving it the most unbalanced gender ratio in the world – and one which has worsened since China introduced the One Child Policy 30 years ago to curb population growth. Abortion is a widely used method for controlling family size.

The alarming gender gap means that there are already 18 million more men than women of marriageable age. The restriction has cemented traditional preferences for boys, particularly in the countryside, where farming families favour sons because they believe they are better able to provide for the family and support their elderly parents.

Gender scanning of the foetus is illegal in China but the regulation as it stands does not spell out punishments and a large black market flourishes, with a scan typically priced at about £4 if the child is a boy and £2.50 if it's a girl.

Censorship
China keeps a tight grip on all media, regardless of whether it be newspapers, TV, books or cinema. But working out exactly how the government censors things is an inexact science – by design rather than by accident.

China's cultural banner is being carried by its emerging film-makers, such as Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Feng Xiaogang, Li Yang and Yang Shupeng (see The Hot List, p39) but many of these are forced to work under excruciating pressure, chiefly censorship. Lou Ye has been banned from making movies, while the other directors have to get script approval before they can proceed with a movie. Even the top Chinese director Zhang Yimou was banned for many years in China until he started making nationalistic martial arts epics.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-the-dark-side-823593.html

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As far as I'm concerned,this issue is worth talking on.Regards.

thanks for your care to china.

i still have something to say,but i can not  exress all my thought in english

I want to say that Turky doesnot have the dark side

Dignified: Could you please simplify what you posted here? maybe a summary.

I think all of you write is not dark side, also china have many problem but we are going to overcome . so show me which country have not problem and dark side? If this is your kindly suggestion we can accept and thank you very much.

It is the dark side that give us courage to go on,we can overcome!thank you .

I don't wanna be misunderstood by Chinese friends.I only intended to question what is behind China's intense economic development.That's why I wanna know Chinese people's opinions about that.I have never tought of villifying China.The article written above adapted by The İndependent newspaper.I accept that every country has dark side.For instance,Turkey is identical to China in human rights violations,cencorship and so on.My aim is to reveal how much known these problems by people.I know that countries could deal with these problems by facing up with them.For example,cencorship is a big shame.How can it be solved?How can human rights violations be healed?At this point we should focus on solving these problems.Regards.