The Chinese politician's power is still checked by the norms of collective leadership.

How well the country navigates these rough waters will determine whether and when it fulfills its potential by combining the world's largest population, economy, and military.

It's always exciting to visit the PRC. But it is most interesting to learn about China, which is vastly larger, more complex, and humane than the nominal communist state which still rules. It's impossible to predict what China will ultimately become. Most important is that it becomes free, consigning today's authoritarian regime to history's dustbin. Then the people of China will be able to decide their own future.

On this morning after Donald J. Trump made his first entrance into the Republican National Convention in a scene that made it look like he was descending to us from heaven, the thoughts of one who has recently been on a trip in China and its subjugated territory of Tibet turn to a consideration of the Trump phenomenon in the light of China's past and present.

Wei remembers clearly the first time she tried a mango. She was six years old, from Dalian in north-east China, and just as she bit into the fruit her parents told her that it was the deceased leader Chairman Mao.