Charity ends at home

DENG XIAOPING once dismissed worries about unwanted foreign influence by saying that when you open a window, of course the flies come in, along with the fresh air. China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is less insouciant as fly-swatter-in-chief. Witness, in the two past weeks, a newly published speech he gave to the Central Party School, a new law governing foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs), signs of an unwelcome policy shift towards religions deemed to be too “foreign”, and even, on a lighter note, a ban on landlords naming buildings in China after foreign places (see article).

Mr Xi has long been suspicious of Western ideas (except Marxism-Leninism). But his speech to the party school in Beijing last December, published in a party magazine, Qiushi, on May 1st, was unusually insistent. He repeatedly warned educational institutions not to deviate from the party line and not to “spread Western capitalist values”. They did not sound like the words of a reformer.