I was in China last week, my first visit in about four years. As usual, nearly all news websites I rely on were blocked by "The Great Firewall of China."
So, determined to make a virtue of necessity, I spent a lot of time on China Daily, Xinhua and the Global Times to see the world through those prisms.
There were two big events during my stay — the visit to China by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania — and coverage of both pretty much conformed to expectations. The vehement tone that colored reporting of the NATO meeting was a bit of a surprise, however, as was the emphasis on “civilizations” — a perspective that affords great insight into Chinese conceptions of how the world works. It isn’t pretty.