James Fallows, writing from China:

This is the kind of scene I wish I could convey to people who worry about China as the all-conquering juggernaut that has coped with every internal challenge and is sitting around thinking about how to take over the world.
My wife and I spent the afternoon at a public “High Tech Middle School” in Ningxia autonomous region, in western China bordering Inner Mongolia. The students could not have been more charming or open-spirited. Here’s how a few of the girls looked: