But because the Chinese giants are still in essence tied to the state, their leaders must remain Chinese.
But in the rural interior, tens of millions of Chinese still live in poverty.
"There are things happening in Chinese football but there is still a long way to go, " Asian football expert John Duerden told CNN.
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The Taiping Uprising has inspired an enormous literature in Chinese and a much smaller but still significant amount of writing in English.
Malay Singaporeans may still lag behind the Chinese and Indians in educational achievement but, with additional tuition, they have made enormous progress under our system of meritocracy.
The process has improved somewhat for the Chinese, but outside the embassy in Beijing people still stand in line for three hours just to apply for a simple tourist visa.
The commodity story of China being the demand force for oil, minerals like iron ore and agricultural commodities is still in play, but savvy fund managers are turning inward along with the Chinese government.
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The big prestige projects that impress Tom Friedman are real, but so equally are the squalor of the conditions in which most ordinary Chinese still live.
Their economies are growing slower, but are still humming along as upwardly mobile Chinese drive demand for housing and consumer goods in those hot urban centers.
But the target's still to be in the Christmas market and to be in for Chinese New Year, and we're going to launch the device with enough time to be able to build the logistics and get the demand, and be able to sell the devices.
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But in the U.S., at least for one group of lawmakers, it still represents the Chinese cyber-bogeyman.
But Chinese authorities refused to recognize the payment and ruled last year that Proview still owned the name in that country.
He still sports the bow-ties he wore as a colonial civil servant, but has recently been seen in a Chinese-collared jacket.
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