Causing the raising of an eyebrow is an easy enough feat nowadays in China. Last July, in a speech to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, President Jiang Zemin lifted restrictions on China's capitalists that kept them from becoming party members. After the September 11 attacks, China enthusiastically welcomed Bush's war on terrorism. And in December, China finally entered the World Trade Organization.

To most American eyes these are liberal and cosmopolitan steps forward: an increasingly open Chinese society embracing the free market and international norms. But recent events provide a reminder that there is a different view out there--one President George W. Bush is unlikely to experience when he visits China on February 21-22. It is a view that was made concrete and bloody when five independent bombings--the latest in a string of explosions that have been escalating since the early 1990s--hit Chinese cities shortly after China's WTO entry. Several people were killed in these incidents, two of them at McDonald's. It is probably not an accident that the bombers selected Western multinationals patronized by wealthy Chinese.

The government has yet to offer an explanation for the bombings, and it's easy to see why: The Communist Party will never acknowledge that the vast majority of the Chinese people are disgruntled. I spent the latter part of 2001 traveling around China talking to workers and peasants, and discovered that contrary to Western perceptions that the common people are benefiting from the free market, the Chinese see their government and the nation's elite as conspiring to sell them out to imperialists, a k a the Americans. Frustration with the government's economic policies is now entwined with rapidly expanding anti-Western sentiment.

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