Zhou Wenzhong, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, stood before a full-capacity crowd at Rackham Amphitheatre on Nov. 12 and, with an almost casual air about him, explained China's plans to drastically improve the lives of its nearly 1.3 billion citizens by quadrupling per capita income by the year 2020. Zhou, speaking perfect English, went on to say that China was committed to preventing future health scares stemming from Chinese products - alluding to the recall of tens of millions of Chinese-made products from American toy manufacturers last fall. And responding to criticisms about the environmental consequences of China's emerging industrial sector, Zhou said his country sought to build "a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society" in conjunction with its booming economy.

A week after Zhou's visit, hundreds of people streamed into a Law School auditorium across campus from Rackham to hear Wang Dan, one of the leaders in the Chinese democracy movement of the late 1980s. Wang, who had spent years in Chinese prisons and lost many friends and fellow activists in the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, embodied a spirit of Chinese patriotism starkly different from the views of Zhou. Passionately speaking in broken English, Wang criticized the policies championed by the ambassador, and assailed the Chinese government for the treatment of its people. Wang said the economic reforms proposed by the Chinese government - the ones Zhou said would increase the per capita income of the country's citizens - were, in fact, not for the benefit of the people, but were "a license to openly steal the people's property." He said the success of the government's current economic reforms "has become the best excuse for the Communist Party of China to reject freedom and democracy."

While Zhou's and Wang's ideologies differed drastically, the two lectures put together made it perfectly clear: China is a divisive, tumultuous nation that garners worldwide attention for both its unparalleled economic growth rate and the stagnation or decline of human rights standards for its people. The dichotomy between positive and negative interpretations of China's modern development makes the nation a dynamic subject for the University's theme year series. This year's program, titled ChinaNow and coordinated by the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and the Center of Chinese Studies, offers an array of events, activities and special courses meant to enlighten students on the budding world power.

But while ChinaNow promotes a stronger link between the University and China, the question remains what China that is, and whether the University has a moral responsibility to take a public stand against human rights atrocities - which include, but are not limited to: state-sponsored censorship of media, suppression of religious freedom and repression of dissidents and protesters - occurring in a country with which it has a close relationship.

The University's association with China, though likely stronger now than ever, extends back to the late 19th century, when then-University president James Angell served as the United States's minister to China. Since then, the University has continued to maintain and expand its relationship with China by establishing the Center for Chinese Studies in 1961, sending a University delegation to China in 1971 and opening an official office - the University of Michigan Office in China - in the Chinese capital of Beijing in 2003. More recently, current University president Mary Sue Coleman led a University delegation to China where she helped establish the Joint Institute with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, an engineering exchange program that allows for shared degree programs and research collaboration between the universities.

What makes the University's ties with the China of the past so different from its present relations is the global power that today's China now wields. For one thing, the desire to foster bonds between the University and China has undoubtedly taken on more steam since the latter became an economic powerhouse. In 2006, both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ranked China's gross domestic product - used to measure the size of a country's economy - at second in the world behind the United States. And last year, the IMF's World Economic Outlook projected that China's global economic growth would surpass that of the United States in 2008 - something no country has done since the 1930s.