media - "I was wrong, wrong, wrong"

Andrea points at the refreshing statement of Chris Richard, chief editor of the New Internationalist, who already made a special issue about China in September, but was only found now online. Seldom journalists are prepared to admit they had to adjust their ideas about China so dramatically when they came here.
"I thought I would find here a closed and restrictive society whose people – fearing punishment or scrutiny from the Chinese authorities – would be reticent to speak. I imagined an embryonic civil society movement in which any NGO that wanted to advocate against Chinese Communist Party policies would be crushed before it could even begin. And I thought that China’s long march towards capitalism was relatively recent, and that the excesses of globalization would be some years from irretrievably infecting the welfare of its people. In some ways, I was right. But in so many ways, I was wrong, wrong, wrong!"
More at T-Salon and the New Internationalist.