The New Yorker:

The President of China compared moral education to buttons on clothes. The girls’ buttons were wrong from the start, but they learned the more valuable lessons that two systems can impart.

By Peter Hessler 

At 7:01 a.m. on September 2, 2019, more than an hour before my twin daughters, Natasha and Ariel, were scheduled to begin third grade at Chengdu Experimental Primary School, the first message appeared on the WeChat group for parents. The group name was Class Six, and every time somebody posted a message, my phone beeped. The initial beep came from somebody called Number 16 Zhou Liming’s Mama:

Regarding today’s weather, is it fine to wear shorts?

It took less than a minute for the next beep. This time, the writer was Number 35 Li Jialing’s Mama:

We are wearing shorts, it’s not cold.

Each message appeared in the standard WeChat format: a time stamp, the sender’s name, an avatar, and the text within a bubble. The bubbles scrolled down the screen like the dialogue of a play in which characters had been both named and numbered:

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