Everything's Great in China - NYTimes.com HONG KONG-Some two weeks after China's once-in-a-decade leadership change brought intense scrutiny from the rest of the world, mainland government officials and sundry representatives vetted to speak with American journalists are fiercely, defensively optimistic: Everything's swell, the country's on the up and up, and any problems are really just glitches, easily surmountable. As is widely known, the Chinese government blocks access to Internet news sites and services in response to controversy (including the New York Times, after it published an article on Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's family finances). It also allegedly employs tens of thousands of people to censor Internet communications. Yet last Tuesday evening Gao Shangang, the executive secretary of the All-China Journalists Association, said through a translator that China has a freer press than Americans realize. Chinese journalists, he said, can and do report on industrial accidents and wrongdoing among local officials. And what about the central government, and party higher-ups? In that case, he said, journalists can and do report negative information - after the party has disclosed it. So no muckraking, but the press is free to disseminate government materials. On Monday, Zhang Wei, a senior captain and research fellow at the Naval Military Studies Institute, batted away a question about corruption in the military. Colonel Liu Mingfu, in his recent book "Why the Liberation Army Can Win," argued that "the People's Liberation Army has reached a stage in which its biggest danger and No. 1 foe is corruption. He recalled 1894, when a corrupt Chinese military lost a conflict with Japan despite access to advanced European ships. But Ms. Wei said through a translator that any parallels to the 19th century were an "exaggeration" and not "responsible journalism." She said the Communist Party acknowledges corruption but has the "ability to resolve it." She didn't specify how. As for the situation in Syria, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, Li Guofu, on Tuesday defended China's decision to veto U.N. Security Council sanctions. The U.S.-led international community has been too quick to meddle in other countries' affairs, he argued, without understanding the local situation. Besides, governments have a right to enforce order. By way of example, he mentioned the fact that New York police officers arrested Occupy Wall Street protesters who blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and that London police officers arrested rioters in the summer of 2011. No foreign powers interfered. Not even the topic of rapid development seems within limits. New Yorkers may grumble whenever an old tenement gets torn down for a condo, do Beijingers do the same as 8-lane highways and high-rises replace hutongs? According to American media, the answer is yes. But Sun Wei Jia, the Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Information Department, said on Tuesday that no, not really: Beijingers realize it's necessary to modernize. And that's more or less that.