Anand Giridharadas writes the “Currents” column for the New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune. He is the author of “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.”

The two men have little in common. One is a hotheaded cop who liked to whip out his pistol and was an inspiration for the Chinese television series “Iron-Blooded Police Spirits.” The other is a soft-spoken blind activist who advocated for women and the disabled, and who irked the authorities enough to suffer their iron-blooded spirits firsthand.

But the apparatchik and the dissident, the insider and the outsider, were of similar mind on one count. When each man fell into danger, he rushed to the sovereign diplomatic territory of the United States.

For Americans, whose national confidence isin professional and personal life. Those liberties are slowly leading to more political ones: With the implicit approval of the authorities, the country is developing a vigorous, irreverent, often critical discourse on the Internet. In those forums, a new culture of questioning official truths, demanding accountability and airing abuses is forming. The abuses in China remain grave and numerous; and yet, increasingly, there is a way of talking back.

China is, gradually, becoming a freer society. Perhaps Washington figures that letting it work that out in some measure of geopolitical privacy – talking just amongst its billion-plus selves – is the shortest path to a China it would like to see.

Anand Giridharadas writes the “Currents” column for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune.