They are there as night falls, and your car lights pick them up as you speed along the coast on a new and excitingly empty motorway: clusters of ragged people who have clambered up through the barriers from the patchwork of ancient paddy fields which this new road paved with glorious intentions has sundered. This is Hainan, an island nearly the size of Sri Lanka which for centuries the Chinese considered to be a place of exile and disease but which the Communist state and its construction mafia is rebranding as a tropical paradise. The people are not ethnic Chinese at all, but from the Li minor-ity-the original settlers of Hainan.
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