China's Youth: Do They Dare to Care about Politics?

At a teeming intersection of Shenzhen's Dongmen shopping street, between KFC and McDonald's, Liu Zhongqiu, twenty-one, sits on a white fold-up chair that looks as if it is about to break and clasps his hands together like a proselyte whenever a passerby drops money into his bucket. His legs below the knee are swollen to the size of balloons, puckered and mottled with grey spots. His feet poke out below, useless and misshapen as if they fell off and were glued back on wrong. His disease, elephantiasis, has left him crippled and in a constant aching pain that registers on his furrowed brow above fleshy cheeks, high eyebrows, and coffee-colored eyes.