I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution.
In some ways China resembles Italy just after the turn of the last century or Russia in the 1920s — countries whose faith in modernity was driven, in part, by insecurities over their own relative backwardness.
China's leaders also know how much their power over international affairs remains constrained by China's relative backwardness, economic and military.
ECONOMIC backwardness has its advantages.
And the roots of scientific backwardness lie not with religious leaders, but with secular rulers, who are as stingy with cash as they are lavish with controls over independent thought.The long viewThe caricature of Islam's endemic backwardness is easily dispelled.
This is a manifestation of social backwardness".
A little backwardness would be healthy".
It is almost Luddite in its backwardness.
He says to forget the backwardness.
That challenge is poverty and economic backwardness".
