The 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China is tomorrow, bringing deep reflection on China's path since 1949 and its role in the world. Yesterday, we rounded up the praise heaped on a growing China. Many Western writers, though thrilled with China's economic expansion and global leadership, have given China's human rights and environmental struggles little attention. References to Beijing's fraught relations with with the Uighurs, for example, are oddly absent from Western reflections on China's anniversary. Today we survey the criticism of China, the strongest of which come from non-Western media.

• China Must Address Human Rights  Nina Hachigian asks in the L.A. Times, "Now that China is fully engaged and has earned considerable clout, what will it do? Will it increasingly abide by and support international standards? Could it eventually become a genuine leader for the global common good, with the risk and sacrifice that often entails?" The Sudan, for example, has long traded with China. "China's human rights conduct does not live up to international standards, and, often to ensure access to natural resources, it supports and shelters dictators who abuse their people," she wrote. "The U.S. does not have the power to make China a global do-gooder, but it has some cards to play."

• Big Growing Pains for Richer China   Melissa Chan writes for Al Jazeera that China, for all its success, has real problems. "All these economic changes have come at a heavy price for China's environment, in the form of dead rivers, poisoned land and toxic air. Then there are the increasingly frequent reports of unrest and rioting," she wrote. "the Tibetans, as we saw in the recent outbreaks of unrest, remain deeply disenchanted with Chinese rule. Other ethnic riots earlier this year in the western region of Xinjiang, home to Muslim Uighurs, revealed that, after 60 years of communist rule, some of the most entrenched obstacles to uniting China's people remain untackled."

• The Death of Maoist Marxism  Chris Patten writes in the Malaysia-based New Straits Times that the Maoism dictatorship being celebrated in China has been long debunked. Patten criticized Mao as a "tyrant" and China's Mao worship as forgetting his crimes. "There was the Great Leap Forward, which led to mass starvation and perhaps as many as 38 million deaths. Then the madness of the Cultural Revolution, when millions suffered terribly, many died, and many more behaved disgracefully as Mao sought to destroy those who had rescued China from his earlier follies," he wrote. "This creed has clearly not survived its creator. Pragmatism with a Leninist face is the order of the day. The glories of getting rich have overwhelmed the deprivations of patriotic self-sacrifice. Mao made China proud. Deng [Xiaoping] made it prosperous."

• West Must Push China on Human Rights  A staff editorial in the U.K. Telegraph condemns China's leadership while praising its people. "The Communist Party insists nowadays it wants to build a normal nation, and perhaps the most encouraging aspect of modern China is the increasingly normal behaviour of its people: they work, they play, they go on holiday. They grumble about the corrupt among their leaders; they moan about censorship; they worry about the dominance of American multinationals without trying to burn down their headquarters," the editorial reads. "This imposes a duty on the West. It is incumbent on us to accept with enthusiasm the challenges and opportunities presented by a vast population ready to play its part in the world, while remaining sceptical about the often rose-tinted image of the country's development propagated by its leaders."

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