[The Frozen Man and the Chinese Alphabet]

The Confucian philosophy teaches us that the search for truth does not always follow a straight line. The clinical observation presented here illustrates this perfectly and is about a child afflicted by a rare neuromuscular disorder (in Chinese, the word 'myopathy' is translated to meaning 'frozen man') in whom was suspected a deficit in αB crystallin. The authors take the opportunity to put the spotlight on China, this great country which did not wait for Alain Peyrefitte to wake up or, more precisely, to rewake. In the light of past and recent missions in the former Middle Kingdom, an update is made on the medico-scientific but also societal issues of this country on the verge of becoming, perhaps, a giant in the field of neuromuscular diseases.