NEW COLOSSUS

FT columnist Gideon Rachman makes a list of lessons learnt during a high-level visit to China. Let's begin with the good part:

China and the West: The Chinese seemed both baffled and faintly irritated to be receiving a joint European-American delegation. As one Chinese academic put it – "In 2003 we thought that there was a major split in the west over Iraq, and that this would prove lasting. But I think we were wrong."

Hooray. The bad news, though, is not far away:

Nationalism: Beijing-based journalists reckon that China has taken a nationalistic turn under Hu Jintao, who became president in 2003. The days when the Chinese would lean over backwards to help foreign investors are over. These days foreign businessmen are finding the going increasingly tough. Chinese foreign policy is also increasingly assertive and is underpinned by an assumption that the west is ultimately hostile to the rise of China. One westerner I met, who teaches at a Chinese university, said he was disturbed by how many of his pupils had been told during the course of their education, or military training, that eventual conflict between China and the United States and Japan was inevitable.

Comments

[mikek]

"that eventual conflict between China and the United States and Japan was inevitable."

Damn.

I wish the Mongolians would make a comeback. If you ranked people who hate the U.S. from Car Bomb(10) to Angry Retoric(2), 1 is for friends, the highest have all been crushed by Genghis and the lowest were damaged by the hordes.

Clive, a few months or maybe a year ago I posted a comment about Michael Bisping who fights in the UFC. They are going to have a fight night in Manchester this spring and plenty of people in the U.K. are going to hate the sport (there are rules now and it is sanctioned). If you have writers block in the spring it might make for an interesting globalization story. It is something that was created in another country, brought to the U.S. and will be exported to other countries. I expect Europeans to pinch their nose and complain in opinion pages about the U.S. even though the owners are Italian. (From Japan to Brazil to the U.S. to the U.K. in seventy years)