When Britain, following the industrial revolution, came to world dominance, and the United States later supplanted it, they each produced genuinely new manifestations of products and culture, and they each imposed them on a sometimes reluctant, sometimes eager world.
China now seems more to be opening itself to the globalising rapacities of luxury goods manufacturers, ‘world-class’ architects and, soon to come, international banks. (Will China prove to be the first nation state the banks cannot capture? A discreet and interesting struggle will unfold.) And she is selling back to the rest of the world the sometimes debased satisfaction of its own native appetites.
The fact that China controls the purse strings perhaps makes her feel this to be totally different from the indignities imposed upon her by the foreign powers in the nineteenth century, but what is the currency that she is stuffing into her purse?
