The coverage of last week's events in China had two points of focus.
On the one hand we were shown groups of serious old gentlemen in box
suits, gathered in some vast congressional amphitheatre and waiting to
cast their votes for Mr Xi Jinping as a successor to the regime's
current organ-grinder, Hu Jintao. "The Congress has elected a new
Central Committee of the Party," President Hu revealed, in a brief
address, "and replaced older leaders with younger men." To which one
wanted to reply that youth in China is clearly a highly elastic concept.
All this came interspersed with footage of the vibrant and
increasingly westernised life that is apparently going on in China
beyond the senior citizens' clubs of political debate. Here some
genuinely youthful people, most of them indisputably under 40, crowded
over the electronic gizmos that had been put into their hands, executed
dance moves, warbled rap music and looked as if they were having a high
old, if state-sanctioned, time. No doubt we were supposed to sneer at
the men in suits, dutifully "electing" the names stuck on the official
slate, and silently applaud all the ambitious young people just itching
to join the consumer free-for-all in the West.
Amid all the
rousing, if not positively crusading, western talk of bringing "freedom"
and "human rights" to the world's autocracies, as well as selling them
military hardware, it is worth pointing out some of the consequences of a
properly liberalised China for the faltering Western economy. Even
under Communism, China is an economic behemoth. How much more powerful
would it become without its ideological fetters, and how much more
disadvantaged would be the West?
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