Contemporary China: the upside

So, farewell then, Beijing. It’s been fun as usual, but it’s beginning to take on the wearily familiar characteristics of a great economic metropolis: rising prices, overburdened transport infrastructure, and everyone too busy to enjoy life. Might as well have stayed in London, you may think.

The enterprise society, certainly, continues to burgeon, within the tight constraints of a corrupt and sclerotic political system. Maybe one shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s just occurred to me that the rigidity of the political structure here has perhaps contributed more than we think to China’s irrepressible growth. If you grow up in a system where nothing works and nothing can be formally changed, but you still need to get things done, you develop an innovative, and sometimes an unscrupulous, approach to ways and means. China is a society in which one is constantly coming up against the mantra “nothing can be done” – “mei ban fa” is the virtual state motto – but where almost everything can be worked with patience and imagination. There are some lovely stories of unofficial enterprises springing up on the very margins of the law in the seventies, before Deng Xiaoping came along with his black and white cats and conferred official blessing.

And this sclerosis may well be the real foundation of China’s coming economic triumphs. My dear friend Katy, who, despite being quite well-connected, has never bothered with a conventional “job” in her life, and who has just taken seven years out following the birth of her son, is now doing the groundwork for her seventh or eighth business start-up, and she is considerably younger than I am. When one compares that to my contemporaries in the UK, whose idea of the way to prosperity has been to land a “job” in someone else’s organisation, and then spend 40 years sitting around wearing suits, one sees why China is looking like a winner. Maybe the “ghastly old waxworks” (©HRH The Prince of Wales) of the Politburo are China’s best bet for continued economic expansion. Of course, 20 years down the road, when the leaders of society all belong to the spoilt, privileged and over-educated single-child generation, it may all be very different.