the greycat blog

An excellent puncturing of the great empty bubble of awe with which the West surrounds China these days: John Pomfret’s ‘A long wait at the gate to greatness’ at the Washington Post. Pomfret is a former Peking bureau chief for the Post and knows what he is talking about.

So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China’s becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China’s missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.

But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

Too many constraints are built into the country’s social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons — dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn’t travel well — China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

It’s a balanced, realistic, well-informed view, the kind of thing you almost never get from the Western media when it comes to China. Highly recommended. If I may pick up my own trumpet and send forth a few muted notes for a moment, some of my own thoughts about China can be found here: ‘China’s future is not Europe’s past’.

By the way, I see that the Washington Post has underlined certain words and phrases in its online stories: these, of course, are links, but of a particular kind. The idea is that you, poor feeble-minded reader who needs to be led by the hand through everything, can click upon them and be taken to a page giving a list of resources (on washingtonpost.com, of course) related to the word or phrase in question - oh, and you’ll get a nice pop-up ad too, unless you’re careful. Thus, Pacific Ocean is linked in this way, in case you don’t know what that is. This is presumably the web’s wonderful version of the obsolete mind-broadening exercises once known as thinking for yourself and doing your own research. Take warning from any page scattered with those inviting underlinings: guided in everything you do by the notions of pedantic twats, you will ultimately become one of them.

I found Pomfret’s article thanks to a link from a post at Alan Sullivan’s fine Fresh Bilge blog. My thanks to him.

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.