Diary – 2 June 2016

In 1873, when Jules Verne published his Around the World in Eighty Days, it seemed worth betting that a circumnavigation of the globe could be achieved in less than three months. Having just completed the feat in roughly three weeks, I feel like a slowcoach. (I gather it can be done on scheduled flights in 32 hours.) First stop was Los Angeles for Mike Milken’s annual conference, an extravaganza of West Coast networking and notworking (the two go hand in hand) held in Beverly Hills. One of the year’s best one-liners was Jamie Dimon’s back in January, when he defined the Davos World Economic Forum as being ‘where billionaires tell millionaires what the middle class feels’. By contrast, the Milken conference is where New Yorkers tell Californians what the Chinese feel.

And so to Beijing, where I was lecturing on ‘The West and China’ to several hundred students at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management.