Even China can’t buck the market

Some years ago, I sat with an old China hand in a Beijing teahouse sipping oolong. An American director at a local education firm, his face was grey, creased by decades of pollution and office politics. But when talk turned to the country’s first spacewalk, recently completed, his brow furrowed. ‘Have you ever noticed that the government is trying to do everything the United States did, but 50 years later?’ He ticked off a list of the mainland’s aims and achievements, from manned space travel, to plans to place a Chinese citizen on the surface of the Moon.

But the comparisons don’t end there. For all of its trumpeted exceptionalism, this is a country desperately striving to catch up with and copy the West. A network of Chinese motorways mimic Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1950s Interstate System, designed to aid nation-building. Western-style conglomerates sally forth from Beijing to rule the world. State news outlets replicate the nuance of the BBC and the colour of CNN.