Inside the dragon
Sir: How refreshing to read some sharp insight on ‘The Chinese question’ (24 March). We have all had enough of handsome Niall Ferguson on our television screens, one moment telling us that China is running the world, then abruptly changing tack and saying that the People’s Republic is collapsing. Jonathan Fenby offers something different — a measured interpretation of an impossibly complicated story. But it’s a shame that even he can’t shed more light on the scandal surrounding Bo Xilai. For all the microbloggers in China, we westerners still cannot fully understand the mystery of the rising east.
Liam Collard
Hong Kong
Tories for the ECHR
Sir: It seems awfully unfair to blame the Liberal Democrats for the enduring supremacy of judgments handed down by European Court of Human Rights (Leading article, 17 March), when the Conservative attorney general, Dominic Grieve, lauded the ECHR in his maiden speech in 1997, and the Conservative Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke, described the proposal for a British Bill of Rights as ‘xenophobic and legal nonsense’.
It is the two most senior legal minds in the government who are committed to ensuring that the Bill of Rights Commission produces a document ‘full of drivel’ (i.e.,
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