It’s not often that you come across a book that completely transforms your understanding of the world. Just recently I’ve read two. One, Tom Holland’s Dominion concerns the debt we all owe — not just vicars and popes but atheists and social justice warriors — to Christianity’s revolutionary (and frankly still shocking) message that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The other, China, Trade and Power by Stewart Paterson, is about a seismic event in 2001, three months to the day after 9/11, which shook the world to a degree few remotely comprehend.
Almost none of us is familiar with that epochal moment, yet it changed everything and explains everything: the Blair/Brown spending bubble; Australia’s prosperity; Mexico’s gangland hell; the 2008 crash; the rise of Donald Trump; Momentum, Antifa and the only problem with communism being that it hasn’t been tried properly yet; Brexit; your smart phone; protectionism; the price of houses; the crowds at Bicester Village; the riots in Hong Kong…
All these happened partly or mainly because on 11 December 2001 China was admitted to the World Trade Organisation.
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