Playing with fire | 11 November 2010

As the G20 summit begins in Seoul, the emphasis in much of the papers is on the economic hostility between America and China. The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote a cover piece on this matter for The Spectator two weeks ago, which we’ve reprinted here for the benefit of CoffeeHousers:

In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in British spending — and they are drawing the obvious conclusions about the relative fortunes of the two nations. As one of my colleagues in China put it to me, ‘Nobody spots blood in the water faster than the Chinese.’

The contrast between the boom in China and the gloom in Britain is part of a bigger story of the shift in economic and political power from the West to the East.