China

Two very different lunch talks in two days. Thaksin Shinawatra spoke to the FCC "via satellite" (sounds cool to us old people, but much more expensive and much worse quality than Skype) and an FT debate on China and Obama's America, featuring the very excellent historian Simon Schama, among others. Several contrasts: the Four Seasons lunch beats the FCC by a predictably wide margin. But the FCC wins hands down for history and ambience. Call it the roof factor: excellent for staring into space, thoughtfully. A common conclusion though: can't think of anywhere else in Asia that can deliver such quality of debate and variety of voices.

For us resolute optimists, it's great to see a sophisticated, nuanced and above all positive overview as James Fallows' piece on China's prospects in the current economic maelstrom. In passing, he raises a stark fact that we communications people - even those who’ve worked with colleagues and clients in the Mainland for 15 years or more - too often forget

"...Being in China today is like being in Western Europe in the 1950s. No one’s family story is dull or uneventful. People doing routine jobs have been through great hardships and dramatic swings of fate. … A scholar I know in Beijing once offhandedly remarked that he had developed self-confidence when learning that he could survive for four years as a teenager on a labor gang during the Cultural Revolution. People in their teens and 20s were not on the labor gangs—kids today!—but they have heard the stories."

We "China experts" need to remember how little we know.

Via Imagethief