“I’ve seen the future and it works.” That was US journalist
Lincoln Steffers’s message after visiting the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It’s
worth remembering how wrong he turned out to be. Why? George Osborne and Boris
Johnson have just come back from China, and they’ll be tempted to use the
impressive things they’ve seen to justify huge infrastructure projects, like
HS2 and a floating airport off the Kent coast.
Already, Osborne has claimed that China, unlike Britain, has
ambition. There may be some truth in this. More uncomfortably, in conservative
circles I’ve heard some discuss “the limits of democracy” – whether seen in the
time it takes to build nuclear power stations, or the recent stand-off over the
US debt ceiling. Sometimes this implies that China’s model of so-called
political-economic “state capitalism” may be on to something.
