Now that Mammon has replaced Mao, corruption is fuelling the rural inequality opened up by migration to the cities

The case of Lu Banglie, who was beaten up by a mob near Taishi in southern China – as reported in yesterday’s Guardian – is not unusual. There has been a rapidly growing number of conflicts between villagers and the authorities, often over the sale of agricultural land on the edge of a town or village to a developer. These conflicts are a graphic illustration of the tensions involved in China’s transformation. The essence of industrialisation is the shift from the countryside to the towns involving, in China’s case in particular, a huge migration to the urban centres. The cities and towns are growing apace and gobbling up the adjoining land in a ceaseless process of expansion.

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The defeat of colonial rule will come to be seen as the defining event of the 20th century

What was the most important event of the 20th century? The answer might once have been 1917. More recently, the favourite has been its historical nemesis, 1989. The different vantage points offered by history provide different perspectives and, as a consequence, different judgments. What might seem incontrovertible to one generation appears less obvious to the next, and perhaps not at all obvious, even perverse, to the one that follows.

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Japan’s contempt for its own continent has become a liability

Six years ago, when I was last in Japan, the issue of China barely ever featured during conversations. But China now looms large in the Japanese mind. It evokes a complex of emotions, from surprise and confusion to fear and defensiveness. While there is a recognition that China represents a huge economic opportunity – China has suddenly become Japan’s largest trading partner and played a key role in hauling Japan out of its long-running economic malaise – that is far from the dominant emotion. Rather, April’s anti-Japanese demonstrations in China have helped give expression to an intangible but growing sense of concern.

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US v China will soon be the dominant fault line of global politics

Ever since 9/11, the US and China have been rubbing along nicely. The US needed China’s support in the war against terror and China is anxious to create the best conditions for its economic growth. But how long will this latest honeymoon last? A string of recent announcements coming out of Washington suggest that the Bush administration may be adopting a rather more abrasive position.

First, China was attacked for the huge wave of textile imports that followed the lifting of the global quota agreement at the beginning of the year, a decision the US had 10 years to prepare for. The US has now imposed quotas on Chinese textiles, as has the EU. Meanwhile the US treasury has demanded that China revalue the yuan within the next six months, describing its currency policies as “highly distortionary”. In fact, even if China does revalue the yuan, it will make precious little difference to America’s huge current account deficit; moreover China’s own current account is broadly in balance, suggesting that the case for revaluation is hardly overwhelming.

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As Japan has shown, and China will too, the west’s values are not necessarily universal

Not so long ago, Japan was the height of fashion. Then came the post-bubble recession and it rapidly faded into the background, condemned as yesterday’s story. The same happened to the Asian tigers: until 1997 they were the flavour of the month, but with the Asian financial crisis they sank into relative obscurity. No doubt the same fate will befall China in due course, though perhaps a little less dramatically because of its sheer size and import.

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Long-running regional hostilities threaten the stability of east Asia

After being obliged by Tokyo to provide a seemingly endless series of documents, the cheerful official at the Japanese embassy in London eventually informed me that the person who helps to look after my little boy – and who happens to be Filipino – would be granted a visa to join us in Nagoya for four months. Alas, when she arrived at the airport, immigration officials interrogated her for over two hours, told her at one point that she would not be allowed in, and then finally agreed to admit her.

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At last China’s culture of racism is being contested by Chinese

Condoleezza Rice’s recent visit to east Asia concluded in Beijing, where she made clear her opposition to the new anti-secession law and her view that Japan should be a permanent member of the UN security council. With Sino-Japanese relations deteriorating and unification of Taiwan with China regarded as non-negotiable by the Chinese, it is hardly surprising that these remarks did not go down well. But what has not been reported in the western media is the reception Rice was given.

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US unilateralism was a means of breaking the old order. Now it is building new alliances

With any new political phenomenon, there is always a tendency to underestimate its novelty and treat it as some kind of short-term aberration. I vividly recall how long it took commentators and analysts, on the right and left, to recognise that Thatcherism was something quite new and here to stay. Similar doubts greeted the Bush administration and the neocon revolution: its novelty would be short-lived, it would not last and it was just not viable. It is always hard to imagine a new kind of world, easier to think of the future as an extension of the past, and difficult to comprehend a paradigm shift and grasp a new kind of logic.

There was speculation last autumn that the second Bush term would be different, that the breach with Europe would be healed as a matter of necessity, that the US could not afford another Iraq, that somehow the new position was unsustainable. Already, however, from last November’s presidential election it was clear that the neocon revolution had wide popular support and serious electoral roots, that it was establishing a new kind of domestic political hegemony. In fact, the right has been setting the political agenda in the US for at least 30 years and that is now true with a vengeance. All the indications suggest that the revolution is continuing apace.

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By failing to hold any ideological ground, New Labour has sown the seeds for a resurgent right

New Labour will probably win the next election, perhaps comfortably, although Blair’s speech at the weekend betrayed a new sense of anxiety. New Labour, however, will not rule for ever. Maybe it will win a third term, even a fourth, but sooner or later, it will again be consigned to opposition, most likely by the Conservatives. The idea that the latter would be banished to the electoral sidelines was always fanciful: notwithstanding the impressive performance of the Liberal Democrats, the two-party system is enormously resilient, as it showed in the 1980s and surely will again. But what will be the legacy of New Labour: or, to put it another way, what kind of political era will succeed it?

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American dominance is bound to wither as Asia’s confidence grows

In President Bush’s inauguration speech, he pledged to support “the expansion of freedom in all the world”, deploying the words free or freedom no less than 25 times in 20 short minutes. The neoconservative strategy is quite explicit: to bend the world to America’s will; to reshape it according to the interests of a born-again superpower. There is something more than a little chilling about this. Even though the Iraqi occupation has gone seriously awry, the United States still does not recognise the constraints on its own power and ambition.

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