ARTICLE BY LORD PALUMBO FOLLOWING HIS OFFICIAL VISIT TO CHINA
20/10/93
History has the habit of turning full circle.
A hundred years ago,
the advice given to any aspiring youngster with brains, ambition and a spirit of adventure, seeking fame and fortune abroad, was "Go West, young man".
Nowadays, the advice would be to turn to the East, and in particular, to China, a land as fabled today as it was in the time of Marco Polo, and no less fascinating in its diversity and in the mystical beauty of its landscape.
Our youthful aspirants would find the need to master the language, the philosophy, the culture and the tradition of a dynastic civilisation that stretches back almost 5000 years, and many thousand before that in terms of development. No-one should pretend that that learning curve would be other than steep, for the Chinese mind and character are infinitely subtle, whilst the language is as
But it would be an complicated as the calligraphy is beautiful: essential treading-path to success. They would find the Chinese courteous, kind, friendly, helpful, hospitable, curious, proud, nature-loving, industrious and inexorably patient. They would find a land mass comparable in variety and size with that of the United States, inhabited by 1.2 billion people, almost one-fifth of the world's total population, eighty per cent of whom work close to nature on the land, every inch of which is tilled and cultivated with the thoughtful precision and beauty of the hand-crafted wristwatch. Unlike Russia, they would find the shops overflowing with food and top quality goods at prices that the West, and indeed, many of their neighbours in the East, can only envy. They would find a country is completely unaffected by the recent world recession.
Nobody should be in any doubt that China is on the move economically, and that in fifty years' time, or less, it stands every chance of becoming one of the most powerful economic forces on earth, exhibiting the same jolting energy that Stephen Hearst once attributed so memorably to the United States,
- 'the vitality of a nation sparking across a continent like an unearthed electric current!! There exist extraordinary opportunities for Western enterprise to profit from that phenomenon, jointly with the Chinese.
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