You can fool some of the people some of the time…

This week, I find myself in the sumptuously indulgent surroundings of the Reading Mi bookshop and it’s very pleasant extension, Cafe Mi. Coffee is an eye-watering 35 yuan a cup, which equates to around £4 or $5 a cup at current rates. The coffee is good, but not that good. What you pay for is the experience of enjoying an Americano in such a wondrously pleasant circumstance: softly lit and comfortable booths on the inside of the café or overlooking the Hongfu Road and the Exhibition Centre on the other, the tables surrounded by voluminous volumes many of which, quite fortunately given my awful Mandarin, are actually in English. It should also be noted that coffee in China also has something of an added cache to it, even a common-or -garden Starbucks will cost you somewhere in the region of $4 here, hence the incredibly inflated prices in Café Mi.

I write this particular piece a couple of weeks after the election of one Donald J. Trump, an event that came as something of a surprise to some, but which others, myself included given my recent experience of the Brexit vote in the UK, suspected may well come to pass. I actually wrote a piece two days before the election warning people to expect the unexpected but, due to the difficulties of blogging from China where I currently find myself, I was unable to find a means of publishing that particular diatribe in time.
Let me be perfectly clear, before I begin a process that is likely to bring some degree of opprobrium down upon my head, that I thought, and still think, that Donald Trump was a perfectly awful candidate for the office of President of the United States. He was, however, the better of the two candidates on offer as his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was so distasteful that it was only through necessity, and the thought of the dangers of Donald Trump achieving the ultimate office, that even dyed-in-the-wool Democrats were persuaded to vote for her. 

A good friend, and a man whose judgment I much respect even when I don’t completely agree with it, put it a little too succinctly perhaps when he expressed his relief that HRC fell on her ‘fat, feminist fascist ass’. A little crude perhaps, but he does have a point. Feminists, particularly the type represented by the extremists such as HRC, have in the last decade seriously damaged the fabric of American society and, by their actions, precipitated a long overdue reaction that has worked very much in the favour of the American right. Equality of the sexes is no longer the aim for contemporary feminists, but rather the complete emasculation of all expressions of what it is to be male. Misandry has become politically and socially respectable, no matter how violent, how hateful or how sexist. ‘Fascist’ is an extreme accusation, but given the way that all debate has been stifled, all expression of contrary views suppressed, all freedom of speech trampled underfoot in the universities of the US in recent years it is, perhaps, not too far short of the mark.

As ever, the UK tends to follow in the wake of such cultural movements in the US. Britain’s universities have also began to suffer from the same depressing, repressive and regressive tendency to expound a single, narrow, ‘politically correct’ point of view and to suppress all others. Speakers who do not toe the line have found it increasingly difficult to find platforms, even those whose views are only a few degrees apart from the PC hardliners find themselves struggling to be allowed expression on university campuses.

Both the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump also revealed a most disturbingly arrogant attitude from some, by no means all, of those who found themselves on the losing sides in these debates. The line, oft repeated of Brexit supporters and now applied to those who dared to vote for Trump, has been that they are either ‘old’ or ‘stupid’ or, more likely, both. Such people have been much derided for not having understood the issues involved. My own experience has been quite to the contrary. Those who understood in depth the issues involved were more likely to vote Brexit.
During the UK campaign, I was somewhat shocked to find that the the theoretically left-wing Labour Party was supporting the notion of remaining in the European Union complete with its democratic deficit, with its unelected and unrepresentative Commission and with its deep embrace of Globalization. Tony Benn must have been spinning in his grave (not to mention one Jeremy Corbyn and his quite woeful hypocrisy on this issue). The only left wing choice if one cared at all about the fortunes of the British working man, the man who has seen his standard of living absolutely slaughtered by Globalization and the free movement of labour across Europe, was to vote to leave that benighted institution.

 
Given the decimation of prospects that working people have seen in the last 25 years, surely their choice of Brexit can be described at many things but stupid it was not. Logical, consistent, rational...all these words would fit quite nicely, but stupid it was not.
Much the same can be said of the American working class, although the ravages of Globalization have by no means stopped at that level. They have suffered a very similar fate to those in the UK with their jobs and their livelihood disappearing to the countries of the East where workers rights and conditions are much exploited and hence products can be manufactured at far cheaper rates.

This has worked hugely to the advantage of China and other countries of the Far East. Every time one returns to this land one sees it developing at an incredible pace. In effect, much of that development has been achieved by usurping the livelihoods of the working and middle classes of the West: of America, of the UK and of Europe.

For a tiny, tiny fraction of society in the West, the top one or two percent perhaps, this has worked out just fine; they have been having a glorious time exploiting sweat shop labour whilst throwing their fellow countrymen and women to the wolves. For the rest of the population though, it has not been quite so much fun.

Back in Café Mi I look around at my fellow customers. They are mostly of the increasingly prosperous Chinese middle-class enjoying the benefits of two and a half decades of economic growth. They are well-dressed in fashionable and stylish attire. They read intellectually challenging tomes or chat whilst enjoying an overpriced cappuccino and the view across to the gargantuan Exhibition Centre opposite. Such folk are as much the beneficiaries of Globalization as their counterparts in the West have been the victims. They once looked to the West in envy at the lifestyle that hard work and application could achieve there. Now they look with a faint curiousity and perhaps just a little sympathy…