Too much information

One of my ambitions this summer is to try not to see even the tiniest glimpse of Olympics coverage on TV. This isn’t mainly a protest about how boring athletics are generally; or about China’s human rights record. It’s more that my hatred of the modern world has risen to such a pitch that I’m now trying to dissociate myself from anything that smacks too scarily of the future.

China is definitely one of those things. Call me reactionary, call me racist, but I just can’t bear the idea that, after centuries of Anglo–European, Judaeo–Christian global hegemony, we’re soon going to have to cede economic and cultural place to these people who don’t think like us, share none of our values and for whom pretty much everything we’ve achieved from Aristotle onwards is a total irrelevance. I feel rather as the citizens of Rome must have done in 410 as they watched Alaric’s Visigoths gathering at the gates: ‘Why our generation? Why couldn’t it have lasted a few more centuries so some other poor saps as yet unborn could take the rap instead?’

Some people — my father, for example, who lives, breathes, eats China; speaks halting Mandarin; thinks Tibetans are bastards who have it coming to them; and has been on about two dozen trips to China in the past month — have responded by becoming more Chinese than the Chinese. Others, like my friend Jamie, are trying to get in on the act by buying up all the old Chinese porcelain in Britain while they still can and flogging it on at a profit in the auctions of Hong Kong. My response, though, has been to bury my head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening.

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