Diary – 8 July 2005

Banff, Alberta, Canada

I’ve been invited to address the annual meeting of the Canadian Investment Dealers Association on the subject of ‘why China isn’t going to be a global superpower’ — a theme I explored here in January, in contradiction of eminent pundits whose New Year essays had gone large on the coming ‘Chinese century’. To be negative about China in any gathering of investors is to invite the response provoked by H.M. Bateman’s Man Who Asked for a Double Scotch in the Grand Pump-Room at Bath, and this turned out to be especially the case in Alberta, which has oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia’s and sees the Chinese as huge future customers. So I followed an eminent China-watcher to the platform with some trepidation and started with a low trick to get the audience on my side: a joke about that well-known former Canadian investor Conrad Black. I’m sorry to say it went down rather well, and I think I made some unlikely converts to Sinoscepticism.

I certainly made more friends than the star lunchtime speaker, James A. Baker, the US elder statesman and Bush loyalist who has recently come out of retirement to negotiate the cancellation of Iraq’s debts. He offered a grimly militaristic view of America’s role in the world — harder-edged, I suspect, than anything he would have subscribed to when he was Bush Senior’s secretary of state — that did not hide contempt for Canada’s refusal to go to war in Iraq. The audience was polite, but a gang of feisty Québecois told me afterwards they had been relying on me, as a member of the notoriously impolite British media, to have a go at Baker in the Q&A session.