A couple days ago in Shanghai I delivered a presentation to a group of Executive MBA students out of the UK (though 16 countries represented in the session) on the implications of 10 irreversible trends in China’s development:

• a growing (anxiously) middle class
• mass urbanization
• aging population
• increasing tension between livability and waste management
• rise of the consumer society and dwindling natural resources
• the economic development of China’s interior
• the country’s increasing integration with the global economy
• the modernization and build-up of China’s national security apparatus
• the increasing pervasiveness of electronic media

One of the slides I presented during the hour-and-a-half long presentation involved a brief history of colonial aspirations in China from about 1840 until 1945.

After the talk, one of the participants asked me if the Chinese really do dislike the West (and Japan) for that bit of unfortunate history. I answered, “Yes, right along side of its admiration of the technological and economic strides the West – especially America – has made.”

And then I added, “But mind you, as much discussion as there’s been about what the West has done in recent past to China, China’s had no discussion of what it’s done to itself in its more recent past – especially from about 1958 through 1978. A lot of terrible things happened that no one talks about. And until they talk about that period, it’s most convenient to whip the West and Japan for its injustices.”

The British gentleman said, “Not very good at introspection, eh?

He continued, “Well, you know, British society until recently was similar. Until a generation ago we were taught not to discuss certain embarrassing issues in public, not to cry out loud and the like. Now, we’re talking in our media about pedophile Catholic priests and so on – things we would never have dreamed of talking out loud about not long before.”

It takes more than construction equipment to build a civil society, I suppose.