Pankaj Mishra’s excellent report from Shanghai:

There are still more poor people in India and China than in all of Africa. But the leaders of both countries, having promised to usher their huge populations into a Western-style consumer society, now make claims on the world’s resources as confidently as their American counterparts. Striking oil deals in Lagos, Tehran and Caracas, they scour the globe for iron ore, steel, copper and timber. China and India also increasingly rank among the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions.

In both countries, the newly enriched have similar aspirations. The wealthy farmer’s house I visited in a tea-growing village in Zhejiang province could easily have belonged to an Indian of comparable wealth, with its marble floor, 26-inch television, big poster of a white girl with an inexplicable tear in her eye, garishly upholstered sofa, bathroom with shower cubicle and open-hole toilet, and kitchen, with a brand new microwave and other underused mod cons.

To be an Indian in a Chinese city is to find familiar not only the vast crowds, the vivid street life, the open-fronted shops and food stalls, but also the malls with their luxury brand-names, the shiny new Mercedes and BMWs marooned in the intransigent traffic, the billboards for reality TV shows, the websites mixing sexual exhibitionism with jingoism.

It is hard not to wonder about the political outlook of the newly affluent Chinese.

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