Wednesday 22 January 2014

China: By The Short and Curlies

This morning the DTel's Alex has a dusky delegate to Davos explaining that his sole reason for being there is to visit his dosh "where I've stashed it in a numbered Swiss bank account, and check it's still there".

Ah, satire: how very timely.  Because also this morning, the Grauniad breaks a story on how the Chinese 'princelings' are building their stashes in the British Virgin Islands - in rather large quantities.

And if Alan Rusbridger and a motley of investigative journos know all about this, we may safely assume our diligent data-hoovering agencies do, too.  It's another perspective on the gradual rise of China in the world, n'est-ce pas?   Offsets some of the less palatable aspects:  they may have an increasing share of the hard power, but soft power remains a bit of a mystery to them.  And when you've got them by the short'n'curlies ...

Capitalism - so flexible, and so ... resilient.

ND

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The recent series of Homeland was all about this. But blackmail is such an ugly word.

Demetrius said...

One item I read today says that China is exporting its smog to California. The US having out sourced consumer good production to China is getting back both the goods and the pollution. As for the BVI a good hurricane or tsunami wrecking the computers could cause some fun.

Anonymous said...

@ good hurricane or tsunami: Pearl Harbour 2?

Not sure you want to grab a tiger by the short hairs.

Electro-Kevin said...

Richard Branson has his fingers in everything doesn't he ?

K said...

@Demetrius

I recently watched the film "Her" which is set in LA but the outside scenes are obviously shot in China.

I thought many of the outside scenes were just concrete and smog. Like Milton Keynes with skyscrapers (and boring skyscrapers at that, makes you appreciate the London crap).

I learnt afterwards that the production team intended for this vision of LA to be utopian.

Perhaps Californians enjoy the Chinese smog?