The World

Here is an interesting piece about a new best-seller in China that claims that Goldman Sachs is secretly working to destroy the Chinese economy. Nationalist books with a conspiratorial twist are now regular best-sellers in China.

“Currency Wars”, published in 2007, argued that America had deliberately engineered the end of the Japanese economic miracle and the Asian financial crisis – as well as suggesting that the western financial system is controlled by the Rothschilds. In 2009, Unhappy China hit the top of the charts. Its authors argued that China is a victim of western bullying and should become much more assertive on the world stage.

So what, some might ask? Conspiracy theories are pretty popular in Europe and the US, too. But, actually, I think the Chinese taste for nationalistic conspiracy theories is slightly alarming. First, I have some anecdotal evidence that these theories are by not confined to disgruntled students and the crazed inhabitants of internet cafes. A few weeks ago, the FT hosted a delegation of senior Chinese journalists who were passing through town. I thought the most interesting moment of the conversation came when the leader of the delegation said that he had heard that the entire financial crisis had been engineeered by a small group of people in America, for their own personal profit. What did we think?

And yes, it is true that the US is chock-full of crazed conspiracy theorists. But I don’t think that that is a matter of no account. On the contrary, I think it is really disturbing that large numbers of Americans seem to believe that Obama is not a US citizen, or that he is plotting to turn the country into a one-party dictatorship, or that the American government itself had a hand in 9/11. If there are millions of Chinese equivalents of these American nutters, so much the worse.