In my previous career, as a Shanghai-based publisher of English-language magazines, I banned my editors from using the word expat. It implied a sense of “them and us” which I despised. Nor did I much respect members of the “international community” (as I preferred to call them) who spent their summers back home.

We live and learn. I’ve just returned to China after my longest-ever summer break in Britain, and I now eat my words about expats. My holiday has left me feeling more refreshed than I have felt in years, mainly thanks to the pleasure (particularly acute for an ex-publisher) of life in a liberal society with a free media, where you can drive to the pub listening to Radio 4 and have a good argument when you get there. Or you can buy a magazine like Prospect, whose editors get ministers, intellectuals, generals and so on to speak