For all of the attention paid to China's impact on international politics, the global economy and the environment, few people in the west look closely at its ideas. Mark Leonard's cover story seeks to put that right by considering not only China's ideas but the people who produce them—China's increasingly boisterous intellectual class. The country enjoys relatively open debate in leading newspapers and journals (although certain subjects, like Tibet, remain taboo). Indeed, intellectual debate and the factions it breeds have become a kind of surrogate for western-style party politics. But such similarities with the west—both in ideas (such as the "new right" and "new left") and in the way they are debated—are skin deep. Intellectual formation in the west and in China could hardly be more different. Among other things, every Chinese student is still monitored for signs of political dissent. And, as Leonard says, China's leading thinkers are guided by the idea of creating a model of economic development and political legitimacy that can act as an alternative pole of attraction to western market democracy. (One aspect of Chinese development that is already the envy of western counterparts is the fact that many of the brightest academics and intellectuals are, like their Russian equivalents in the early 1990s, leaving the academy to make large sums of money in business.)
Just as America seems ready to turn left (although not far, according to Robert Reich), Ernst Hillebrand's essay points to the slump in the fortunes of the European centre-left. He declares an end to the centrist, technocratic project embodied by Tony Blair in Britain and Gerhard Schröder in Germany—but says that there is, as yet, no convincing new story. Gordon Brown's government has certainly not found one. The law of unintended consequences continues to stalk Brown, whether it is the sudden crisis in science funding arising from the apparently routine merger of two science quangos last year (see this month's News and Curiosities) or the failure to think through a minor reform to the tax status of "non-doms" (see Richard Sennett). In both cases there now seems to be a threat to Britain's role as a magnet for clever, mobile people. But it must be possible to address real anxieties about, say, the tax affairs of the richer "non-doms" without closing the door indiscriminately on the mobile elite. One obvious answer is more careful consultation about complex legislation—consultation that can distinguish special pleading from legitimate concerns. That is easier said than done in a very competitive political system with a high degree of convergence between the main parties (and their voters). The result is a race to unveil popular ideas before the other lot can pinch them, which inevitably means hasty policy formation.
