I think John Gray has a contract to write book reviews for the New Statesman. I have to confess I read them for what John Gray says only:
“Thirty years ago the east meant communism. The cold war was a struggle between two political blocs, each of which defined itself in terms of western ideas – versions of Marxism and liberalism. Yet it was commonly described as a clash between east and west, the media conjuring up images of Russian inscrutability and academics peddling a venerable cliché in which the Soviet system was a variant of Asiatic despotism. When the Soviet system collapsed, there was less need to divide the world into opposing parts, but the demarcation reappeared with China’s rapidly advancing industrialisation. The east now means something more akin to what it was in colonial times: an exotic region of danger and promise, alluring but at the same time threatening, the mirror image of our weaknesses and our fears.”
and
Further reading:“Of all the social sciences, economics has come closest to formulating law-like principles. The trouble is that they fail to explain some of the largest historical changes. Ask what makes sustained economic growth possible, and economists will tell you that certain institutions are required – private property, enforceable contracts and the rule of law, for example. Yet none of these is common in China, where economic growth has occurred over the past 30 years on a scale unprecedented in history. Economics contains many well-founded generalisations. Price controls tend everywhere to produce black markets; the scope of these markets varies, however, depending on culture and circumstances. Rationing resulted in a thriving black market in many commodities in wartime Britain, but it was nothing like the one that existed in the Soviet Union, where practically everything had a price in the informal economy. Certainly there are recognisable patterns in economic life, but the universal laws of which economists speak exist only on paper.”