To the passenger on the Clapham omnibus we must add the driver in the Beijing taxicab. The views of the voter trundling across London on the upper deck of one of the city’s red buses has long been a metaphor for the attention British governments should pay to public opinion. Now the Chinese are complaining that they have politics too.
I was introduced to the cab driver by a scholar from Central Party School of China’s Communist party. This is the elite academy where future leaders are trained. Xi Jinping, the school’s present head, is the likely successor to Hu Jintao when the Chinese president steps down next year. In short, these are people worth listening to.
The context was the fevered talk about whether China might rescue the eurozone by dipping into its $3,000bn of foreign currency reserves. Mr Hu has rather damped such expectations during this week’s meeting of G20 leaders in Cannes. After the latest pantomime in Athens, some may wonder how long there will be a eurozone to save.