Obama in China - Visit might help rebuild economies

WHEN, in 1972, Richard Milhous Nixon became the first American president to visit the People’s Republic of China it was as if he visited a different world.

It was almost as if he had flown Airforce One to Mars. We all craned to look over his shoulder with a combination of curiosity, awe, great ignorance and more than a little fear.

Everything was different; the scale of the country, the size of the population, the dominance of the apparatus of the state, the unchallenged single party system, the regimentation, the culture of obedience but, most of all, the relative poverty endured stoically by the vast majority of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people.