China views the west with a barely disguised chip on its shoulder. And not without reason.
One of those reasons stands behind a locked gate on a trendy lane in Rockbund, Shanghai’s art deco district. The British Supreme Court for China and Japan is an unassuming two-storey colonial building from which British judges handed down some of the worst indignities of what China calls its “century of humiliation”, from the mid-19th century until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
While the Middle Kingdom was never a full-blown foreign colony, “foreign devil” forces did rule chunks of vital port cities such as Shanghai, where many streets are still lined with plane trees and European villas. Old resentments die hard, especially in a culture with 5,000 years of history (and, it seems, 5,000 years of anger to go with it).