‘Eat up your dinner’, my mother used to say. ‘Think of the starving millions in China.’

That was before 1949. When 1949 came round, no one bothered to tell me what had happened. The ploy simply changed to ‘Think of the starving millions in India’.

Even at that age I knew there was something funny about this argument. Whether I ate my dinner or not, the starving millions weren’t going to get a whiff of it.

It is interesting, especially after nearly two years in China, to look back and laugh at my mother’s trick. More interesting, though, to realize that the new generation in the West has still not grown out of thinking in my mother’s terms.

‘What is to be done about Vietnam?’ people say, in intervals between working at their meaningless jobs, or keeping up with the Joneses. ‘And what about India?’ And now that the Cultural Revolution is in full swing in China, such people might add ‘And poor China. . .’.

There is no end to the ‘problems’ that confront Western suburban man. He revels in solving (in his head) the population explosion, the bomb, famine and flood, war. It seems to be little more than a game, an entertainment to take his mind off himself, off the apparently insoluble problems of his own society.