A good number of readers were (rightly) none too happy with the nature of the comparison Martin Jacques was making between the US and China.
Here’s a comment from Germany:
“This argument looks astonishingly similar to the good, old
romanticist rejection of America. “It’s artificial, it has no “national”
culture.” etc. That’s also what the German right wing used to say
about America in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, when they
tried to contrast American “lack of culture” to the noble cultural
tradition of the German “volk”. I think that’s just another proof for
how un-left the left really has become.
While others took issue with the very idea that the US is indeed ‘artificial’, arguing that it too was part of a tradition that had evolved over the millennia.