GO EAST YOUNG MAN

The first time I realised something was happening with China, and with the world, and with me, was the 15th March 2008. It wasn’t in the papers, or on the news. It wasn’t some editorial telling me: China is the fastest growing nation on Earth, China is building 100 power stations a second, China will eat more cows than Belgium by this date, snooze snooze snooze. In fact, it was in a museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

It was partly what I saw in the V&A that made me realise. I’ve been to China before, last year, for a month. In that month, I saw more people than I’d ever seen. I saw sprawling cities full of fat skyscrapers, like cheaper versions of the ones we built in the 80s. I saw shops full of mobile phones, streets full of cars, malls full of people.

But the phones all looked like knocks-offs of the phones we buy; the cars looked like crapper versions of the cars we drive; and the shopping centres were full of our shops. It didn’t seem like China was doing it for itself, having its own ideas, creating its own cities. It just looked like a country copying off other people. It seemed quite desperate to me.

In half a day at the V&A, this changed. The exhibition was called CHINA DESIGN NOW. The poster was made out of neon Chinese characters. It was Dead Cool. And suddenly, here was China talking to itself, not to us.

There was graphic design made in a city called Shenzhen, created out of Chinese characters and images, that looked as modern and as good as anything Peter Saville did in Manchester. These posters were designed by kids in a city of 10 million, a city with an average age of 27, that didn’t even exist 30 years ago.

There were films made in Shanghai like ‘In The Mood For Love’. Subtle, pouting, gentle, beautiful films. There was a music video by a band called New Pants, in which the band dressed up like Bruce Lee and dispatched a series of 70s martial arts clichés. There were amazing products, tea-sets, trainers, dresses, corsets. Not just made in China any more, but made by China.
And then there were the buildings in Beijing. Buildings that the rest of the world wouldn’t even dare to think of. Yes, you’ve got your super-modern look-at-me boxes, like the CCTV tower by Rem Koolhaus, or the Beijing Digital Centre by Studio Pei-zhu. And there were some subtle, little buildings as well: the very much uncommunalCommune by the Great Wall, or Fathers House, built for the architects’ Dad, better than every would-be icon thrown up at home. But who gives a shit: Beijing is building the Birds Nest, the most beautiful building on Planet Earth. Just that would be enough for me.

All of these things, these products, these buildings, couldn’t have come from anywhere else. All of them were totally and utterly Chinese. And all of them were amazing. My jaw was dropped. My mind was blown.

But it was something else that really hit me. The best exhibit, the most incredible thing on display, wasn’t anything from China. It was the rest of the people there. It seemed like the entire Western world was at that exhibition. Upper-class global types with no homes and grey Muji clothes. Painfully trendy London boys wearing trenchcoats and their dads’ moustaches. Posh old London ladies with fat painted lips and 80s glasses. Pretty Finnish girls with symmetrical faces. Japanese girls with perfect bobs and perfect English. Fat Americans wearing bum bags. Grey haired academics with grey haired wives.

The whole rich white world. And all of these westerners, these lean, toned, moisturised, well-fed, in-credit westerners, were walking round the museum in silence. They were looking at China, and trying to understand. Trying to come to terms with this massive geographic shift, with this tectonic economic movement.

And they were thinking this: the world is slipping away from Us and towards Them. Everything is going East. Something new is happening now. We are no longer the golden boys. We are no longer the only ones running the show.