When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping began to seriously set about lifting China’s (then) billion-strong population out of squalor and poverty in the 1980s, with the aim of joining that small and lucky part of the world that lived in material affluence, I wonder if he recognised the problems he would create for the rest of the planet?
For the better part of two centuries, the world had maintained a sort of equilibrium, with a small minority of the population concentrated in Europe and North…
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