Paul Breen writes from China about instability in America

Down below, a few people are starting to move, to begin their daily routine. Probably much the same as back home, these are the labourers, the cleaners, the hospital staff, the people who rise early for the first shift of the day – just the very same as people might be doing in the South West Acute Hospital. I’ve been in China on an academic trip for a week now. I’ve found the place very peaceful, even liberating.

England of late has felt very claustrophobic. Even with the change of government, if feels forever angry.

And sometimes I get angry too, because the spirit of the country that you live in rubs off on you.

Here, everything runs at a leisurely pace, which contradicts stereotypes we might have of China.

The people seem free and relaxed, glued together by a sense of community.

I often see groups sitting out in the evening, chatting, just as the birds are chattering now above the trees and river that runs through this green city.

Chengdu’s not that far from Tibet as the crow flies, in a land where it takes up to a day on a bullet train to cross from one side to the other.

And for the past decade or so, this city has been voted as the best place to live in China. I can understand why.

Partly it’s to do with being a westerly city. Galway’s got a different vibe to Dublin, for example, and Oregon or California have got a very different vibe to New York.

Western people are just the same the world over perhaps, from Chengdu to Donegal. And again, that’s a contradiction to so much of the ‘othering’ of China.

The British media spends so much energy making these people seem so different to us, as if at some stage, we might even be ready to fight a war with them.

But I haven’t seen much evidence that these are fighting people. They’re hard-working people.

You don’t get anything here for nothing. If you don’t get out of bed in the mornings, you’re going to starve.

Just like parts of America, there are people on every roadside selling fruit, vegetables and other goods at every hour of the day to make ends meet.

So it’s a tough society, and a very different society to ours. The language is obviously hugely different. The menus sometimes seem indecipherable.

For someone who doesn’t eat meat it can feel like a nightmare, but once you get the hang of it, everything soon starts to become comprehensible.

It’s the same with the traffic, which keeps coming at you like a hundred bullets whizzing in all directions.

But there are few accidents, which is quite strange, because the empty country roads of Fermanagh seem to carry a new story of death every week, especially young death, or suffering.

And yet here, the chaos is regular as clockwork. So in that sense, there is something mechanical about life in China.

But at the same time, people enjoy themselves and they’re not angry at the world or at their politicians.

But we’re rarely shown this picture of China. The images we’re shown on TV are of a smoggy, polluted place that contributes greatly to climate change. And I’m sure it does.

When 1.5 billion Chinese start to live like a few hundred million Westerners, then the world’s in trouble, because it can’t cope with that level of consumption.

We’re also told about China being aggressive. But so far, the only military display that I have seen has been in a toy shop.

So the China that I’m seeing is very different to the one that’s portrayed in the media. Right now, it’s America that seems like a rogue state. That’s something reinforced by the potential assassination of Donald Trump.

Contemporarily, the rhetoric out there is one of pure hatred. It’s a verbal and linguistic civil war.

And with what’s happening in Gaza, America has no longer got the moral authority to claim to be the world’s policeman.

It seems to have reverted back to the Wild West. Didn’t Oscar Wilde say something about America being the only society that ever moved between barbarism and decadence without civilization in between?

And now, as we see such civil unrest and polarisation in that society, it seems to be regressing into barbarism.

I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but Joe Biden’s performances, of late, leaves it likely that Trump will get elected again.

Surely America can put up someone younger, more articulate and less compromised than Joe Biden in this day and age?

It’s absolutely shocking that a country that sees itself as ‘the greatest in the world’ has offered its people a choice between two jaded old men, with almost nothing to offer anyone but their lobbyists and their special interest groups.

Maybe America just isn’t the superpower that it was. It has all the hallmarks of a fading empire.

History teaches us that this has happened to every empire before it collapses, from the Roman Empire to those in the era before World War One.

All empires crash at the end of the day. And I’ve a strange feeling that as I sit here, in a hotel room, in the west of China, on the borders of daybreak, watching a city come to life, I’m on the borders of something else. I’m on the borders of change.

Slowly but surely we’re seeing a transference of power from one side of the world to another.

And it’s ironic that one of the sounds heralding change was the shot fired at a man who has made his name out of spouting bile about walls and borders.

Nobody though deserves to be shot for their political beliefs. But then, what sort of example has America set the world in terms of violence this past 50 years?

Maybe, as I’m listening to these birds chirping at the rising of the sun, the sun’s also setting on the American empire, and sadly, in many ways, America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

That’s not a good thing, because a good, ethical America at peace with a modern and prosperous China could actually see us create the more stable world that everybody surely wants at the end of the day.

Paul Breen is @paulbreenauthor on X.