He would be apprenticed to some cheesy shop or become a clerk in an office and his entire life he would be one of the ordinary poor people, whom he despised and wanted to surpass.

Away to the south-west ran the French Concession, its tree-lined avenues gashes of green through the grey roofs. Between it and the river lay the misshapen circle of the old Chinese City of Nantao, the city wall long since gone,¹ the narrow, stone streets now clean of the beggars, pimps and street-hawkers that used to infest its gloom.

Triangulation was a presidential leadership strategy that presented the president as having borrowed elements of both the right and the left to develop some form of center policy amalgam.

That new project manager is just the one to ramrod this through to completion.