DJ: Niall, in your book (Civilization: The West and the Rest, Allen Lane, £25), you talk a lot about religion and the importance of the Protestant work ethic in helping the West take off and create modern capitalism. You suggest that the Chinese are now adopting Protestantism and Christianity in general at exactly the moment when we are giving it up — "we" being Europe, of course — the United States is a different story. How far do you think that might herald the long-term demise of the Communist Party? How much longer can this organisation that really dates from the early 20th century continue to maintain its grip? After all, it was really communism that held China back for a generation or more. We might have been facing the situation we do now many years ago, were it not for this terrible mistake they made in the 1940s when they followed Stalin rather than the West. 

NF: That's an interesting counterfactual you've raised there. It's worth remembering how incredibly corrupt the Kuomintang regime was, and although Mao was a monster who inflicted millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward and then totally disrupted China's society again with the Cultural Revolution, there were certain things that the communists did that laid the foundations for what is happening now. They vastly improved education and primary healthcare and so China's human capital was significantly better in 1979 than it had been in 1949. I don't think any of that would have happened under Chiang Kai-shek. That would have been the same-old, same-old China which would have been so unequal that it would not have been capable of this kind of growth. So it's a doubly uncomfortable story for you. Not only am I saying nice things about Protestantism but I'm also going to say some nice things about communism. The one thing that communist regimes did — and it's true in Cuba too — is that they addressed the problems of profoundly unequal societies and left the populations better educated and healthier than they'd been before. You can't have higher productivity growth — which is the key, as Dambisa points out, to China's story — when people are starved and illiterate. 

DJ: But more than half the population is still very poor. 

NF: Yes, but compared with the situation of China in 1949, this is really a very, very changed society in which there are much higher levels of literacy and numeracy and they are basically well-fed. They're poor but they're not dirt-poor like they were back then. That's in parenthesis. The bigger answer is to the religious point, the political point. What is happening in China in terms of religion is fascinating because Mao left a vacuum. Like all the great totalitarian leaders, he created a cult. But these cults are very ephemeral: the leader dies, the cult dies, a vacuum is left. The Cultural Revolution smashed up what remained of traditional Chinese culture quite successfully and there is a genuine thirst in China for something to fill that vacuum. The thing that's filling it most successfully right now is Christianity — in particular, evangelical Christianity. There is an official church, which is doing pretty well and in control of the state — much as many Protestant churches in Europe were after the Reformation — but what's really fascinating is the unofficial house church movement, which is growing astonishingly fast. The regime does not know what to make of this — I've seen that up close. Party officials are obviously ambivalent. They don't like the fact that it's happening but they've given up trying to stop it. There were anti-crucifix campaigns in Wenzhou as recently as the 1990s but they gave up. There are crucifixes everywhere — red neon ones that are quite fetching. The problem for the regime is that it knows there is a spiritual vacuum, and because of that, corruption and business malpractice are major problems. So there are elements in the regime that wonder if this isn't the answer.