Towards the end of my book I quote some of the people within the Communist Party who say maybe Christianity is part of what made the West successful, maybe it's something they need. But at the other end of the party spectrum, there are people who are saying they can't possibly let these house churches flourish. So this is a major dilemma which is only going to grow as the Christian community grows. If it carries on at the present explosive rate of growth, it will become a major factor in Chinese culture. Whether it becomes a political factor is really hard to predict. The one thing I would bet against right now is a kind of 1989-type event, a democracy movement in China. There is almost no appetite for it. The regime has drawn that sting successfully. So what we should not expect is that China goes back to Tiananmen Square and that a democracy movement suddenly topples the Communist regime. That only exists in the fantasies of a few, somewhat senescent neoconservatives in America who've never been to China. That's never going to happen, at least not in our lifetime. What is going to happen may be something completely unexpected in a way that the Taiping Rebellion [from 1850 to 1864] was unexpected. Suddenly, some wacko decides he's the son of Jesus Christ and an extraordinary millennarian movement explodes into life among the dispossessed and the relative losers of Qing China. Everybody in Beijing worries about that scenario, that the whacko suddenly gets some critical mass. That is why they are so paranoically suspicious of disorder in the periphery. But if a regime is paranoically suspicious of disorder in the periphery, that disorder pretty much always gets snuffed out, which is why I'm fairly sceptical of the "China plunges into chaos" scenario. 

DJ: Dambisa, to shift the focus to the United States, the other great power — you are very critical of the way American politics and society has developed in recent decades. You feel that it's moving rapidly towards a European-style socialist welfare state system and acquiring all its concomitant problems. Then on top of that, there's mismanagement of the economy, debt, and so on. Do you think the US will suddenly change course now that it faces this immediate  challenge?

DM: I certainly hope so, because the planet needs both the US and European countries working effectively. My book is not saying that this is the end of the West and we'll all trundle along and it'll all be fine without those countries. We need Europe and the US to do the right thing. With respect to the US, it is a great disappointment because over the last several decades, it has been absolutely consumed with politics, to its own detriment. If you ask Americans across the political spectrum what the main issues facing the country are, there is absolutely mass agreement — they all recognise that education has declined. Some of the statistics are shocking: from the OECD's Pisa survey, or the Timss, look at the trends in mathematics and science, look at President Obama's comments about the US going from number one in college graduates to twelfth. The new generation is the first generation whose education is actually worse than their parents'. So education is a serious problem, and infrastructure is a serious problem. The estimates coming out of the Engineering Society suggest that 30 per cent of America's infrastructure is graded ‘D': they need two trillion dollars over five years. We've got issues with energy — 85 million barrels of oil are consumed every day on this planet, 25 per cent of them in the US. The US is actually wavering in its own core values by engaging in oil trades with countries that have, at best, dubious political and cultural ethics — completely the antithesis of what the US claims to stand for. But there has not been a groundswell in the US to say that this isn't what America believes. There is greater competition for resources, there are more people becoming more dependent on the state — some 45 per cent of Americans don't pay federal tax. There is data that says that since 1980, the difference between public compensation and private compensation in the US is   at least 10,000 dollars. There are lots of statistics already indicating that we're moving into a situation where the government is going to be much more of an allocator of capital and other resources. These are structural problems that have been ignored. I worry not so much that the US will become socialist per se, because clearly places like Germany and countries in Scandinavia have been successful with a mixed model. The problem is that it could end up as a model of socialism that happened by accident. If you look at the healthcare pension concerns, which we all acknowledge as a big issue, it's virtually impossible to get a straight answer as to the exact number of pension liabilities the US faces. I have seen a figure of $2.5 trillion, but you hear of even bigger numbers coming down the pipeline.