My students were final-year undergraduates — representatives, then, of the so-called "me generation". In China, there is a perception that rising materialism and Western influence has created a generation who are disconnected from traditional culture and solely concerned with their trainers and smartphones. The latter I can certainly verify: never have I had to tell so many students off for using their mobiles in class. 

Many talk of the new culture of openness in China and this was certainly my experience. The students were familiar with events in Tiananmen Square and agreed that Hong Kong-style democracy was the way forward. When it came to politics, though, they seemed apathetic; certainly, they did not display those "post-materialist" values associated with present-day capitalism in the West. They equated the market with progress and aspiration; disillusionment has not yet set in. 

My task was a difficult one. While their English was impeccable, they knew very little about contemporary Britain. In China, the Beckhams are more widely recognised than the royal family, with young Romeo modelling for Burberry, an airbrushed Posh on the cover of Vogue and Becks the face of their beleaguered Super League. Their knowledge of British history was patchy but positive: they had heard of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, recognising the value of what one student termed the "British rule of law". The Whig version of our history may have died out in Britain, but it is very much alive in Beijing.

Adam Smith was as familiar to them as Karl Marx, although Friedrich Engels was new to them. On reading his Condition of the Working Class in England, they pointed to the parallels between his analysis of the Irish poor and the rural peasants now inhabiting China's cities. But they seemed unconvinced by Engel's critique of laissez-faire capitalism or even that from the Christian socialists. Victorian workhouses did not come as a great shock. Given that the poverty rate in China has declined from 85 per cent to 13 per cent since the liberalisation of its economy, it is little wonder that this generation perceives the market as the route out of poverty rather than the cause of it. 

Explaining the British class system to anyone outside it is a challenge, but its shift from a pyramid to a diamond shape with the expansion of the middle class was a phenomenon my students recognised. Only one identified himself as working-class — he was also the only Communist Party member among the group. I was, however, surprised to see a copy of Roger Scruton's Meaning of Conservatism bulging out of his satchel.