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At the start of a new year, it’s good to sum up where we came from. And I think this is the image which hit me the hardest last year. It’s a photo of a mum and her son separating coal from slag at a coal-mine somewhere in industrial China.
This picture struck me not because of the brutal hardship it contains, nor because it harks back to similar pictures taken seventy or eighty years ago everywhere from the midwest of America to Industrial Britain to the steppes of the Soviet Union.
What struck me was that, by the time the little boy in this photo is a grown man, China will be the world’s economic superpower. And I don’t think we’ve really started to come to terms with that. A great deal of what appears in this writing will be about change. That’s not “change”. It’s the way the world in which we grew up is changing. And I can’t think of a bigger change than this one with which to start things off.
When I first arrived at Oxford, there was a sherry part with the dons. One of the intake drank too much and said “The course here starts in 285AD and ends in 1900. How can that possibly be called Modern History?” And the tutor put his glass down and said “Because everything after that is journalism.” As cocky eighteen year olds, we thought that was nonsense.
And the older I get, the wiser that statement seems to be.
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Tags: change, China, photography
