KEY POINTS:
I was in Taipei last week, speaking to bankers about the outlook for the private equity market.
The Taiwanese capital is not my favourite city. It is low-rise, shabby, full of scooters and lacking in elegance or sophistication.
Yet it always holds a fascination for me because it represents a living example of "counter-factual history" - a branch of history which studies not what did happen, but what might have happened. Some of the most popular areas revolve around war, such as studies as to how Britain would have coped under a Nazi occupation, or what the outcome of a French victory at Waterloo would have been.
Taiwan, of course, offers a glimpse into what China could have been without the communist revolution. And a tasty glimpse it is, too.
It's an island with a decent artistic tradition and history of economic and political reform which is the envy of the mainlanders. Or it should be. In fact, the mainland Chinese simply look at you strangely if you praise Taiwan. To them, it's still a "renegade province" and all the more contemptible for allowing the motherland to look bad by comparison.
I've lost count of the number of times earnest students and taxi drivers have assured me that they will go to war if Taiwan announces independence.
The corruption scandal swirling around President Chen Shui-bian, interestingly enough, has not been vigorously seized by the attack dogs in China's propaganda department.
"The mainland Chinese authorities know full well that to attack corruption in Taiwan would risk Chinese citizens drawing unfavourable parallels with the sky-high corruption issues at home," says one of my Chinese friends.
During my time in Taipei, I visited the famous Imperial Palace Museum, an impressive assembly of Chinese art and historical artefacts which the Nationalists (who ran Taiwan until the ascent of Chen Shui-bian and his anti-Chinese party in the early 1990s) took from Beijing, all the way to Taiwan during the dreadful defeats by the communists of the late 1940s.
The museum is well worth seeing, but it did remind me how dull Chinese culture can be.
As the array of landscape paintings, calligraphy and ink pots reminds one, China was run by scholars. Unusually, these scholars also ran the country, giving rise to a culture with a clear academic flavour.
Who else but a bureaucrat could elevate the act (as opposed to the content) of writing to an art form? Where else but in a culture of teachers and students will you see such an emphasis on copying and refining, rather than innovation?
In an academic culture, showing how well you know your subject is important, which is why so much traditional art refers to a shared body of knowledge - often in mind-boggling detail. But given the world of Confucianism scholarship is now long gone, I can't but help feel that the absence of a wider appeal in Chinese art is now laid bare.
The month before last, I had visited the Islamic Museum in Kuala Lumpur. The exhibition on imperial court items during the Ottoman Empire was fabulous. Elegant yet deadly weapons and exquisitely engraved armour, sensuous and whimsical clothes in precious silks for both men and women - they all reminded me of the great days of Islam.
Mainland China itself, of course, is still a culture of bureaucrats. The difference is that the current crop are far more thuggish and corrupt than their predecessors. As a consequence, cultural life in mainland China is essentially non-existent.
That raises an interesting thought.
If China does become a genuine superpower, as opposed to hollow giants like Soviet Russia and modern Japan, it will be the first one to do so with its art scene so mutilated. In fact, if you look through history, only cultures with thriving arts scenes have proven long-term contenders for superpower status. Countries such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (and now China ahead of the Olympics) often try to replace art with sports.
So far, such an effort has not been linked to long-term success.
