What you have to remember, said the man who had lived and worked in China for the last seven years, is that the Chinese have a sense of history that is much longer than we have in the west. Most of the people here believe that the last sixty years of Communism was only a brief interruption in the dominant position in the world which China should hold and indeed used to hold a few thousand years ago when it was a leading civilisation.
Whether they agreed with that assessment or not, members of the Farmers Weekly Farm Study Tour of the country could only wonder at the speed of industrial and infrastructure development that had happened in China over the last ten years and is clearly still going on.
We have been through literally beautiful new airports, travelled smooth and wonderful new six and eight lane highways and marvelled at forests of prestige office buildings that leave London standing.
Here is real wealth exemplified, perhaps most eloquently, in the City of Chongqing. Twenty years ago it was a "small city" of only 8 million people. Today that City has more than 31 million and it is the second biggest in China, after Shanghai. We drove through the centre of Chongqing after dark and it was lit up with neon lights like Disneyland.
But were are here to look mainly at the farming. And the contrast between urban wealth and rural poverty is probably more extreme than anywhere else in the world. Ask different people and you get different figures but the average size of farm is said to be in the region of one third of an acre and the average income of farmers around us$400.
There are some 750 million living in villages, most of them farmers, and many are barely surviving.Two hundred million are expected to move to cities within the net ten to fifteen years and what a translocation that will be. Can the Chinese manage it? On the basis of what the FW party has seen so far we think perhaps they can. We are mighty impressed and would not deny the potential that China may one day soon be the dominant power it feels it should be