The road obscured [The Financial Times]
Boao has been, for the past four years, the site of the Forum for Asia, China’s attempt to create a Davos-style World Economic Forum for Asia. Its air-conditioned, artificial reality is designed to show that China has made it: that it can reproduce the nowhere-everywhere splendour of the international high-level conference. George Bush Snr was among the guests in 2004; in April this year, it welcomed a slew of world leaders near, if not at, the top of the global hierarchy, including John Howard, the Australian prime minister; Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schussel and ministers and former leaders from France, the Philippines, Malaysia, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Iran and Korea.
