Madsen Pirie

CCTV-9 is not in fact closed circuit television. Rather it is China Central TV, China’s huge English language TV channel.  Very large numbers of people in China want to learn to speak English, so there is a large domestic audience, and it is carried in dozens of countries, giving a worldwide audience in excess of 100 million viewers.

I was interviewed by James Chau, one of its leading presenters who was schooled in England, in connection with the funeral of Lady Thatcher, which I thought was done with dignity and the sort of ceremonial we seem to do so well in the UK.   She had many admirers in China, as she did worldwide.  I was able to explain how she had enabled ordinary people to become property owners through sales of state houses and popular share issues during the privatization of state companies.  I explained how she had broken with the postwar consensus to transform the UK from an ailing and sclerotic economy headed fast for ruin into a modern economic powerhouse.  Her combination of conviction and resolution had restored free markets and opportunities, and achieved a practical success that vindicated them as alternatives to state planning, ownership and controls.  I posted on the ASI site a refutation of ten of the current myths about her term in office, with a brief account of what actually happened.

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