But he was not going to be deflected. “I mean, when I went to the States I spent months reading up on it. Constitution, law enforcement, culture . . . Hah.” He laughed out loud. “If it’s possible to use the words American and culture in the same breath.” She glared at him. “You decide to come to China, and what do you do? Nothing. You prepare nothing, you know nothing. About our law enforcement, our history, our culture. You’re in the country five minutes and you’re shouting the odds in the street about male attitudes to women drivers. You pick a fight in a restaurant and offend your hosts who’ve gone to great expense to welcome you.”

“Welcome me?” Margaret spluttered her indignation. “From the moment I arrived in this goddamn country people have been telling me what not to do, what not to say, in case I stepped on your precious Chinese sensibilities. You know, you people ought to lighten up and join the rest of us in what will very shortly be the twenty-first century.” She immediately raised a hand. “And don’t tell me about your five-thousand-year history. I’ve already had that lecture. How you invented paper and the printing press.”

“And the crossbow, and the umbrella, and the seismograph, and the steam engine—about a thousand years before the Europeans thought of it,” Li said.

“Jesus,” Margaret gasped. “Spare me. Please.”

But Li was on a roll. “And what has America given the world? The hamburger and the hot dog?”

Margaret was stung. “We invented the light bulb, the means of generating electricity on a commercial scale, the gramophone, the motion picture. We put the first men on the moon, invented the microchip, the personal computer, developed technologies that allow people to communicate around the world in nanoseconds, and send pictures from Mars with better definition than Chinese television. Jesus, everything you people did was in the past. All you can do is look back. We’re doing it now.”

Li flushed with anger, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Oh yes? And just what exactly is it you are doing now?” He raised a hand to stop her answering. “No, no, let me tell you. You stomp around the world like overbearing school bullies, self-appointed world policemen telling the rest of us how to live and how to behave. And if we don’t knuckle down and conform to your moral code, you’re just as likely to give us a bloody nose. You preach about freedom and democracy, and practise racial and political discrimination.”

“That’s rich, coming from someone with your country’s human rights record!”