Philip Dodd’s enquiry into China’s impact on our intellectual and cultural life (1 November) began with what he called “a tsunami of facts and figures”. These included the 1.3 billion Chinese, 600 million of them apparently members of the aspiring middle class, and the 274 recently published books with the words “China” and “Threat” in the title. Whatever we might feel about the Chinese now, Dodd insisted, was fed by older imaginings that were deeply, if not unshiftably, fixed in the national consciousness.What we did feel about this new economic behemoth took the form of an odd dualism, in which the memory of a great civilisation with its armies of terracotta warriors contended with the fear of a nightmare landscape populated by a mass of w