Warren Buffett playing ping-pong, at a Berkshire Hathaway meeting last year. Another billionaire looks on. (Rick Wilking / Reuters) When I was living in and reporting from China, I spent a lot of time trying to hammer this point home: whatever you might say about China — good or bad, friendly or hostile — there was some place in the country where it was true, and also some place where its opposite was true. Thus embracing China’s contradictory realities was not some minor fine-tuning detail but a starting-point necessity in thinking about the place. In case you haven’t read China Airborne, a further riff on this theme comes after the jump.* Today’s America is not quite as contradictory as...
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