Sunanda K Datta-Ray: School them right

WHERE MONEY TALKS

University is less the hallmark of pedigree, being open to scholarship students.

A young Chinese princeling at Harrow, nursery of the world's rich and powerful, proves that where Marxist Bengal goes Communist China must follow. Like Bengal, China demonstrates that yesterday's dedicated Communists are tomorrow's fervent capitalists. Today bridges the gap with revolutionary rhetoric accompanying pragmatic action.

One might imagine that Deng Xiaoping, the bridge club chairman, set the trend. He talked of the colour of cats being of no concern providing they caught mice (read money), and called ancient get-rich-quick methods socialism with Chinese characteristics. But Bengal was there first. Bengalis don't make much money but do prove that good Marxists are unencumbered by the ideological inhibitions that frown on money-making. They swill scotch, trot the globe, hob-nob with tycoons and groom their children to become entrepreneurs. It isn't necessary to earn money since those who do are so generous with funds. That allows Bengali Marxists to earn hoi-polloi's votes by promising the red revolution to come.

Like everything else, Bengal learnt the trick from the land that Continentals once called Perfidious Albion. It's because Britain lost the dissimulative art that it is now reduced to clinging to George W Bush's coat tails in international affairs. But during the high noon of empire it could with sublime conviction say one thing and do the opposite. Conquest was civilising. Vast populations were persuaded that enslavement was for their own good.

Similarly, doughty Bengali Marxists whose own offspring attended Anglo-Indian schools saw no inconsistency in thundering that instruction in English in state schools was unpatriotic and undemocratic. The graduation of their children into unabashed businessmen also enjoys a hallowed British precedent.

Retired Labour politicians used to be ennobled "" kicked upstairs "" so that the working man had a voice in the House of Lords. But no sooner did these sons of miners and porters don coronet and ermine than they turned Tory.

Blame schools for the transformation. They are central to British life. Tony Blair made a great show of sending his son Euan, now 22, to a state school. But masters from Westminster, one of Britain's great public schools, coached him before admission to Bristol University. Euan has just received a £50,000 scholarship for postgraduate studies at Yale.

School turns out pukka sahibs. That means people whose fathers went to the same exclusive prep and public school as yours. University is traditionally less the hallmark of pedigree, being open to scholarship students. Just as imperial strategists sent budding empire-builders to Haileybury (Attlee was an aberration), Labour lords yearned to send their sons to Tory sausage factories like Winchester and Rugby.

Winston Churchill's old school, Harrow, lies at the heart of Britain's conspiracy to subvert the revolution. It ensured through Jawaharlal Nehru that independence made little difference to the quality of Indian life. Its next conquest eight years ago was Thailand "" Land of the Free "" through an overseas branch in Bangkok that sternly forbade Thai students from conversing in their mother tongue. Now Harrow has turned to China with a Beijing school so that the next revolutionary generation speaks in the clipped tones of Nancy Mitford's U folk and sports the crested blazers, striped ties and ribboned boaters of the ultimate bastions of British privilege.

But while this mofussil institution might be good enough for common or garden party apparatchiks (like Delhiwallahs flaunting an external London School of Economics degree) class-conscious Chinese leaders fork out something like an annual £20,000 for their princelings to follow in the footsteps of Churchill and Nehru. It is a patriotic duty. The law (which they themselves crafted) forbids Chinese below the age of 17 attending the Beijing Harrow school. Good Chinese must go to school in England.

So, young Master Bo, child of Long March veterans, had no option but to travel to the country whose next king mocked Hong Kong's transfer as the great Chinese takeaway and dismissed China's leaders as appalling old waxwork figures. Just two years short of a century, Grandfather Bo Yibo threw his pigtail into the party's ring when he was only 17 and became one of the Eight Immortals to march shoulder to shoulder with the Great Helmsman. He became finance minister for a while and, more to the point, went to jail for 15 years after Mao Zedong died.

Father Bo Xilai, 56, kept the red flag flying ... at least until it was prudent to dip it to more abiding human instincts. He is the dynamic commerce minister who gave a new Chinese twist to the "produce or perish" slogan by famously declaring that the export value of 100 million shoes or 800 million shirts would equal the cost of a single Boeing aircraft. Bo Xilai also went to prison, but that was before he became an enthusiastic Deng supporter.

The Chinese may have learnt their sophistication from Bengalis who, in turn, absorbed it from the British. But China has outstripped Bengal in a crucial respect. It has access to the real Eton and Harrow. Bengal must be satisfied with Harrow-on-the-Hooghly and Eton of the East, both in Darjeeling. But, of course, it's the principle that matters.