Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, penned one of his most famous works, “To a Mouse,” in 1785. It’s about a small rodent whose plans are suddenly and catastrophically disrupted when the narrator, while plowing one of the fields on his farm, accidentally destroys the mouse’s nest, which it had built to survive the coming winter. It includes the immortal line “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” — or, in standard English, “the best laid plans of mice and men / oft go awry.”
What does a poem about what Burns called a “wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie” have to do with China and its Arctic aspirations? A great deal, as it turns out. Over the past few years, Beijing’s best-laid schemes to become a key stakeholder in the high north — perhaps even a “polar great power” — have gone disastrously aglay, leaving China with, as Burns put it in connection with his famously unhoused mouse, “nothing but grief and pain / rather than promised joy.”
Author
Andrew
Latham
Non-Resident Fellow
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