Today, however, they have far more in common. China is now the major trading partner of most South American states, which marks a substantial change from the 20th century when the US dominated bilateral trade with the region. Brazil sold 110 million tons of soy beans to China in 2025, while Chinese firms are building a new metro line in the Chilean capital Santiago, and in 2024 opened a brand new port near Lima. Overall, South American-Chinese trade in 2024 topped half a trillion dollars.

In the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s rendition, many have been asking whether the incident marks a major blow for China’s prospects in South America. One of Beijing’s representatives was in talks with Maduro mere hours before Delta Force came calling. Beijing won’t be thrilled about Maduro’s loss, but his presence probably isn’t critical to its influence in the region. American oil companies are proving skeptical about investing in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure, but China has readily made much longer-term investments there and in other South American countries. Beijing has long believed that in the 21st century, real power lies in tech infrastructure — and it shows.

Under Maduro, Venezuela committed on a grand scale to Chinese Huawei systems to run 5G. Huawei and other Chinese players have also moved into cloud computing in recent years, and have penetrated much of South America. It is not yet clear whether America’s new arrangements with Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, will change all this. There are alternative 5G providers in operation in Venezuela, but it will be hard — and costly — to remove Chinese infrastructure that has already been installed.

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That infrastructure includes energy as well as communications. South America has shifted decisively toward renewables: over 60% of its electricity generation is from renewables (including hydropower), and more than 90% of the region’s solar and wind equipment is from Chinese producers. Meanwhile, Chinese EVs have more than a quarter of the market in Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay, and their presence is growing fast in the continent’s other markets.

Will the Trump administration demand that South America abandon its current dependence on Chinese infrastructure, electric vehicles and green energy? And if so, will the US help pay for an alternative in a region where consumers want cheap, efficient products here and now? American taxpayers might not be delighted to hear that Venezuelan oil revenues, if they ever arrive, are spent on subsidizing cloud computing in Caracas or Buenos Aires.

If the Americans allow China to remain the region’s infrastructure giant, then many in Beijing will be fine with the loss of Maduro. In the long term, tech dominance assures China leverage in Venezuela regardless of who sits in the presidential palace. If arresting a head of state is America’s way of showing its dominance in a key region, then influencing everything from business to energy infrastructure might be Beijing’s way of doing the same thing. China has multiple opportunities to adapt and find new opportunities in a region where it’s indisputably a major economic player.

Meanwhile, Trump’s success in decapitating the Venezuelan leadership has revived his enthusiasm for talking about taking Greenland. In an interview with the New York Times, he suggested that Russia and China might take over Greenland if America didn’t get there first. Yet this implies that China’s Arctic plans are further advanced than is really the case.

In 2018, China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — the word “near” is carrying a lot of weight in that formulation. China’s interest in the far north is rooted in a historical sense, developed over the past century, that the country is surrounded by enemies and that an alliance of adversaries might cut off important sea routes to China by blocking the Strait of Malacca. It’s hard to imagine that many powers would actually seek to provoke China, now a military superpower, in that way. But Beijing has long sought alternative ways to supply itself if one key route is cut off. The warming waters of the Arctic provide one possible pathway. China has invested in new icebreaker ships and has sought increased status in the Arctic Council, the international body where issues relating to the region are discussed.

This is still a policy for the 2030s and beyond, but the thinking started years ago. In 2018, China introduced the term “Polar Silk Road”, describing its interest in sea routes from northern Chinese ports across the Arctic waters to the Atlantic and beyond, though the phrase hasn’t caught on in quite the same way as its more famous Belt and Road Initiative. A few prescient Western researchers have been tracking China’s increased interest in the Arctic, and Greenland in particular, for some years now, including Eyck Freymann, who co-wrote, with Calvin Heng, an important paper for the Belfer Center of the Harvard Kennedy School on the Arctic intentions of Asian powers. As they point out, the Arctic is one of the areas where greater cooperation between Russia and China, which is certainly real in a broad sense, is still fragile. Other analysts point out that Russia has a very strong sense of the Arctic as part of its own identity. A greater Chinese presence there would cause significant anguish among the Russian nationalists who both inspire and goad Putin online.

The aspiration to expand beyond China’s traditional Asian position is influenced in part by three Western figures who have been prominent in its thinking on geopolitics over the past few decades: Mahan, Mackinder and Monroe. Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most prominent naval theorists of the 19th century, argued that control of the oceans through a powerful navy was central to dominance in the global economy; Sir Halford Mackinder maintained that control of the “World Island” of Eurasia was central to any power’s search for global dominance. US president James Monroe’s doctrine of hemispheric dominance has come into prominence this month because of its recasting as the “Donroe Doctrine”, but Chinese thinkers have been debating an “Asian Monroe Doctrine” since at least the Thirties, when Japan’s empire sought to dominate the continent.

China has little obvious interest in classic territorial dominance over Greenland, though mineral rights are another matter. But a new approach to global politics, one that enables Beijing to push its case around disputed islands and maritime routes in Asia, will be of great interest. It has had longstanding disputes with other maritime powers over islands in the East and South China Seas: Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. In the longer term, the precedents set by the Donroe Doctrine might yet lead online Chinese nationalists, many of whom love a bilingual pun, to start agitating for dominance in the South China Xi.

Both presidents had reason to be pleased. Each got what he wanted: a compromise which doesn’t cut off options, at least for now. Both achieved their specific aims: for the US side, the removal of many of the restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earths; for the Chinese, lower tariffs on their goods entering the US. They also managed to put off some of the hardest questions on how the US-China relationship will develop in the next few years.

Their similarity of intent was masked by their very different personal styles. Trump is freewheeling, improvisational, unpredictable. This is not to say that he lacks direction: for this meeting, he had a key goal of getting an agreement on fentanyl and rare earths, and he achieved both. Xi, in contrast, is tightly choreographed, sticking to talking points and bland language. (There is only one recorded incident of Xi making a joke during his relationship with the US: on a visit to America in September 2015, he declared that his anti-corruption campaign purging the Chinese Communist Party was “no House of Cards”, referring to the skulduggerous television show about a scheming US president). Trump has been warm in his language about Xi, calling him “respected” and referring to him as the “king of China”. Xi has said little about Trump personally.

Compare this disbalanced personal dynamic with each president’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin is clearly able to adapt to Trump’s fixations and bugbears, as when he sympathized with the US President’s dislike of mail-in ballots (even though Russia makes wide use of digital remote voting), and assured him that he would not have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if Trump had remained president. Yet it’s hard to see Putin having a conversation with any Western leader, not just Trump, where the surface level conversation and deeper intent really match.

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The relationship between Xi and Putin, in contrast, seems genuinely quite close. Xi’s respect for Russia is not purely instrumental. His father Xi Zhongxun grew up in China’s revolutionary movement under the influence of Russian and Soviet literature, and seems to have passed on some of that interest to his son. (Joseph Torigian’s superb biography of Xi Zhongxun, The Party’s Interests Come First, notes Xi’s knowledge of relatively obscure Russian novels.) Putin, of course, has his own nationalistic view of Russian culture and its importance, and is willing to flatter China, although he seems to have little specific to say about its culture or society. This year, official records show that the two leaders have talked on the phone frequently and met at various international gatherings. Indeed, Trump posted disapprovingly on Truth Social during the Victory Day parade in Beijing in September, accusing Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-un of conspiring against America. There’s no record of a Chinese reply. Putin at least sometimes tries to reply to Trump in his own idiom. Xi never does.

On the core issue of trade, both gunslingers have put their weapons away — for now. China has made it clear that it’s able and willing to use restrictions on the export of rare earths and critical minerals to squeeze the US and other Western powers in the most sensitive parts of their supply chains. The US has likewise indicated that it’s prepared to take the hit to consumers that comes from restrictions on China by pushing tariffs up to unbearable rates. The possibility of mutual destruction has led to a temporary deal.

But the negotiations are nowhere near finished. The Trump administration says that China has agreed to restrict the export of fentanyl, which is responsible for severe opiate addiction in the US. Yet it’s hard to know how enforceable the fentanyl ban really is. In the end, fentanyl production in China, unlike the production of EVs or solar panels, is not subject to governmental oversight, and it’s going to be hard to track how much China really controls the drug. The export restrictions and tariffs have been lifted for just one year.

In South Korea, Trump and Xi managed to avoid some of the biggest questions that divide them. Perhaps the biggest issue is Taiwan, where policy seems to be changing at some speed on both sides. Over the years, Xi has made ever-louder comments about the need to “resolve” the Taiwan question — that is, its unification with the mainland — in public speeches. China’s military spending rose to over $314 billion in 2024, and the PLA Navy is developing its capacities for the kind of amphibious assault that would be needed for an invasion. While logistics do still make that particular outcome unlikely, Taiwan is nevertheless vulnerable to a blockade, as well as to cyberattacks.

For the past half century, even though the US switched recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing, the US has maintained a strong commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. Under the first Trump administration, senior figures such as the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger made it clear that they regarded the defense of Taiwan as a top political priority. Joe Biden stated several times during his presidency that the US would defend Taiwan: he was so emphatic in this claim that his staff had to walk back the assurance several times to restore the “strategic ambiguity” that was supposed to define policy.

Under the new Trump administration, however, the position on Taiwan seems more fluid. A planned shipment of some $400 million worth of arms to Taiwan last summer was halted by the administration. Taiwan president Lai Ching-te’s attempt to transit the United States on his way to Latin America (where there are still a few states that recognize Taiwan) was also vetoed earlier this year. Of course, the US still provides plenty of military assistance to Taiwan in service of what has become known as a “porcupine” strategy for self-defense. But China seems less inclined to tolerate Taiwan’s status quo, and many in Taiwan are unsure that the US will offer them long-term protection if the situation changes suddenly.

Trump left Seoul declaring that he would visit China in April next year. So far, the Chinese side has been silent on a date. Clearly neither party would think it worth a presidential visit if there was nothing to sign off on. And many of the issues look intractable on both sides. The US has to decide whether Taiwan is worth defending: say no, and a democracy could be destroyed and American power in the Pacific permanently diminished; say yes and thousands of American lives could be lost in yet another far-off war. Meanwhile, China wants access to US high tech: American security officials are skeptical about the wisdom of allowing the export of high-level chips, while the tech magnates who are central to the new administration are keen to expand their market in China.

Above all, China wants to know whether the recent change in US foreign policy is real. Recently, the term “involution” (neijuan) has become popular in Chinese internet usage, referring to an increasingly inward turn of many of the youth in China’s competitive society. Today, China’s leaders are trying to work out whether the “involution” in the US is real, and if so, how that can be made to boost China’s rise to becoming the global power that sets the rules. The Seoul meeting did not come close to answering those questions. Perhaps the summit in Beijing next spring will do.

For in truth, Beijing doesn’t seem all that concerned about Trump 2.0. An experienced China policy analyst told me a few days ago that Beijing’s political thinkers see Trump as “no worse than Joe Biden”. The Chinese public, likewise, seems genuinely relaxed about Trump’s return. According to recent polling from the European Council on Foreign Relations, 34% of the Chinese public welcomed Trump, and 21% didn’t feel strongly about him. (This would suggest that Trump is currently polling better in China than in California.)

Zhou Bo, former Senior Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, and author of Should the World Fear China?, corroborated this view, telling me that most Chinese are not worried about Trump. “Compared with his attitude towards the rest of the world,” Zhou said, “[Trump] looks confusingly yet almost pleasantly ‘friendly’ towards China.” Zhou believes that Trump has learned from his first term that his signature unpredictability will not work as well on a peer competitor as it does on small or medium powers. Tariffs would be less effective too, as China moves toward a more self-sufficient economy. And compared to Trump’s first term, China’s economy is less dependent on America specifically. “So why should China worry?”

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Another reason some Chinese are unfazed by Trump is that they believe his worldview opens up more space for China. The phrase “Trump founder of our nation” is bounding about a lot in China at the moment; the logic is that by distancing itself from its European and perhaps Asian partners, America is creating opportunities for China to exploit. German auto companies, for instance, might choose to partner with Chinese firms as America’s markets grow harder to access. America’s turn away from green tech is also opening up more space for China to sell solar and wind equipment to the Global South.

But that doesn’t mean the Chinese think badly of the US president. On the contrary, Trump is a familiar, and not unwelcome, figure in China’s social media ecology. “Looks like there’s a show to watch for the next four years,” said one Weibo user just after Trump’s election, in a post that was liked some 38,000 times. China’s “netizens” admittedly aren’t fans of his anti-Beijing rhetoric, although Trump’s kept that on a simmer rather than a boil since the inauguration. But nationalistic billionaires with strong opinions are now pretty commonplace in China, and that lot give Trump credit for his unashamed pro-American stance: China is not a place where bashful opinions about your own country gain much respect.

What’s more, many Chinese feel they’ve met Trump’s kind before, or at least, their parents have. One described Trump’s whiplash shifts in domestic policy to me as “the American Cultural Revolution”. The original Chinese version saw the supreme leader dismantle his own party from within, demand that people reject everything from the past as “old culture”, and empower 19-year-olds to lecture their elders about righteous political conduct. So far, no American federal employees have been made to take the “airplane position”, unlike those Chinese bureaucrats who were forced to stretch out their arms for hours on end. But plenty have been told that they’re the equivalent of the “cow demons” and “ghosts” targeted by Mao’s Red Guards. There has been no sign at all of the mass violence that scarred China’s major cities in 1966. Yet in China at least, there’s a sense that history is rhyming, if not repeating itself.

If there’s one element of Trump’s new regime that does worry some in Beijing, it’s the idea of a “reverse Nixon”, which has been floated in certain Washington circles. The theory goes that by getting closer to Russia, the US can force a peace on Ukraine, and then work with its new partners in Moscow to push back on Beijing. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently gave an account on Breitbart of why it would be wise for the US to avoid confronting a firm Sino-Russian alliance, and argued that America should try to prevent that outcome by becoming closer to Russia. One Beijing thinktanker I spoke to buys into this idea strongly: he was at pains, privately, to say that the idea of “a friendship without limits” declared between Xi and Putin in 2022 is now old news, and that the partnership is pragmatic, not ideological.

Yet 2025 is not 1972. In that year, the USSR and China were in danger of going to war with each other, and had only the most rudimentary diplomatic relations. There wasn’t even a full Soviet ambassador in Beijing between 1964 and 1970. Nowadays, though, Xi and Putin seem to have worked out a genuinely cooperative relationship, and mistrust of Washington runs deep in both capitals. Even if Trump moves significantly closer to Russia in the next few years, analysts in Moscow and Beijing won’t forget that the next president might take exactly the opposite tack. Nor is it clear what material or strategic benefits would come to Russia if it turned its back on China. Falling out with the neighbors didn’t serve either Mao or Brezhnev well in the Sixties; Xi and Putin are unlikely to make the same mistake in the 2020s.

Another area of uncertainty is Taiwan. The pressure currently being placed on Ukraine to cede land to Russia is making some Taiwanese policymakers nervous — though they take heart from the fact that Trump’s national security team is full of China hawks, including Rubio and Waltz. Yet Trump’s Ukraine pivot won’t necessarily make a Chinese invasion of Taiwan more likely. An amphibious attack on the island would be difficult, regardless of policy in Washington. China’s other tactics may have a better chance of success, especially those of economic pressure, given 80% of the island’s firms are linked to the mainland, and social media disinformation, which could spread despondency about whether Taiwan can survive. The 2028 Taiwan presidential election campaign will see these tactics tested extensively.

For now, China’s policymakers have decided it’s better just to observe the Trump administration, rather than seek to influence it. But over time, as the new geopolitical landscape becomes clearer, the chance to shape “events not seen in a hundred years”, as Xi puts it, may become irresistible. Xi is referring here to the century since the Russian Revolution of 1917, which started the long breach between the US and China. As he bides his time, Xi will be calculating whether the new American Revolution provides an opportunity to reshape the global order in China’s interests — or even whether a grand bargain between the US and China might be on the horizon.

In the West, information has a habit of wanting to be free. Every so often, government documents are recalled, or a court order prevents an issue from being discussed — but once the material is out in the public sphere, especially online, it is generally very hard to retract it. Since this is the norm for liberal societies, we sometimes underestimate how important it is to keep bodies of knowledge free and accessible to the public.

In today’s illiberal China, by contrast, we see what happens when the preservation of information for the public is less important than protecting the ruling system. The Chinese government is determined to prove it can be made to disappear at the snap of its fingers. In March, it was announced that large parts of CNKI, the major Chinese research and academic database, were being closed to overseas readers. The Chinese insist that this is just tit for tat, as it’s harder for their own researchers to get access to Western research databases. But that’s disingenuous. It’s true that there are now security-linked restrictions on some researchers from China getting access to Western hi-tech labs. Yet Chinese historians, political scientists and sociologists still have easy and convenient access to sources in the West, such as the UK National Archives.

Foreign academics studying China aren’t nearly so lucky. Overseas access to China’s historical materials — particularly those from the turbulent years of Mao Zedong’s rule — is now off-limits. This wasn’t always the case: a number of key archives including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were open to foreign and domestic scholars during the first decade of this century, allowing for astonishing insights into the formation of Mao’s foreign policy (and, as it happens, helping China to make its current foreign policy more legible to the world). Then, in 2012, most of the collection was closed off again. No single explanation was given other than a cryptic “zhengli” (reordering or tidying up), but in retrospect, it marked the start of a decade of narrowing boundaries for academic and political discussion as Xi Jinping tightened his control over China.

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The closing of archives might seem like a rather specialist complaint. But the wider issue — the illusion that once information is out in the open, it remains there — is more fundamental to the behaviour of writers, thinkers, and societies as a whole than the liberal world sometimes realises. China’s intellectuals have to reckon not just with the battle to get material out in the open, but the reality that any victory may be temporary, and the door may narrow or close again.

Consider the writing of Wang Xiaobo, a well-known Chinese novelist in the Eighties and Nineties. Unsure what to make of his wry and ironic fiction, the authorities first banned his work, then allowed it to be published in the relatively more liberal atmosphere of the mid-Nineties (though it has been only sporadically available in China since then). Wang’s story is neither unique nor particularly tragic: it is often the case in China that the same artist is both feted and censored. But his story is illustrative of the way that information and access come and go in China, a phenomenon that shapes attitudes towards reality.

In China, collective knowledge and memory are fragile. To give them more substance and staying power, Chinese intellectuals have come up with two different techniques. The first is to embrace the ironies surrounding the ephemerality of the written word. Wang’s most widely-known novel, Golden Age, now in a new translation for Penguin Classics by Yan Yan, is an account of the Cultural Revolution: the decade from 1966 to 1976 when China was racked by an internal civil war instigated by Mao in an act of purgative revenge against his own Communist Party, which he believed was sidelining him.

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Yet Wang’s book doesn’t offer the kind of grand narrative sweep present in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and other bestselling memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it opens with a “sent-down youth” named Wang Er, a young man exiled to the countryside during Mao’s political storm. During his time in the village, he has a long on-off affair with a young female doctor until the two of them are discovered and forced to self-criticise. This tactic of demanding that political offenders recount their own “crimes” was a standard part of the project of ideological purification from the Forties onwards. But rather than going through a violent and painful humiliation typical of the Cultural Revolution, the wayward couple is simply made to write confessions of their Orwellian “sexcrimes”. The cadre in charge of monitoring the confessions seems to enjoy them for their prurient detail rather than seeking to use them for reforming the recidivists.

For much of the novel, Wang depicts this strange parallel Cultural Revolution, far removed from the violence in the cities. It is only later that we find out that the anti-hero has been witness to a horrific confrontation when he gives an understated but devastating account of a teacher who is persecuted until he throws himself from the window, and whose family are left standing on the ground next to scattered pieces of his brain. Like much of the writing of post-1949 history in China, Golden Age only makes sense when the missing elements are added in late in the day.

This mixture of irony and violence is not the kind of thing that the Party tends to favour. The Cultural Revolution is not completely off limits for discussion in China, but it’s hard to talk about it in tones that suggest it was anything other than a terrible historical error — the fault of a few erring leaders — that the Party itself successfully corrected, and that it’s time to move on. Wang’s approach, in contrast, implies that the wounds of that time have never really healed. That bleak interpretation must be one of the reasons that the book was illicit (though widely read).

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Chinese writers today face even greater challenges than Wang. As Megan Walsh points out in her book, The Subplot, popular fiction is now written at high speed online, and is highly commercial, bringing in the kind of income that many Substackers can only dream of. Yet online readers can suddenly find their favourite epic blocked by censors. Unlike Wang’s physical novels, which could at least be hidden in private libraries during times of harsh censorship, today’s bestselling fiction can disappear overnight. Just because you read something today doesn’t mean you’ll find it tomorrow, whether it’s a historical document about the Cultural Revolution or a multi-part fiction series about lesbian martial arts champions. Fiction flickers on the screen: you have to catch it while you can.

This leads us to the second way that some seek to preserve memory, as illustrated in Ian Johnson’s new book Sparks, which gives a highly empathetic account of the way that China’s historical community gets around the rules that prevent the preservation of documentation and restrain historical analysis. The fate of the journal China Through the Ages (Yanhuang Chunqiu) offers a particularly disturbing example. For decades, the journal, officially permitted as a vehicle for the more liberal strain in Chinese Communist politics, was allowed to publish documents and essays that forced attention to the darker and more complex side of Chinese Communist history, even referencing figures such as Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief placed under house arrest after Tiananmen Square in 1989. Then, in 2016, the magazine was shut down in a political purge (although it reappeared under new management). Such unpredictability means that historians have to resort to other means to preserve material: either publishing as online “newsletters” that don’t require an official publication permit, or publishing abroad. The seeming solidity of an ISBN melts into the air — even more so in an age where digital-only publications can be switched off at a moment’s notice.

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Today in the West, there are major, unresolved debates about how electronic data can be preserved when technology makes old formats such as CDs obsolete. There is also a growing divide between institutions and societies that can afford to keep databases switched on and those that can’t. But these choices are very different from deciding that a particular body of historical data — records of top Party leaders’ discussions; economic data about unemployment — should vanish because they are politically inconvenient. This fear of disappearance profoundly affects the way that China preserves its modern history. Libraries and even databases are still important, but the piles of printouts in a local historian’s back room, next to the rice cooker, or those videos of Cultural Revolution survivors kept on a private laptop take on a particular urgency because handing them over to an official archive could mean disappearance rather than preservation.

Wang Xiaobo died young in 1997, so we don’t know what he would have made of a 21st-century China which largely lives on the internet. He would probably have been pleased that his own books are reasonably freely available today. But he might well have been hard at work on a novel that reflected the here-today-gone-tomorrow fragility of history, fiction, and memory in today’s authoritarian China, where it is easier than ever to disseminate information and simpler than ever to cut it off.

A preview of the tension this will inevitably arouse was revealed towards the end of last year, when a film about rural China became a surprise box office hit in the country — before being pulled. Return to Dust, directed by Li Ruijun, portrays a rural couple (played by renowned actress Hai Qin and farmer-turned-amateur-actor Wu Renlin) who are pushed into an arranged marriage. Over time, they develop a quiet, understated love while dealing with countryside poverty. The luminous and deeply moving story ends in a muted tragedy.

The film received international accolades, but in September, it was abruptly removed from Chinese streaming services and discussion of it was censored on social media. No official reason was given, though there was speculation that the film’s bleak and unglamorous view of rural society was unwelcome just before the 20th Party Congress, when Xi Jinping would seek (and gain) an unprecedented third term in power.

Before it was banned outright, there was a brief moment when the distributors tacked a more upbeat ending onto the end of the film. There is a long tradition of this tactic. Back in 1950, one of the first films made under the new Maoist government was This Life of Mine, directed by the brilliant Shi Hui, and based on a story by the novelist Lao She. The story is bleak: across the first decades of the 20th century, a policeman falls lower and lower in social status as his economic situation worsens. Eventually he falls down dead. Although the film was an indictment of the old society that had been ended by the 1949 revolution, the censors clearly thought that such a downbeat ending was too depressing for audiences in a glorious new China. So they added some gratuitous but rousing footage at the end of People’s Liberation Army soldiers storming towards victory.

Yet the desire to change narratives in films about contemporary issues is a thread that runs through the Chinese Communist Party’s political tactics. Gao Xiang, the historian who has just become president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), recently reiterated the importance of treating history as a “Marxist” subject; in other words, one that has a definite grand narrative, based on “objective” factors. The rise to power of the CCP is the grandest possible such narrative, and the transformation of Chinese society the inevitable consequence of its rise.

That certainty sits in stark contrast with the story that the CCP tells about the pre-1949 world. This Life of Mine made the cut in the Fifties because it was primarily about a supposedly feudal society that had now been eliminated, one where individuals had little control over their own fates. There are scenes in Return to Dust that could easily fit into the 1950 film — for instance, a moment when the protagonist is pushed into donating blood to save the life of a local landlord, in the hope that he’ll be given some leeway on his rent (he isn’t).

As metaphors go, this one isn’t subtle. Yet this isn’t the bad “old society” but the 2020s, a decade after the initiation of Xi’s “new era”. In this context, the implication that ordinary Chinese citizens, particularly the peasant farmers who were at the heart of the revolution, have turned into passive victims of fate, is an indictment of the CCP. After all, in the Forties, the revolution was made in the countryside, with “land reform” used euphemistically to describe the violent seizure of land, and public humiliation and lynching of thousands of landlords by poorer peasants, all organised by the Party in campaigns to “speak bitterness”. Today, that same party does not welcome hints that seven decades of reform have not eliminated that bitterness.

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Here, the countryside is a particularly sensitive subject. China’s rural areas did suffer during Covid, but less from the effects of the disease than from its knock-on effects. Online teaching, relatively easy to arrange in well-connected cities, proved much harder to arrange outside of urban areas. The capacity crisis was further exacerbated by longer-standing problems that have dogged China’s attempts to improve rural education in the past few decades. China offers free primary education, up to grade 9 (aged 14-15), but textbooks and tuition fees then fall on family shoulders during high school. Many parents move to the city to earn enough money to pay for their families. However, the internal passport (hukou) system means that if their children come with them, they can’t register at local schools (although there are charities that do provide some schooling for migrant labourers’ children in some cities). And if their children stay at home, they do so in the care of grandparents or state boarding schools, which are a long way from the elite high schools in Shanghai that nurture youthful genius in maths and music.

Local governments are expected to foot the bills, but they are almost all strapped for cash and loaded with debt. (One of reasons for the Zero-Covid protests was that the central government created the legislation but local governments were expected to pay for its implementation, including expensive PCR tests). Then, even if you have funding, it is very hard to get good teachers. Few urban graduates want to spend years in what they consider backward parts of the country on miserable salaries.

Back in 1987, Chen Kaige directed King of the Children, which dealt with the dilemmas faced by an idealistic teacher going to an impoverished area of southwest China. Today, however, there are too few real-life equivalents to his fictional hero, meaning that some 60% of rural children drop out of high school. This doesn’t bode well for a country whose shrinking population means that it will have to develop a highly educated workforce serving a high value economy. There are more signs of this change in southern China, where the financial power of Hong Kong and the emergence of the Shenzhen tech hub have created a much stronger set of economic drivers. But in the impoverished north-west, the need for levelling-up makes Britain’s gap seem tiny.

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In one scene in Return to Dust, we are shown a “solution” to the rural dilemma which is becoming all too common. The couple’s land is purchased at a low price, under pressure from local elites, and they are scheduled to move into one of the new, underpopulated tower blocks that mark so many of the instant cities thrown up during China’s property boom (now in danger of becoming a property crash). “Where will my donkey go?” asks the protagonist plaintively. It’s not just donkeys who are cut out of the picture in the new cities, but also the rural way of life as a whole. Simply creating instant urbanites, without lives and structures to replace what they have lost, is a huge challenge. No wonder that nearly 100 million Chinese suffer from mental health or anxiety disorders.

Some might suggest that Return to Dust, though beautifully shot and movingly performed, is slow and doesn’t have a definitive conclusion. But that, in a sense, is the point. There are plenty of narratives created by China, and by others about it, that have conclusions either transformative or apocalyptic: from the power of its economy to its threats over Taiwan. Yet for many Chinese, it is the slow but very real crises in the countryside that are likely to create dilemmas on a day-to-day basis. These can be the specifics of poor education or rising Covid rates. But they might also be the anomie that comes from a growing realisation that China is a fast-modernising society which has yet to develop a convincing story about how its peasant farmers, for thousands of years the backbone of society, are going to fit into its national story.

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Return to Dust is available to stream online (outside China).

The tight-lipped statement didn’t mention Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. But that’s hardly surprising. For much of Europe, the outcome of the war is existential: all eyes are currently on China to see if it will back Putin. Just days before Russia’s invasion, Xi Jinping and Putin announced that the friendship between their two nations had “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation”. Yet in the weeks since, Xi has been distracted: he has far more pressing issues to worry about than war in far-off Ukraine.

While bombs rain down on Mariupol, Covid remains the main story in China. Much of the rest of world has opened up, including India, but China and Japan remain major outliers. This week, the mega-city of Shanghai, with a population nearly half that of the UK, is being locked down; first, its futuristic eastern zone of skyscrapers and towers, and next week, its western half defined by its British-style art deco waterfront, the Bund.

Stories of commuters emptying shelves in supermarkets fill the headlines, just as in Britain in spring 2020. Hong Kong’s politics is no longer dominated by the struggle for democracy. Instead, public anger, still more freely expressed than in the mainland, has attacked Chief Executive Carrie Lam for a policy that has seen the city isolated from the world and the Chinese mainland for weeks, but still ravaged by growing deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated and elderly.

The economic and social turmoil that Covid has brought to China has shaped its reaction to Ukraine. It is certainly true that China will seek to strengthen its geopolitical position where it can — as indeed does every other major power. However, right now, any decisions on Ukraine will almost certainly be filtered through a domestic lens first and foremost. What will any decision do to the economy? How will it affect the march toward a third term in office for Xi, a decision unprecedented in the modern era but likely to be achieved this autumn at the Party Congress? These are hard questions to answer: no wonder that Xinhua readout was so short.

China’s relationship with Ukraine is part of the equation. Since 2019, China has been Ukraine’s largest single trading partner. And Ukraine is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, along with Russia. For years, Ukraine was proof that European powers at odds with the EU could find friends in Beijing; Serbia being another example.

China also imports grain from Ukraine, not in a way that makes it dependent on that supply in the way that some Middle Eastern countries are, but usefully nonetheless. And it has invested heavily in projects in Ukraine such as a metro rail system and wind energy farms, which it would presumably want to keep going in the event of a peace deal. A settlement that allows China to restore Ukraine to its existing place in its economic matrix would be welcome; whether Putin will permit that is another matter.

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There are also small, but significant opportunities for China to burnish its global image in its handling of the Ukraine crisis. It has plenty of peacekeeping experience via the UN, and actually has more peacekeeping troops trained than any other permanent member of the UN security council. In theory, then, its troops could be part of a UN force that keeps order, assuming that Russian soldiers would be unacceptable to the Ukrainians.

However, this remains unlikely, even if the UN does play a central role in any potential settlement. Past experience shows that China is uncomfortable with the political aspects of peacekeeping — particularly post-civil conflict resolution in sub-Saharan Africa — as it involved bringing civil society and opposition groups into authorised dialogue with government, something which China does not do at home.

Overall, China is much more comfortable talking about physical and economic reconstruction, as it did when it offered to build roads for the Taliban regime last year. But cash alone is not going to settle the Ukraine situation. As its relative distance from the current talks in Istanbul have shown, China is not yet ready to step up as a prominent mediator with a democratic state, just as Western actors have sometimes struggled in the past to deal with hybrid or semi-authoritarian states.

There is another area where China may use Ukraine for political rethinking: on Taiwan. It is far too simple to read Taiwan as a direct analogy to Ukraine, and Beijing does not do so. It has been thinking about the Taiwan issue for years, and regards it as a matter of internal politics, not an external breach of sovereignty. However, one revelation from the past month should surely have set alarm bells ringing: the massive miscalculation by Russia’s political and military elites about the nationalist sentiment and will for resistance of the Ukrainian people.

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The case of Russia suggests that a propaganda echo chamber does not produce good intelligence; if you only listen to your own propaganda, you can’t be surprised when it turns out to be wrong. There are thoughtful voices in the Chinese foreign policy world, muted but audible, that have suggested that China should take its own rhetoric about the decadence and weakness of the West with a pinch of the delicious weijing that makes much Chinese food so sharp.

The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly introduced a programme in selected universities and schools to educate children on the correct approach to understanding the “tragedy” of the Ukraine situation. The overall message is that the crisis is the fault of the West, and Chinese sympathy should take Russia’s feelings into account. Yet the programme still pulls its punches, and it’s still a long way from all-out support for Moscow.

According to the South China Morning Post, one university pledged to provide “positive guidance to ignite their learning passions as the Russia-Ukraine situation remains a hot topic for students,” while another addressed “the fundamental causes to Ukraine’s national tragedy.” But a clear direction on who is right and who is wrong is singularly lacking.

Like the rest of the world, China is going through a period of maximal uncertainty. Just as in recent years the British have adopted the term “permacrisis” to describe the endless rolling news cycle, the Chinese now speak of the world “going through major changes not seen for a century” (“bainian weiyou zhi da bianju”). China may have a five-year plan for its economy, but right now, regarding Ukraine, it appears that Beijing is as uncertain as the rest of us as to what the next five minutes might bring.