The scrap was written by the Japanese artist Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece: the bestselling manga of all time. For nearly 30 years, fans have followed Oda’s rascally pirate, Monkey D. Luffy, as he and his friends sail the seas in search of the fabled treasure that gives the series its name. Some enthusiasts have wondered, of late, whether Luffy would ever find it, or even whether Oda himself knows what or where it might be. In celebration of an astonishing 600 million copies of his manga circulating worldwide — and perhaps to mollify his fans — Oda committed the answer to paper and placed it in that orb. The truth, he promises, will surface when the manga finally finishes.

You may never have heard of Luffy. But you’ve probably seen him. A skinny young man in a straw hat, red waistcoat and blue shorts, he adorns children’s clothing from London to LA. There are trading cards and Lego sets. Shops like HMV are crammed with franchise memorabilia, and where manga fans once had to seek out specialist bookshops or trawl the internet to feed their fix, mainstream retailers now devote enormous amounts of shelf-space to Japanese manga in general — and to One Piece in particular. For their part, Netflix subscribers will be familiar with the One Piece anime and live-action series, due to be joined at the end of this month by LEGO One Piece. The anime series has run for 26 years, racking up some 1,180 episodes and counting. It is now broadcast in around 80 countries across the world.

Why has One Piece become so ubiquitous? And, as we reach peak Luffy, are we also reaching peak “Japan” as a global brand? Oda himself doesn’t offer many answers. Reportedly very sociable in private, he has always sought to avoid a public profile. In part, that’s because he doesn’t have the time or energy. Brutal deadlines from his publisher have sometimes obliged Oda to sleep for less than three hours a night. And where most top manga artists pen their main characters and then — like the Old Masters — delegate much of the rest to assistants, Oda claims to draw anything that moves: crowds, animals, smoke, even the sea.

But Oda doesn’t appear interested in becoming a public intellectual, like some manga artists. He grew up on rollicking adventures like Dragon Ball and the German-Japanese animation Vicky the Viking: the latter, like One Piece, revolving around a plucky boy and his crew roaming the high seas. Oda is also partial to a good yakuza film or period drama, and as a history fan seems attracted to the enterprise and audacity of the Age of Discovery and the Golden Age of Piracy. His driving question in drawing One Piece is simple: would his 15-year-old self enjoy this?

The result is a main character, Luffy, who wants what most 15-year-olds want: fun; freedom from interference or consequences; fairness from people in authority; an endless supply of food, and — ideally — superpowers. After eating a mystical fruit as a child, Luffy is able to deploy stretchy, rubbery limbs against his foes. He’s also blunt, ambitious, and willing to battle the “World Government”, whose cruel will is enforced by thick-set gym bunnies in the Marines. Luffy is also devoted to his friends: Roronoa Zoro, a muscular, laconic swordsman; Nami the navigator, who brings brains and a bit of business acumen to Luffy’s Straw Hat Crew; Sanji the chain-smoking chef; and Usopp, a coward and compulsive liar — complete with Pinocchio nose — who gives the series surprising emotional depth.

Suggested Reading

Japan's bleak vision of the future

By Tom Feiling

Yet the characters alone don’t account for One Piece’s outsized popularity. There’s also its unique art style — charmingly ragged, where many of its rivals employ a samey precision — plus its ever-compounding status as the recommended starting point for anyone wanting to get into manga and anime. Alongside all this runs Oda’s gift, shared with other internationally successful Japanese creatives, for finding the universal in the particular: drawing out, from Japanese life, values, sentiments and dilemmas, ideas that possess broad human appeal.

On and off down the centuries, some in Japan have prided themselves on taking the collective good — family, neighborhood, company, nation — more seriously than wealthy rivals like the UK and the US. The result is a rich artistic legacy, which dramatizes the tensions involved in trying to live this way. An individualist can stick two fingers up, and walk away. There’s romance in that, perhaps, but not much real drama. On the other hand, to remain committed to the welfare of a group or a whole society, while mourning serious and possibly intractable failings, is difficult and painful. It’s also truer to the way most people live.

These are the very waters in which Luffy and his friends sail. There’s Princess Vivi, for instance, drawn to the life of the Straw Hat Crew but who chooses to stay behind in her war-torn kingdom. We see her standing on the shore, tears streaming down her face as Luffy and his friends sail away without looking back. Have they forgotten her already? In fact, they can’t answer her, because it might put her in danger from the watching Marines. But, as one, the crew all raise their fists in the air, an “X” marked on each of their arms in covert salute to a friend. It is one of the most poignant scenes in the series.

Suggested Reading

Welcome to the age of Otaku

By Louis Elton

Pirate yarn though it is, then, One Piece can be read as a conservative tour de force, championing age-old values like freedom, solidarity, justice, hard work, self-sacrifice and ninkyō: a chivalrous spirit, oriented towards helping the weak and fighting the strong. It is associations like these that have Gen Z protestors flying the Straw Hat Jolly Roger at marches in Indonesia and Nepal, illustrating their opposition to what they regard as corrupt and authoritarian governments. The Jolly Roger has the additional virtue of being politically ambiguous, and thereby complicated for governments to ban without reinforcing the critique that they are indeed repressive. And yet trouble may be looming on the horizon, for the Straw Hat Crew and the wider world they represent.

Oda recalls discovering as a small boy that you could draw manga for a living, realizing in that moment that he might never have to work a day in his life. Quite a few people in Japan have felt the same way, feeding the rise of one of the country’s great postwar export industries — but also contributing to infamously demanding work conditions, as an over-supply of manga artists meets tight profit margins, quick turnaround times, and a publishing culture in which low polling among readers quickly places a manga at risk of being dropped.

An already under-pressure industry now has to contend with AI hoovering up its output and creating rival content at lightning speed. Japanese manga also faces competition from Korean manhwa and Chinese manhua, which often take web novels as their source material and use assembly-line production to create full-color panels. Readers find themselves drawn into a primarily online revenue system, one geared towards mobile phone reading and tie-in purchases.

Suggested Reading

How Weebs lost their way

By Poppy Sowerby

Alongside East Asian competition runs East Asian history. One of the greatest achievements of artists such as Osamu Tezuka and Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki was the refurbishing of Japan’s international reputation after the Second World War. They replaced the militarists and colonizers of old, if not quite burying them, with animated adventures that were variously funny, consoling, saccharine-sweet, techno-futuristic and deeply dystopian. Hopes ran high that young Chinese and South Koreans brought up on Japanese manga and anime would be inclined to reject as outdated and irrelevant dark tales told by their parents or teachers about Japanese imperialism. Yet survey evidence suggests that, for South Korea’s young, it is possible to regard Japan both as a place that produces great food and fiction and where the events of the past have yet to be sufficiently atoned for. So too in China, where a patriotic school education tends to cast Japan as the main villain (closely followed by the British), and where the government has shown its willingness to filter Japanese manga, films and music, and sometimes to ban them outright.

Compounding this problem is Japan’s recent policy of beefing up its military and intelligence operations, while also seeking to strengthen the constitutional position of its armed forces and crack down on foreign espionage. Advocates argue that all these measures are necessary, even overdue. But scholars equally note that Japan’s creative output travels well when it is, as the sociologist Koichi Iwabuchi puts it, “culturally odorless”. A few years ago, a row broke out in South Korea when fans noticed that red-and-white earrings worn by one of the characters in Demon Slayer resembled Japan’s wartime Rising Sun flag. Inevitably, then, the future reception for manga and anime in East Asia, and indeed further afield, will be shaped by perceptions of how Japan’s politics and social attitudes are changing.

When One Piece first launched, back in 1997, Japanese manga was subject to restrictions imposed by South Korean authorities who feared a repeat of the cultural colonization of the past. Luffy’s 30-year odyssey has unfolded alongside Japan’s rise to become Asia’s cultural superpower. Whether that reputation survives until his journey ends is likely to be decided less by Oda than by politicians in Tokyo, Washington, Seoul and Beijing. By the time the One Piece finale arrives, and Oda’s treasure chest is opened, the most interesting secret of all may be what the world has come to think of Japan.

Things might not be quite so simple. There is a school of thought that Kim Ju Ae is being used to distract from the existence of a male heir, perhaps one who is studying abroad under an alias. And, as observers of North Korean politics can attest, much can rapidly change after long periods of apparent stability. Even if Kim is planning a handover, it might not go as planned.

Yet the prominence of this 12- or 13-year-old girl is itself remarkable, for this is a country where choreography is central to the Kim dynasty’s cult of personality. Kim wants the North Korean public, and the world, to be aware of his daughter, and to see her as part of his demigod lineage. And in the event that she succeeds her father, whose health is suspect, Kim Ju Ae will become the world’s only female autocrat. While there are no parallels to her rule today, there have been female autocrats going back all the way to first-dynasty Egypt 5000 years ago. We can look at them to give us an idea of how Kim Ju Ae, as the newest member of this select group, might choose to rule.

Suggested reading

The axis of evil is a fantasy

By Ian Garner

As she will already know, North Korean society is highly patriarchal. In this it is no different to Korean society across history. The last woman to rule any part of the Korean peninsula, Queen Jinseong of Silla, abdicated in 897 AD, making it more than one thousand years since a woman has held direct power there. In the region as a whole, female rule has never been common. Japan’s last reigning empress lived in the 18th century, with female succession banned at the end of the 19th. China’s ineffectual male emperors were puppeteered by Dowager Empress Cixi in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but the country’s only female head of state, Wu Zetian, died in 705. 

Fear of an established leader, such as Kim Jong Un, can make it appear that a non-standard succession has been agreed, but in a society as male-dominated as North Korea, there are very likely grave concerns about a female ruler. This skepticism, though, will be well-disguised. Kim Ju Ae, like many female rulers,  might not find out about it until the moment her father dies. Matilda, for instance, was the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England, and was readily accepted as heir by noblemen who swore fealty at her father’s court. But when Henry died, in 1135, these oath-takers abandoned Matilda in favor of a male cousin. Similarly, the teenaged Tamar was given a well-attended coronation to rule as junior king alongside her father in Georgia in 1178, But when he died, six years later, she Tamar faced rebellion. More recently, the accession of Maria Theresa to the Habsburg Empire in 1740 directly led to the devastating War of the Austrian Succession. North Korea is, of course, a nuclear state, making the stakes all the higher.

One way that Kim Ju Ae can seek to safeguard her position will be already familiar to her. North Korea’s leaders always establish a cult of personality, something that Ju Ae will undoubtedly look to do. With this goal in mind, she must first show reverence towards her predecessors, even as she subtly stresses her likeness to them. Kim Jong-Un will probably join his father and grandfather in the pantheon of “eternal leaders of Korea”. His daughter will therefore become one of many female rulers who have found it expedient to stress their links to famous male members of their dynasties. Margrete I of Denmark and Norway, who was so powerful that she conquered Sweden in 1389, still considered it politic to refer to herself as “King Valdemar’s daughter” long after her father’s death, making an overt link to her kingdoms’ last effective male ruler. It is a technique that has been used many times. The acknowledged heiress to the Aztec empire took the baptismal name Isabel Moctezuma after the Spanish conquest in 1521. She did so in order to tie herself more firmly to her father, the last emperor Moctezuma, in the hope of securing a financial settlement from the Spanish conquerors. We can expect that Kim Ju Ae will make much of her descent, likening her character, and even her appearance, to those of earlier members of her dynasty.

Having underscored her place in this lineage, Kim Ju Ae will then need to establish her own cult of personality. Such cults are marked by very public displays of devotion to the ruling family. Kim Jong-Un’s cult emphasizes his strength as a leader, as well as portraying him as, effectively, the father of his country. State propaganda also stresses his military strength and his prestige on the international stage, something that was bolstered by his meeting with Donald Trump in 2018. These values are distinctly masculine, and are in keeping with traditional views from around the world of what a leader should embody. These values can pose problems for women. It was the view of Matilda’s contemporaries that her arrogance cost her the throne, even though arrogance might not have been considered a problem in a man. 

One successful strategy is to attempt to turn the disadvantage of being female into a blessing. Elizabeth I of England did this remarkably well in the sixteenth century, portraying herself as “Gloriana”, or the unchanging Virgin Queen, and as the wife or mother of her kingdom. We still view Elizabeth, who stares down blank-faced and unageing from portraits, through the prism of this personality cult of hers. The same can be said for Catherine the Great, who, in the 18th century, rebranded herself from minor German princess to contender for the Russian throne. In Catherine’s 34-year-reign, she expanded Russia’s territory, enacting complex reforms, and helped elevate her country to the highest echelon of cultured European life. If Kim Ju Ae succeeds her father, she will attempt to depict herself as being on equal terms with the male leaders of North Korea’s allies. She will also, like Elizabeth I of England, invoke the ideas of marriage to her country, or the symbolic motherhood of her people.

As for her rule, we might wonder whether we can expect different behavior domestically from a female leader. Many reigning queens have shown a natural inclination to be merciful, with Elizabeth I of England highly reluctant to sign death warrants during her reign. Elizabeth of Russia — who was the only surviving child of Peter the Great, and had been initially passed over because of her sex — vowed when she took the throne in 1741 that she would order no executions. Astoundingly, Elizabeth kept her vow throughout her twenty-year reign, though she also beat her servants. As for plotters, they were exiled to Siberia after having their tongues cut out. Women are, on the whole, less aggressive than men, but a certain level of aggressiveness must be maintained by a female ruler if she is to ensure she is respected and obeyed. 

This is a difficult balance for Kim Ju Ae to have to learn. We tend to better remember women’s crimes than men’s. Wu Zetian, of 7th-century China, is remembered for her purges, while her literary achievements tend to be understated. Everyone knows “Bloody Mary”, the first crowned queen of England whose reputation rests on the nearly 300 of her Protestant subjects that she burned. Her father, Henry VIII who, on a conservative estimate killed 30,000 of his subjects, never acquired the nickname “Bloody”. 

A complicating factor for Kim Ju Ae, should she inherit the kingdom, is that its ruler’s safety depends on his or her implied aggression. North Korea lives a precarious existence. To deter interference, it issues frequent and bellicose threats to South Korea and other antagonists. North Korea’s military is therefore central to its self-image and how it is viewed on the world stage. 

Suggested article

North Korea is ready for war

By Oliver Jia

It might be inconvenient for the claim of Kim Ju Ae, then, that most wars in history have been started by men and that many female rulers have shown a reluctance to go to war. Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, for example, having won her throne after the long years of the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, was always reluctant to commit herself to warfare. An exception was her participation in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, though her aim — to regain the province of Silesia, seized by Prussia more than a decade earlier — was, in Austrian-Hungarian eyes, restorative rather than acquisitive. 

Given North Korea’s circumstances, Kim Ju Ae would need to project the impression that she is no more likely to back down from a conflict than her father. The concept of a warrior queen — such as Zenobia of Palmyra, who conquered Egypt in the third century AD, or Isabel I of Castile, who famously conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, in the 15th century — can be extremely helpful to female rulers in how they are perceived internationally. Female leaders are less likely to be expected to act as generals or to direct military strategy, but they can burnish their reputations with appearances at military parades or in international negotiations. We cannot expect a female autocrat to be a pacifist. If Kim Ju Ae has the remotest sense of self-preservation, the dismal situation on the Korean peninsula will remain deeply entrenched.

If she marries, she will need to consider the threat that her husband might pose: a perennial problem for female autocrats. Elizabeth I never married, and was more secure a ruler for it. But Kim Ju Ae will be expected to produce an heir to continue the Kim line, and will one day have to consider her own succession, just as her father did before her. Behind the carefully-managed choreography, there will be plotting and rivalry. Whether any of this will improve the lives of the benighted North Korean people is impossible to know.

Offering Kurilla a friendly handshake — and Dan Caine, America’s top military officer, an invite to his Pakistani homeland — Field Marshal Asim Munir is clearly at home in the Land of the Free. In June, for instance, he enjoyed a two-hour private lunch with Donald Trump, while Islamabad has also nominated the President for the Nobel Peace Prize, describing him as a “genuine peacemaker” who’d soon bring peace to Iran and Gaza alike. Never mind that Tehran is bloodied and Rafah a wasteland: such shameless toadying has long been central to Pakistani foreign policy. 

After all, there have to be some advantages to sharing your four land borders with the continent’s great powers of India and China, alongside the pariah states of Iran and Afghanistan. And if our new geopolitical era is to be defined by multilateral deal-making, atomic brinkmanship and vaulting duplicity, Pakistan would appear to be extraordinarily well positioned. There is, perhaps, no nation on Earth better at playing one set of interests off against another — especially when it’s the only Muslim nuclear power, and enjoys a robust tradition of self-interested military leaders keen to consolidate their own power.  

Munir has so far proved himself adept at negotiating these difficult waters. When he’s not glad-handing in America, he basks in the afterglow of what is seen (in Pakistan at least) as a “triumph” over India, after the two countries seemed poised to enter full-scale conflict over the disputed territory of Kashmir earlier this year. Not one to waste an opportunity, Munir had initially used the 12-day war between Iran and Israel to consolidate Pakistan’s growing influence in the region and present itself as a useful and, if needs be, servile partner to the US.

More from this author

Pakistani democracy is dead

By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Certainly, Munir himself is keen to oblige. During his lunch at the White House, he presented himself as a trusted source of information on Iran, discussing rare-earth minerals and bitcoin mining contracts — and apparently receiving a MAGA hat for his troubles. Pakistanis know Iran “better than most,” Trump told reporters following the meeting. 

Pakistani officials were also in Washington in July, dangling lucrative mining contracts in front of American firms; promising to buy American cotton and soy; and vowing to devote 2000MW of electricity (a coal-fired power station’s worth) to bitcoin mining, the latter a flattering imitation of the Trump family’s own grand crypto scheme. Islamabad has also co-signed a “letter of intent” with Trump’s pet syndicate, World Liberty Financial, vowing to cooperate on blockchain and stablecoin adoption. 

The general idea is clearly to discourage US tariffs — not least given Pakistani factories produce many of the cheap consumables so beloved of American voters. And, it must be said, Islamabad has lately managed to get its tariff down to 19%: not ideal, but better than the 29% previously threatened. Either way, Pakistan knows better than most how to be a client state. If all this results in American investment, Munir will congratulate himself on having played a storming innings on a tough wicket.

Promoted to Field Marshal in May following the “triumph” over India, Munir has managed to promote himself from the depths of unpopularity to become his country’s ruler in all but name. As his frequent transatlantic trips imply, even the White House has played along: he’s now the go-to interlocutor in Washington, with Pakistan’s hapless civilian politicians left twiddling their thumbs. 

All this is part of a broader strategic plan. For if rekindling animosity against India, helped Munir consolidate his power, the Trump-led ceasefire — Modi’s government vehemently denies the idea of US intervention — has further established Pakistan’s aspirations of parity with India. That there would be the need for global mediation contradicts Indian assertions that they are the subcontinent’s hegemon, and it undermines New Delhi’s insistence that all issues with Pakistan, including Kashmir, can only be discussed bilaterally. 

Suggested reading

India can’t win a war with Pakistan

By Kapil Komireddi

In many ways, this year’s India-Pakistan crisis foreshadowed the Israel-Iran conflict. In both Kashmir and Palestine, there are Muslim populations under the occupation of non-Muslim militaries. In both Kashmir and Palestine, jihadi proxies of Pakistan and Iran have sought to liberate these Muslim populations with attacks on civilians. In turn, India and Israel have both targeted military infrastructure in Pakistan and Iran that they deem to be existential threats. 

And while Israel’s war specifically targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, prompting America’s involvement, it was similarly Pakistan’s possession of a nuclear arsenal that fast-tracked the American-negotiated ceasefire. To reiterate: Pakistan is the sole Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal — something its leaders have described explicitly as an “Islamic bomb”. For the past two months, Trump hasn’t failed to miss an opportunity to remind the world that he was the man who “stopped nuclear war”. 

Whether or not going nuclear was even remotely considered by Munir, the mere suggestion of escalation not only won Pakistan the ceasefire — but also focused American minds on Pakistan at a moment when it had progressively fallen under Chinese influence. 

China has invested heavily in Pakistani infrastructure in the past decades via its Belt and Road initiative, creating the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which gives Beijing vital access to Pakistani ports. However, it has done so in the face of increased resentment and symbolic attacks on Chinese targets, including a 2018 attack on its consulate in Karachi. China, for its part, has responded by micromanaging Pakistan, transforming the country into a de facto colony. 

Still, it was ironically Pakistan’s successful use of Chinese military equipment, shooting down two Indian fighter planes, that prompted the US return to the aid of Islamabad; in recent years, America has counted on Indian military strength as a counterbalance to China. This is precisely the sort of complicated balance of power that Pakistan is now poised to exploit, by playing American and Chinese interests off against one another to get the best deals out of the two competing world powers.

No less important to the US is the influence that Pakistan wields to its north. Pakistan is now a key part of the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition of Sunni states, orchestrated by Riyadh, whose aim is to counter the influence of Iran and its Shia allies in the region. Indeed, Pakistan has allowed Salafi jihadi proxies funded by Saudi Arabia to flourish in the region for decades.

This is why, as Israel and Iran clashed, Pakistan joined a host of Muslim countries in condemning the Jewish state, even as it prepared for the downfall of the Shia one. Pakistan was careful to distance itself from Tehran’s wishful claim that Pakistan would lend it military support against Israel — and went so far as to close the border with Iran to prove the point.

Field Marshal Munir will now be bracing for the call of duty. Should the collapse of the Islamist regime in Tehran throw the country into chaos, or should the existing regime fail to follow through with the updated nuclear agreement, it seems likely that the eager Pakistan army would be called into service at the behest of the Americans. The US won’t want the Islamist in Tehran to obtain a nuclear bomb with the connivance of the Islamist regime in Islamabad that already has one.

If there are contradictions inherent in all of this, Pakistan has form. After all, Islamabad famously took money from America to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, only to allow jihadist groups to run amok with its notorious “Good Taliban, Bad Taliban” strategy. This backfired, though, when the Afghan Taliban — the good one, as opposed to the bad one — was close to establishing official ties with Iran in the lead-up to the recent clashes. The Taliban regime in Kabul will now look to increase its own push for Trump’s recognition, offering to serve American interests in Iran. That, it goes without saying, would be a nightmare scenario for the Pakistani army.

Small wonder, then, that Pakistan is now attempting to position itself as a vital US partner in the region: a haven for crypto speculation, a mine of rare earth minerals, whatever the environmental or the human cost. But the West should be careful. For this is also a state that has harbored jihadis who launched attacks on American soil, has all but given up on democracy — and, a little over two months ago, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Even so, Pakistan’s attempts at flattery are working. If Trump does indeed win the Nobel Peace Prize, it would represent a significant victory for Pakistan, and a global recognition of the country’s triumph over India. It would also be the supreme vindication of Asim Munir’s playbook: why make peace when you can make deals?

Over time, a weakened Russia will likely be a harbinger of chaos across its periphery. Empires since antiquity have provided a solution to chaos. But empires, as they collapse, leave chaos in their wake. History has provided no solution to this conundrum.

The pattern is usually the same. An imperial hegemon cobbles together a domain of many ethnic groups, forcing them to lay down their arms against each other. An empire may last hundreds of years and yet build nothing except a tenuous inter-ethnic truce. This has been the story of the Russian Empire and its shadow zones in the Caucasus, the Balkans, stretches of Central and Eastern Europe, not to mention stretches of Siberia and the Far East. But as the hegemon weakens, fights for control of territory between one group and another commence.

The case of Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus is the most telling. Stalin put this ethnic-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan for the same reason he burdened other Soviet republics with large ethnic minorities: to make it impossible for any of them to secede from the Soviet Union without inter-ethnic war tearing them apart. Fighting between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis (Azeri Turks) began following the weakening of the Soviet Union in the late-Eighties under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, leaving the Armenians in control of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since then, Armenia has looked to Russia as a patron who could not only keep the regional peace, but also keep their ethnic compatriots in place.

But sensing Russia’s growing weakness, the Azerbaijanis took back the enclave last year by force of arms. The President, Ilham Aliyev, provided assurances over the decades that he had no aggressive intentions. But, having built up his armed forces with money afforded by massive oil revenues, and sensing an opportunity provided by Russia’s distraction in Ukraine, he pounced. Next, Aliyev may send his soldiers across southern Armenia to link up with the ethnic-Azeri enclave of Nakhichevan, bordering Iran. Or, he will use the implicit threat of doing so to extract a corridor-of-sorts through negotiation.

Meanwhile, in the Balkans, violence flared not that long ago between masked Serbian gunmen in the north of Kosovo, home to a large Serbian minority, and Kosovar Albanian police. The Kosovars blame organised criminal elements supported by neighbouring Serbia for the attacks, while authorities in Belgrade struggled to deny their involvement.

More from this author

The tragedy behind Kissinger's realpolitik

By Robert D. Kaplan

Throughout his time in power, the Serbian President, Aleksandar Vucic, has played a delicate game, serving in turns as an ethnic arsonist and quickly thereafter offering himself up to European interlocutors as a firefighter. But while he seems to have pulled off the same trick this time, Vucic, or someone even more extreme in his government, may judge that a Nagorno-Karabakh moment could be within reach for Serbia, and that it would be in their interest to more thoroughly stoke the flames of war in the region. And, should open conflict between “breakaway” Serbs in Kosovo, Bosnia or Montenegro force the redrawing of borders once again in the Balkans, it’s not clear where that trend would stop.

All this may just be a prologue for trouble across the longitudes of the Russian empire and its shadow zones from Europe to Asia, a curtain-raiser for ugly unrest elsewhere. Just as Aliyev smelled the Kremlin’s relative weakness as he moved into Nagorno-Karabakh, others might act similarly, motivated as they are by separatist tendencies.

Indeed, small Albanian minorities are to be found in Serbia and Greece, with a much more significant number of ethnic Albanians clustered in the west and northwest of North Macedonia, bordering Albania itself. Demographically speaking, a greater Albania already exists glaringly on the map, and this is why the western Balkans are so ripe for Russian meddling, which is what declining empires do in order to throw their weight around.

A Russian attempt to further undermine the already weak state of Moldova could also ignite a few irredentist voices in Romania, who may ultimately want a union with this largely Romanian-speaking territory formerly known as Bessarabia. In Moldova, there is already measurable support for a greater Romania. At the same time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is fixated on the massive loss of territory in all directions inflicted on the Kingdom of Hungary by the post-First World War Treaty of Trianon. The greater Balkans remain a tinder box because of the ugly combination of official borders that don’t coincide with ethnic ones and economies that in many places have not enjoyed the stabilising effects of middle-class life.

The Russians have historically been a major player in the Balkans, and Putin is broadly backing Serbian irredentist claims across the region — in Kosovo and Bosnia — even as Belgrade tries to stay in the West’s good graces. Whereas Putin lacked the economic and military capability to protect the 120,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, threatened by an oil-rich Azerbaijan, it costs him little to stoke petty violence in the western Balkans as a way to keep the region on the boil and out of the arms of the European Union.

More from this author

Will America share Rome's fate?

By Robert D. Kaplan

While the greater Balkans remain fragile, and therefore susceptible to Russian mischief borne of bitterness, Russia itself, as it continues to be militarily and economically preoccupied with Ukraine, could be weakened in its Siberian and Far Eastern back-of-beyonds. This is where republics such as Buryatia and Tuva which have provided troops for the Ukraine war — who have died in proportionally much greater numbers than ethnic Russians from places such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg — could experience breakaway tendencies. Remember: we are dealing with a vast swath of the map that fundamentally lacks the social and political stability of the West and has been relatively stable only on account of an imperial straitjacket.

Disorder might not just spring up from local strongmen pursuing their narrow goals in upending longstanding imperial ethnic understandings. Russia itself may be tempted to overturn things. There is an assumption that the current battlefield stalemate inherently favours Moscow. But even if it does, it continues to drain resources from the Kremlin, making the system over time more militaristic and brittle. And history, from ancient Assyria to Prussia, has been clear that militarism signals the eventual demise of imperial rule.

In other words, an age of imperial decline is upon us. And while an era of new-found freedoms for all the peoples of the former Soviet empire may lie somewhere in the future, for the moment we are facing the greatest threat to world order since 1945. The First World War gave the 20th century its monstrous and tragic direction precisely because it went on for four long years, killing close to 20 million people. Had it ended in 1915 or 1916, Corporal Hitler would not have won his Iron Cross First Class (as he did in 1918) and the Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires might not have collapsed as they did, leaving a vast and unstable void that Hitler, the war hero, was able to ultimately fill. Every month that the Ukraine War drags on, and however well Russia appears to be surviving the war, the potential for unintended consequences grows. The only thing more frightening than a Putinesque Russia is a slowly crumbling Russia with its nuclear arsenal intact.

We are truly living in times that defy simple analysis. We have to be able to imagine the unimaginable. Who could have conceived of nearly two years of trench warfare in Ukraine before it actually happened? Russia’s brutal invasion, replete with vast human rights violations, was met by a Ukrainian populace clearly unwilling to bow down before their former imperial masters. This left the United States with little choice but to come to their aid. After all, the United States may not conceive of itself as an empire, but since 1945 it has been in an imperial-like situation, given its global power.

Suggested reading

Will Britain lose World War Three?

By Aris Roussinos

Yet the Ukraine War, by forcing Russia to lean increasingly on China for support, has fused the conflict zones of Europe and Asia, so that there is now a single Eurasian battleground in a more claustrophobic and crowded world. For its part, China, another former empire, is facing a historic economic crisis that could at some future moment ignite a social crisis, even as Xi Jinping’s regime distracts its population by stoking imperial grievances over its determination to capture Taiwan.

For all the similarities it might have to an empire, the United States certainly cannot ultimately provide order in former imperial hinterlands. It lacks the geographical proximity and the instinctive cultural-historical knowledge to do so. And as the last few decades have bitterly shown, “liberal democracy” is not something that can be quickly and effortlessly implemented in troubled, unstable regions. At best, it’s a rough blueprint for decades of peacetime nation-building.

As a result, US policy needs to be delicately balanced. The US military and economic support of Ukraine must ultimately find a way to continue, whatever Congress does. Completely abandoning Ukraine to Russia would only further whet Russia’s imperial ambitions, even as the material basis for its empire’s continued existence continues to degrade.

At the same time, however, we should not want the war to grind on indefinitely. We should aim to leave Russia chastened but not collapsed, since that would lead to second- and third-order effects from Europe to China even more serious than those I have just laid out. Indeed, we face no choice but to manage the interlocking wars and crises afflicting the Eurasian land mass — for, ultimately, they can’t be fixed.

Japanophiles had it tough back then. Tell someone you’re a Francophile, and they’d assume you liked the food, the literature, or had a favourite holiday spot. An Anglophile might stand in cultured awe of Shakespeare, or indulge a misty-eyed reverence for Churchill. By contrast, the “phile” in Japanophile — linked with an assumed attraction to cutesy, submissive femininity within Japanese pop culture — suggested something unhealthy, even unnerving; the need, possibly, to be on a register of some sort.

Since then, however, Western appreciation for Japan has blossomed. Netflix has ramped-up its Japanese offerings, while ever more shelf-space in bookshops and supermarkets is given over to the fantasy worlds of My Hero Academia and One Piece, slightly disappointing sushi, and ingredients marketed with faux-Japanese fonts and logos. This Christmas, white-bearded octogenarian Hayao Miyazaki will gift us his final film on Boxing Day: The Boy and the Heron. It caps a career that has helped to define “Japan” in the West: from ancient, spirit-filled forests to presentations of ordinary urban life in which the transcendent seems always about to break through.

Today, Japan seems more firmly entrenched than ever as a cultural superpower: up there with Italy, France and the United States. And yet something of that old suspicion remains. Express too strong an interest in Japanese culture — and in anime and manga especially — and you risk the accusation of being a “weeb”. The origins of the term lie with the 4chan online imageboard in the early 2000s, where Japan-obsessed white Westerners were derided as “wapanese” — a portmanteau of “wannabe Japanese” or “white Japanese”. Things got heated, and 4chan moderators replaced “wapanese” with the word “weeaboo”, from which “weeb” derives.

More from this author

How to rewild Christianity

By Christopher Harding

Twenty years on, however, there are signs online that the word “weeb” is at last being claimed, with gentle irony, by lovers of Japan across the board. And it’s about time. Extreme anime fans who adopt the clothes and mannerisms of their favourite characters, or give themselves made-up Japanese names, are undoubtedly a bit weird. But high-culture purists can be equally clichéd in their devotion to Japanese art, architecture, martial arts or the good old tea ceremony. And they have more in common with the lowly weebs than they’d care to admit: all are heirs to a history of Western fantasy and longing.

You have to go back nearly 500 years to meet the first weebs. Jesuit missionaries struggled to be taken seriously as bringers of profound metaphysical revelations when Japanese feudal lords saw that they kept livestock in their homes, turned up for meetings in shabby religious attire, lacked various social graces, and rarely seemed to wash. It was under the tutelage of such critics that the Jesuits learned to use chopsticks, take small bites, speak Japanese, appreciate (and indeed perform) the tea ceremony, and dress in a Japanese variant on the traditional Jesuit cassock and cloak.

The Portuguese missionary Luis Fróis was among the greatest of this generation, befriending the legendary warlord Oda Nobunaga and pioneering some of the first cultural comparisons with the West. “In Europe,” he wrote in 1585, “baring even one’s foot before a fire to get warm would be considered strange; in Japan, anyone standing before the fire to get warm unabashedly bares his entire backside…”

In the early 1600s, the Tokugawa shoguns banned all Europeans save the Dutch from trading in Japan in a feat of early-modern border control which Westerners rather conceitedly interpreted as “seclusion” — Japan in fact continued to trade with its nearer neighbours. Being cut off added enormously to the romance of the place, and the first generation to step across a newly reopened Japanese threshold in the 1850s was determined to make the most of it.

Suggested reading

How the Moonies took over Japan

By Philip Patrick

Barriers of language and culture enhanced Japan’s exotic appeal. Visiting in the 1870s, the travel writer Isabella Bird commended Japan to her readers as offering “as much novelty perhaps as an excursion to another planet”. The British designer Christopher Dresser was meanwhile perplexed to find the otherwise “genial” and “loving” Japanese indulging the “barbaric cruelty” of slicing a live fish into quivering, edible chunks — a form of cuisine known as ikizukuri. And Irish-Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first people to be called a “Japanophile”, described his adopted home of Japan as “a world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings… the realisation, for imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a World of Elves”.

Yet there was a strong sense, too, that the West was polluting Japanese culture. When the British ornithologist and plant collector Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram first visited Japan in the early 1900s, the country appeared Eden-like in its lack of “smoke-begrimed cities” and the cynicism they bred. A few years later, he declared it to be suffering a “violent aesthetic indigestion”, born of taking in too much, too quickly. Plenty of visitors who followed in his footsteps ended up equally disappointed, travelling thousands of miles in search of a pure, pastoral romance long-since lost back home, only to find a far-Eastern Britain under construction.

The desire to catch up with the West, industrially and militarily, seemed to have resulted in purpose crowding out meaning. Children passed through schools having factory or office skills bolted on. Music lessons were motivational: brass bands and singing in unison — the more whimsical Japanese flute and shamisen were deemed shamefully uncivilised. Clocks were everywhere. The Emperor’s personal tutor spoke for a great many Japanese conservatives when he worried about adopting too much from “foreign civilisations [whose] only values are fact-gathering and technique”.

Indeed, Westerners whose love of Japan was premised on its vaunted depth and purity were not short of allies among the Japanese. They included Okakura Kakuzō, author — in English, for such was his target audience — of The Ideals of the East (1903). He claimed that modern Japan was uniquely placed to steward the “Asiatic soul” and replenish its desiccated Western counterpart. Similar ideas were put forward by Japanese advocates of Zen, and Buddhism more broadly. Some even went on lecture tours of America and Europe, marrying critiques of modern Western life with classes on how to meditate.

This sort of thing annoyed some Japanese commentators. While they were pleased to see their country garnering respect abroad, they worried that a reputation for kindliness and passivity risked holding it back. The Indian poet and friend of Okakura, Rabindranath Tagore, visited Japan on a speaking tour during the First World War and lauded a “culture that enjoins man to look for his true wealth and power in his inner soul”. One Japanese critic in the audience pointed out that Japan had lately done rather well out of wealth of the economic sort, and power of the kind that went “bang” — just ask the Russians, defeated by Japan’s modern armed forces in 1905. Another dismissed Tagore’s message as “the song of a ruined country”.

Suggested reading

The colonial hypocrisy of Japan

By Eri Hotta

On that same tour, Tagore warned his hosts about succumbing to the temptations of European-style nationalism. Heading down that very path in the mid-20th century, Japan suddenly found itself short on Western admirers. When eventually they returned, it was for much the same reasons: Japan as a place of stillness, spaciousness and quiet. Dignified longing was offered up in the films of Yasujiro Ōzu (Tokyo Story, 1953) and the novels of Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel Prize laureate for literature. And Japanese cultural diplomacy steered artfully clear of the country’s recent history, leaning heavily instead on peaceful, timeless art-forms: ikebana (flower-arranging), the tea ceremony, calligraphy, sushi.

Japan’s radical art of the Sixties and Seventies — from painting to performance — struggled to find a mass audience in the West, perhaps because it was too familiar in its forms and political concerns. Instead, manga and anime became the first elements of non-traditional Japanese culture to travel westward, pioneered by artists who had lived through the war or its immediate aftermath, who sought to show Japanese children just how compromised and corrupt the adult world could be. Osamu Tezuka (“godfather of manga”) was part of that group, as were Hayao Miyazaki and Yanase Takashi — the latter not well-known in the West, but adored in Japan for his children’s superhero Anpanman. Japan’s centuries-old tradition of visual satire and storytelling — myths, ghosts, jokey takes on everyday life (one of Japan’s oldest surviving cartoons depicts a fart battle) — was reworked to create fantastical characters and worlds, in which childlike innocence was shown capable of winning out over darker forces.

Japan’s political leaders slowly cottoned on to the potential of enhancing Japan’s reputation abroad while providing a counterbalance to American cultural imports. Talk emerged in the early 2000s of “cool Japan”, and politicians began taking awkward photos alongside anime characters like Doraemon. Western critics pointed out the disparity between the fun, vibrant and ultra-modern on-screen fare and Japan’s creaky political situation, under which the economy sputtered and women struggled to be taken seriously in the workforce. Was there not something a little wrong, they wondered, with filling the pockets of Japanese culture industries whose job seemed to be to supply just enough comfort and creativity to keep moral or political despair at bay?

Suggested reading

Are you a fictosexual?

By Katherine Dee

A defence of weebery may be exactly what we need, as it looks like it will be a major ally of Britain for years to come. At its best, anime shows us how people in different parts of Japanese society imagine and understand themselves. Cultural diplomacy may even be easing Japan’s relationships with its East Asian neighbours, balancing out the strong anti-Japanese sentiment in education systems and political discourse. It is perfectly possible to love My Neighbour Totoro and hold unforgiving views of Japanese colonialism and war-making in the 20th century. But surveys suggest that Japanese pop culture, combined with tourism, is encouraging young Chinese and Koreans to think about Japan primarily in terms of quality entertainment (more relatable than American fare, given shared cultural roots), tasty food, politeness, convenience and good shopping. Far more Chinese can name a Japanese pop-culture classic than the other way around. If dishing out Belt and Road money turns out to be a flop, China’s leaders may find themselves desperate for the Chinese equivalent of a weeb debate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once warned, with Western fans of Indian culture in mind, that “every man has a fairy-land just beyond the compass of his horizon”. But to wonder whether life might be better elsewhere is surely to wonder whether life could be better, full-stop. Whatever your views on weebery, that is surely the sort of wondering with which we ought never to lose touch.

It is not entirely for want of international pressure. In the spring of 2019, for instance, a new design for a 10,000-yen note featuring a portrait of Japan’s pioneering industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was announced, provoking a harsh reaction from South Korea — where Shibusawa’s portrait had been briefly used on the currency imposed by Japanese colonial rulers. The nation’s objections were duly reported in Japan, yet little public debate followed. The banknote will be released, as originally planned, in 2024.

This response echoes the better-known controversy over “comfort women”,  a euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Chinese and Korean women forced to become sex slaves to Japan’s imperial army during the Second World War. Japan’s apparent resistance to engaging fully and sincerely with these historic crimes  has inspired much international criticism, including demonstrations outside Japanese embassies in Seoul and Manila.

To understand why Japan is so guarded about its empire, it is necessary to understand how exactly that empire came about. After all, the nation had only narrowly escaped being colonised itself in the mid-19th century, when the industrialised Western powers set their sights on Asian territories. In the 20th, as the first and only non-Western country playing the game of great power politics, Japan tried to adopt the role of the anti-colonial colonialist, predestined to liberate other Asians from Western imperialism and to lead them on the road to progress. Japan’s stated aim was to create “an Asia for Asians”, a slogan it used to justify its own aggressive invasions. China had to be freed from the Western-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek; Malaya and Burma from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French; the Philippines from the Americans. According to this view, Japan’s imperialism was not self-interested — and acted in opposition to Western colonialism.

Race was at the heart of Japan’s Pan-Asianism. Writing in late 1918, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who would later become prime minister, urged Japan to “reject the Anglo-American Peace” to be proposed at Versailles. Shortly after attending the conference, he wrote: “That the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor coloured people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black people.” And his suspicions were arguably vindicated when Japanese delegates tried to have a clause in favour of racial equality included in the League’s charter — and failed.

More from this author

The drawbacks of Japan's cult of peace

By Eri Hotta

After the worldwide depression, as the Great Powers became inward-looking — putting up protectionist trade barriers and, in some cases, introducing laws against Asian immigration — Japan’s rhetoric became focused on economic security. The nation insisted that each of its expansionist steps was part of a grand project — to build a “New East Asia Order” or the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The official goal of Japan’s war with the West was declared, in late 1941, to be the establishment of Asian “stability”. Just as the Japanese were taught to believe in their emperor’s divinity, they were also taught that their nation had a sacred mission in Asia — especially in colonial South-East Asia, where the dissatisfaction in European colonies justified Japan’s involvement, for some. For others, it had the opposite effect: in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew, who was then Singapore’s Prime Minister, identified Japan’s military occupation from early 1942 as a wake-up call. Japanese occupation made his generation of young people “determined that no one — neither the Japanese nor the British — had the right to push and kick us around”.

To this day, the belief that ousting the predatory West from Japan’s backyard was morally legitimate persists. In the Nineties, one best-selling manga by the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, claiming to be a “philosophical comic book”, painted Japanese imperialism in a shamelessly self-glorifying light. The Japanese army, it argued, “bravely fought the white imperialists, who arrogantly regarded coloured peoples as lowly primates”. More recently, the hawkish former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s success was partly down to his effective deployment of neo-nationalist rhetoric, which has remained present since his death.

But whatever the present-day Japanese would like to believe, in practice Japanese occupiers used anti-colonial rhetoric while behaving very much like colonial masters themselves. This led the historian Grant Goodman to observe in 1991 that Japan “out-colonialed” Westerners in terms of brutality and exploitation. In reality, it would be misguided to dismiss Japan’s “Asia for Asians” claim as purely disingenuous, a post facto excuse for its aggressive expansionism. The philosophical underpinnings for it preceded Japan’s empire.

In the late-19th century, Asian intellectuals — often writing in English — sought to reject the colonial view of Asia as an entity that was racially inferior. The Japanese art historian Tenshin Okakura, an associate of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, emerged as one of the most influential Pan-Asianist voices. Despite its comparative material and military weakness, Okakura asserted, Asia was a civilisation par excellence. In the preamble of The Ideals of the East, he wrote:

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal.”

And yet, Japan’s quest to reach the status of the white nations that ruled the world was conducted not in spiritual terms but old-fashioned military ones. With Japan’s victory in the war against Tsarist Russia in 1905, it became the first non-white power to defeat a white one in a modern war. Unsurprisingly, this stoked anti-colonial sentiments beyond the Japanese archipelago. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1939, recalled the excitement he felt as a boy: “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm … Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.”

A string of anti-colonialists started to seek refuge in Japan — including Indo-Chinese nationalists Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, Indian independence fighter Rash Behari Bose, and, most famously, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism. Many of them were morally and financially supported by Japan’s Pan-Asianists. The movie studio tycoon Umeya Shokichi, for example, drew on his fortune to help finance Sun’s nationalist movement, as did Torazo Miyazaki, a philosopher who actively collaborated with the Chinese nationalists by volunteering to be their publicist and supplier of arms, and even a combatant.

Suggested reading

Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

Meanwhile, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Japanese literature, the novelist Masuji Ibuse, worked in Malaya and Singapore, writing editorials for the local newspaper. He emphasised the importance of propagating the Japanese language. In February 1942, he wrote, ironically in English:

“The substitution of Nipponese (Japanese) for English as the lingua franca in Malaya is but the natural recognition of a nation which has stood up for things Asia [sic] and which is now in the process of saving Asians from continuing to be the victims of the British strategy to squeeze the wealth and culture of Asians.”

Ibuse was convinced that learning Japanese would elevate other Asians. To him, and many others, Asia was not only one, as Okakura had proclaimed; rather, “Asia was Japan”.

Despite Japan’s utter defeat in the Second World War, this narcissistic self-image persisted. That the emperor was never held responsible for Japan’s imperialism did much to hinder the development of an honest debate: his throne was spared by General Douglas MacArthur out of fear of Japanese rebellion, which would have stifled efforts to rebuild post-war Japan as a fortress against communism. A lingering reverence for the imperial institution has also made Japanese colonialism something of a sensitive — if not a taboo — subject in post-war Japan. The emperor, moreover, has become a symbol of peace in a nation that now hasn’t seen war for a lifetime.

All this partly explains why the West’s post-colonial reckoning has so far elicited no discernible reaction in Japan. There is always a slight time lag before Japan absorbs any social and intellectual movements coming from the outside world. Advocacy for LGBTQ rights, for instance, took some years for college students to embrace. Yet there is a bigger reason why Japan has not reckoned with its colonial past. Whereas in Britain the ideologies used to justify colonialism, including Social Darwinism, have been thoroughly debunked, the imperial Japanese claim that Asia had to be liberated from the West is, in theory, morally unobjectionable. None of this excuses the atrocities committed by Japan in practice. And while most Japanese today are indifferent to the topic of the empire, it’s still a subject that gets conservatives riled up. They stick to the classic narrative of Asian solidarity, in which Japan stood up to the imperial bullies, instead of emulating them.

It is a story that stars Radhaninod Pal, an Indian judge beloved by the Japanese Right. Sitting on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, he became famous for arguing that all the Japanese defendants, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, should be acquitted. He insisted that Japan’s crimes were hardly unprecedented, that one only had to look at Western imperialism to find equal brutality. He also pointed to America’s nuclear bombings as war crimes, and accused the victorious powers of moral relativism and racial prejudice. Because of such statements, Pal is to this day memorialised in Japan as a brave nationalist who sided with an Asian ally in the face of Western arrogance.

Japan’s pose as the anti-colonial colonialist will persist so long as it continues to think of itself as having fought a selfless, civilisational war for the good of Asia. All the while, an uncomfortable truth will remain ignored: that, in its execution of the Pan-Asianist dream, Japan fell far too short of delivering its grand promises.

One of the handful of democratic states that still carries out the death penalty — a club that also includes the US and Japan — Singapore executed 11 people last year, making it one of the 10 most prolific judicial executioners in the world. The dawn hangings were put on hold during the pandemic, but the state is now catching up on its backlog, with three carried out in recent weeks, including the first execution of a woman in almost 20 years. Saridewi Binte Djamani, a 45-year-old Singaporean, was put to death last month, having been found guilty in 2018 of possessing “not less than 30.72 grams” of heroin.

The death penalty, mandatory for a range of offences since 1975, has long been held up as a sign that this prosperous island has a dark side. Less commented upon are the disparities it magnifies, which call into question one of the country’s most cherished central claims — that it is a meritocracy, with advancement open to anyone, regardless of their background.

Singapore is a multi-racial blend: ethnic Chinese make up around three-quarters of the population and dominate the highest positions in politics and business. Malays are the next largest ethnic group, while Indians are the third. While all racial groups have benefited from Singapore’s soaring economic growth since independence, Malays have lagged behind; Malay households have the lowest income, on average, of the three ethnic groups. Last year, a group of UN experts expressed concern that a “disproportionate number” of those being sentenced to death for drug offences came from racial minorities and poorer backgrounds. Between 2015 and 2020, 44 people were sentenced to death in Singapore for drug offences. Of those, four were Chinese, three were Indian and 37 were Malay. All three of those executed in the last few weeks were Malay.

Suggested reading

Singapore-on-Thames? Yes please!

By Peter Franklin

But not all drug dealers are equal in the eyes of the city-state. Lo Hsing Han, one of Myanmar’s richest men and, according to the US government, “one of the world’s key heroin traffickers” had strong financial ties with Singapore until his death in 2013. His daughter-in-law owned 10 companies there, all of which were sanctioned by the US in 2008. The US government also found that Lo’s conglomerate, Asia World, provided “critical support” to Myanmar’s military junta. According to Lo’s obituary in The Economist, by 1998, more than half of Singapore’s investments in Myanmar were made with Asia World.

Singapore is now a democracy, but one with an unusual compact between state and people. After independence in 1965, in the space of a few decades, its founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and his successors transformed Singapore from a colonial port into a global manufacturing hub and financial centre. It is a comfortable place to live, with low unemployment, high-quality state-built housing, an exceptional public-education system and one of the world’s highest life expectancies, at 83 years. There is a fairly high degree of personal freedom, though political debate is tightly circumscribed. Singaporeans are, in general, content to accept this bargain, raising few questions about the way things are run.

For those who do, the consequences can be harsh. There is little space for protest. A few years ago, an activist named Jolovan Wham was charged with illegal protest after standing outside a police station holding a cardboard sign with a smiley face drawn on it. Ministers take an unusually prickly view of critics, with a history of successfully suing bloggers, foreign media and political opponents for defamation. While elections are free and fair, the press is largely fettered — nowadays, by self-censorship in newsrooms. There is limited scope for campaigning that challenges the government.

Nevertheless, Singapore has always had plenty of foreign admirers, among them Donald Trump. At his 2024 campaign launch at Mar-a-Lago last year, Trump called for drug traffickers to be executed and said the US should look to Singapore. “Singapore has no drug problem. They don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said. It’s fair to say that drug misuse is small-scale; last year, Singapore, a country of 5.6 million, arrested 2,800 people for drug abuse.

The government says there is overwhelming public support for maintaining the death penalty, citing surveys that find around three-quarters of those polled support capital punishment for the most serious crimes. But that consensus might be fraying. In April last year, around 300 people attended a candlelight vigil for Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a 33-year-old Malaysian man convicted of trafficking 43 grams of heroin, a few tablespoons of the drug that were found strapped to his thigh when he entered Singapore. His lawyers had argued he had a learning disability and had been coerced into carrying the package.

The vigil for Nagaenthran took place in Hong Lim Park, a small patch of greenery on the edge of Singapore’s financial district, and the only place in the country where citizens are allowed to protest without a police permit. His family was not allowed to attend, as foreign nationals are barred from joining such demonstrations. He was executed two days later.

Nagaenthran’s case attracted international attention, with Richard Branson among those deploring the execution and describing him as a victim both of drug cartels and a “justice system that so consistently seems to fail minorities”. A few months after the hanging, Luke Levy, a National University of Singapore student, walked on stage for his graduation ceremony and pulled out a piece of A4 from his gown pocket with a message protesting “state murder”. Levy was edited out of the video of the event (his university said the ceremony was “not a forum for advocacy”). He is not alone, though. Earlier this month, graffiti against the death penalty — featuring a syringe and a hanged man grasping a dollar sign — appeared in an underpass outside a metro station, a bold act in a country where graffiti can be punishable with up to three years in prison and corporal punishment, delivered with a rattan cane.

Suggested reading

The Left is wrong on capital punishment

By Benjamin Teitelbaum

Kirsten Han, 34, a journalist and activist, tells me that, growing up in Singapore, she was happy to accept the view that the death penalty was necessary for public safety: “I had the impression that the people on death row would be those running drug syndicates and making huge profits, and that it would be possible to eliminate the trade through punishment.” She is now a prominent voice against capital punishment. It was volunteering at The Online Citizen, an independent news site, that brought about her epiphany: “It was my first opportunity to read up about the law, meet the family members of people on death row, and get to know the lawyers and activists working on this issue.” Han says, as a Singaporean, campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty has involved “a lot of unlearning”.

In the face of criticism, Singapore’s politicians tend to be thin-skinned. Lee Kuan Yew — who died in 2015 — had studied law at Cambridge before being called to the Bar in 1950, and frequently addressed his political opponents with a truculent barrister’s courtroom swagger. “Human rights?” he once asked. “Are they bankable?” This tradition of verbal sparring has been taken up by K. Shanmugam, another lawyer, who is the long-serving Minister for Home Affairs. He recently swatted down opponents of the death penalty as “narco liberals”.

Lee liked to argue that Confucian traditions imbued Singaporeans with a strong allegiance to the group and a reverence for scholarly leaders. It was a rewriting of Singapore’s turbulent history, which included violent labour disputes when the country was breaking away from colonial rule. But it allowed him to present a convenient narrative that challenged what he called “the unlimited individualism of the Americans”.

More recently, in response to a question about press freedom, prominent Singaporean statesman Tharman Shanmugaratnam said there were other kinds of liberty: “You aspire to the liberty of living in a city that is not defined by its most disorderly elements,” he said. Yet its reluctance to budge on capital punishment has made it something of an outlier in the region. Thailand has scrapped the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, Malaysia is observing a moratorium on all executions, and penal reforms in Indonesia have created the possibility of commuting death sentences after 10 years if a prisoner maintains good conduct.

Suggested reading

'Tough on crime' won't rescue the Tories

By Chris Clarke

Such shifts make it harder to defend an absolute position as an exemplar of stern “Asian values”. But there are signs that moderation is creeping into Singapore’s dispensation of justice. Last year, a drug courier’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Court of Appeal, after judges found that his depression and substance use had combined to impair his mental responsibility.

But Singapore doesn’t have much incentive to make changes. In the face of current geopolitical tensions, it is unusually well-placed to prosper. Hong Kong, its old rival as Asia’s main business hub, is now firmly in Beijing’s authoritarian grip. This makes Singapore one of the few places on the continent that can steer a line between the world’s two superpowers: it has a defence partnership with the US, but close economic ties with China. It’s a place where both Western and Chinese businesses are comfortable setting up regional HQs — like Vienna in the Cold War, but with better noodles. One consequence of this is that Singapore is fairly impervious to external criticism, its rulers more comfortable than ever in defining liberty according to their own measures. And even if Singaporeans have been increasingly assertive in recent years, wanting more of a say in how their country is run, for most citizens, the death penalty infringes little on their personal liberty.

And yet, there may be a push for greater latitude on recreational drugs from Singaporeans, who have observed the relaxing of laws in the West. Singapore’s present and future success is bound up with white-collar jobs in finance, coding and hi-tech manufacturing that require education and a degree of independent thinking. A population that’s encouraged to use their initiative at work is less likely to accept a strictly “just say no” position from their government.

Change might also come from the top. When it comes to the sin businesses, there’s a precedent for shifting official attitudes, especially when there are dollars to be generated. Gambling was once frowned upon, feared for its potential to corrode the nation’s work ethic. But the government changed its mind, ostensibly to boost tourism. If arguments based on the freedom to choose don’t wash, the economic imperative could drive Singapore to loosen up on cannabis at least. The country is unlikely to let go of the death penalty, in part because it is a marker of Singapore’s identity — more ruthless than those soft Europeans. But if laws for some drugs are relaxed, there may be fewer occasions when it needs to be imposed.

Several experts have tried to answer this question — many of whom are featured in a new three-part Netflix documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. According to the official narrative, outlined by Malaysian and Western authorities, around 40 minutes after take-off, 90 miles off the east coast of Malaysia, someone on the plane — most likely the captain — turned off its electronic communication signals, causing it to disappear from Air Traffic Control (ATC) radars. The plane, they say, then made a U-turn, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, veered north up the Malacca Strait, rounded the Indonesian island of Sumatra, eventually turned south and then flew in a straight path for around six hours — at which point it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. If this is really what happened, we are talking about one of the slowest, most bizarre mass murder-suicides in history.

There are, however, several problems with this narrative, as the French journalist Florence de Changy, who has been covering the Asia-Pacific for the past 30 years for Le Monde and RFI, explains in the documentary, and in much greater detail in her 2021 book The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, the result of a seven-year investigation.

The official account hinges on two pieces of evidence: Malaysian military radar data, which tracked the plane deviating westward, and analysis of the automatic communication “pings” between the aircraft and a satellite operated by a British company called Inmarsat, which provides satellite communication services to a wide range of private and institutional clients, including the US government and military. Inmarsat concluded that the plane subsequently flew south until around the time of its last ping (though it couldn’t provide the exact location of the last communication, because the data didn’t have GPS-tracking capabilities).

Both pieces of evidence, however, have been called into question. Firstly, as the Malaysian authorities’ final investigation report acknowledged, the data behind its military radar sighting is inconsistent with the capability of a B777 in terms of speed, altitude and height variations. Moreover, the radar images supposedly showing MH370 flying back over Malaysia were never made public. Likewise, none of the countries that MH370 is claimed to have flown over or close to — Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Australia — have provided radar evidence of the plane in their airspace. As de Changy writes: “Not a single raw radar image has been shown to support the route taken by MH370 according to the official version” (this piece of information was missing in the documentary).

One may also ask why the Malaysian military didn’t scramble jets at the sight of a rogue plane flying over national airspace, especially considering that MH370 is said to have passed right over the Butterworth Air Force Base in Penang, the headquarters for the Integrated Air Defence system of the Five Power Defence Agreement (FPDA), which includes the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. There was also a massive presence of the US Seventh Fleet — which is based in Japan and has 50-70 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 sailors — in the region at the time of the plane’s disappearance. According to a senior member of the intelligence services de Changy spoke to, there were two US “AWACS” in the area that night: planes mounted with long-range radar systems capable of constantly monitoring the airspace within a radius of more than 250 miles. Yet the Americans weren’t able to provide any evidence of the plane’s alleged U-turn either.

Suggested reading

Conspiracies are the price of freedom

By Terry Eagleton

There’s another problem with the “deliberate act” narrative. As de Changy notes, if someone had turned off the transponder, all flight data related to MH370 would have disappeared from ATC screens at the same time. But it took 37 seconds for it all to go dark. “This sequence of events in itself should have been sufficient to dismiss the ‘someone turned off the transponder’ part of the official narrative,” she writes (this was also missing in the documentary).

As for Inmarsat’s satellites, their data also appears to raise more questions than it answers. When, two weeks after the disappearance, the company concluded that the MH370 had turned south and crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the world was expected to just take their word for it — even though Inmarsat’s findings were based on a complex analysis of ping data which had never been attempted before. In fact, right from the start, experts and family members raised doubts about the reliability of the ping-based calculations and asked the company to provide the raw data for independent analysis. For three months, Inmarsat refused, and when they finally did release some of it, several critical details necessary to understand how they did their calculations were missing. Since then, Inmarsat has refused to share its complete set of data with the families and the media.

But the biggest hole in Inmarsat’s story is also the most obvious: the fact that, despite the world’s largest search in history, covering almost two million square miles in the southern Indian Ocean, no remains of the plane have been found in the supposed crash area near Australia — despite the fact that, when a plane crashes into the sea, there is almost always debris. The only debris considered by investigators “almost certainly” or “highly likely” to be linked to MH370 has been discovered around the coast of Africa, thousands of miles away.

Finally, it remains unclear why the plane’s captain — the prime suspect in the “deliberate act” narrative — would have committed such a horrendous act. Over the years, the Western press has questioned Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s mental health, political orientation and even his sexual preferences — all in an attempt to paint him as someone potentially capable of such a crime. However, from extensive interviews with his friends and family, and analysis of the police reports about him, de Changy concludes that Zaharie was unlikely to be suffering from mental health issues. “My research convinced me that Zaharie was of sound mind and a genuinely good man,” she told me last week. “He was also one of the airline’s most experienced pilots.”

More from this author

Questions the Covid Inquiry must ask

By Thomas Fazi

Amid such uncertainty, it’s no wonder that MH370 has become the subject of all sorts of conspiratorial conjecture, involving black holes, insurance scams, North Korea, a meteorite, remote hijacking and even aliens. Most of these theories are so outlandish that they have tended to make all non-official explanations for the disappearance of MH370 seem crazy by association. The Netflix documentary suffers from the same contamination. After covering the official theory in the first episode, the series then explores two alternatives. The first is presented by American journalist and aviation expert Jeff Wise, who suggested in 2015 that a group of Russian hijackers — there were three ethnic Russians on the flight (two held Ukrainian passports) — could have lowered themselves into the plane’s electronics bay and taken control of the aircraft in order to divert it north, possibly to Kazakhstan, while somehow altering the Inmarsat data so it looked like the plane had gone south.

It is such an absurd theory — as Wise himself acknowledges in the documentary — that one cannot help but wonder why the decision was made to dedicate an entire episode to it. It also has the effect of casting its tinfoil hat-shaped shadow over the second alternative theory proposed by Florence de Changy in the third and final episode. She suggests that MH370 didn’t disappear from the screens of ATC  because someone turned off its transponder, but because the plane’s communications system was jammed — possibly by the two US AWACS planes mentioned by the aforementioned intelligence source. De Changy suggests the aim might have been to force the plane to land in order to seize a highly sensitive cargo which the US didn’t want to fall into Chinese hands (she points to a 2.5-ton consignment that was delivered to the airport under escort and was not X-rayed). However, something went wrong and MH370 met its fate somewhere above the South China Sea, possibly as a result of a mid-air collision or a missile strike.

It’s obviously a highly controversial claim, but unlike Wise, de Changy at least has some evidence to back it up, most of which isn’t mentioned in the documentary but is presented in her book. In it, she highlights that there was large US military presence in the South China Sea that day; that progressive loss of signal on the ATC screens is consistent with jamming; that MH370 activated the emergency Tango code, which would indicate the pilots knew something abnormal was going on; that another plane that was flying nearby managed to get a radio contact with MH370 at around 1:30am (10 minutes after the plane disappeared from the radar) but it was brief and muddled (also consistent with progressive jamming); and that MH370 was seen on the primary radar (meaning a target is observed but no identification is received) of Vietnam’s ATC 37 miles after the point at which it is supposed to have made the U-turn.

Suggested reading

The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

Most notably, as de Changy notes, there were initial but unverified reports of a distress signal from MH370 being picked up at 2:43am by a US unit based in Thailand. Finally, we have the dozens of “nodders” (people scanning satellite images on Tomnod, a website that used crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images) who insist they saw extensive plane debris in the South China Sea; the oil slicks spotted off the coast of Vietnam; the Cathay Pacific pilots flying the next day above the Vietnam coast who reported sighting a “large amount of debris” to the Hong Kong ATC; and the employee working on a rig off the coast of Vietnam who claimed to have seen a fire the night of the disappearance.

I had initially contacted de Changy to ask what it feels like for a respected journalist to be presented as a fringe conspiracist — the conclusion many will reach after watching the film. “Actually, I started with an anti-conspiracy theory approach,” she explains. “I looked very closely at the evidence backing all the theories and scenarios out there including the official narrative. Eventually, I discovered a cluster of corroborating conclusions that point to something incredibly consistent and that did indeed point towards a massive international conspiracy scenario. It’s for the readers to decide whether it’s credible or not.”

De Changy is aware that her theory is mostly speculative, but remains confident that MH370 met its fate in the South China Sea, not in the Indian Ocean. “It’s still more credible than the idea that the plane flew halfway around the world completely undetected,” she told me. “If you think it’s impossible for a plane to disappear into thin air, that is because it is.”

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.

Suggested reading

Why is the West locking down China?

By Thomas Fazi

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.

Suggested reading

How we appeased China's Zero-Covid regime

By N.S. Lyons

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.

***

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

The Party has weathered the Covid storm, crushed opposition in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and kept the economy afloat. Total recorded Covid deaths were kept to a tiny 15,000 (about the same as Scotland) while GDP growth was boosted to 8% in 2021. All of this was achieved while China sealed itself off from the world.

The Party has not so much learned to live with Covid restrictions as learned to love them. Although it’s now easier to enter the country (visitors must spend only ten days in quarantine rather than the previous 21), all kinds of other measures are still in force. The staging of the Congress this month seems to be one explanation: the Party does not want an embarrassing outbreak or lockdown to mar the political spectacle. But it’s unlikely that restrictions will go once the Congress is done. There seem to be several reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact the Party leadership has found the various Covid control measures to be very useful.

A self-imposed “walling off” is becoming the leitmotif of Xi’s China, with the CCP separating its people from the outside world through the creation of physical, political and economic barriers. The aim is to exclude disease from the national homeland, but also unwanted information, influence and pressure. During the Eighties, the leader who oversaw China’s opening up to the world, Deng Xiaoping, is reputed to have said: “If you open a window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.” Xi is fed up with the flies: he’s closing the windows.

Take the new “Great Fence of China” along the country’s southeastern borders with Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. The barrier is a substantial structure, clearly designed to last well beyond the likely duration of any pandemic. Yunnan province alone is reported to have earmarked $500 million for its construction. It snakes up and down steep hills, dividing mountain communities that long predate the existence of the border and obstructing unofficial cross-border movements of people and goods. More fences have been built, or rebuilt, along parts of the border where more restive minorities live, in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Suggested reading

Is China about to turn on Russia?

By Nathan Levine

While these structures will block the spread of disease as well as subversion, none of this is to say that Xi is turning China into North Korea. The Party leadership knows that China’s prosperity depends upon international trade, that trade depends upon international flows of finance, and that national development requires skills and technologies that can only be acquired by studying or travelling abroad. So, there must be portals through which goods, money and certain people can pass. But at the same time the leadership is trying to secure its position by reducing the ability of foreigners to influence its politics, society or economy.

In the past few years, there has been increased talk of “decoupling” between the US and China and of “deglobalisation” around the world. But the vast majority of the focus has been on American efforts to sanction China. There has been much less attention on China’s efforts to decouple itself. This is partly a result of the United States turning the dollar-based financial system into a tool of foreign policy. Its case against Huawei, for example, was based on the company breaking American laws by trading with Iran and clearing the payments through the New York banks. China’s response has been to try to reduce its dependency on the US financial system.

The Party’s efforts to reduce foreign influence lie behind the restructuring of its entire economy towards what it calls dual circulation. It is trying, in effect, to create two economies: a domestic economic circuit, which is insulated from the rest of the world, and a global circuit that relies on political connections (the Belt and Road Initiative) to open markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The organising principle of both circuits is that they are controlled by the Party, and not subject to international pressure. Pure economic autarky is not possible for a China that depends upon global trade, but dual circulation is an attempt to create as much autarky as possible.

It’s worth remembering that all these efforts towards self-reliance stem from the Party’s need to avoid foreign pressure so that it can continue to oppress dissident voices in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, continue trading with vicious regimes from Myanmar to Iran, and prepare for war over Taiwan. They are, in other words, part of Xi’s decade-long drive to reassert Communist Party domination of all areas of life in China.

Suggested reading

Is this British company arming China?

By George Magnus

This overarching agenda, announced immediately after Xi was appointed General-Secretary of the Communist Party, is ”the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. His vision is of a homogenous mass of people, stretching from Shanghai to Xinjiang, all loyal to his “five identifications”: identifying with the state, the unified Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party and Chinese socialism. As a result, all threats to Party rule, any rival source of leadership, whether it be imams in Xinjiang or student leaders in Hong Kong, must be flattened.

The inward turn is also squeezing out foreigners — though not all of them, of course. The Party is happy to host certain skilled individuals, such as English language teachers and pet bloggers, who amplify its messages about how the Tibetan and Uyghur peoples have benefitted from Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Equally, the few hundred thousand Southeast Asians toiling on its production lines are welcome to stay. But at the levels of business management and control, something significant is happening.

Ker Gibbs, who was President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai from 2019 to 2021, has watched the growing de-foreignerisation of foreign-owned firms in China. To some extent, this reflects the development of a new generation of skilled Chinese managers able to manage complex supply chains. But he also notes that the constant pressure piled on Americans and other foreigners is causing an exodus. “It’s just not fun anymore” he tells me. “The space to operate freely has become more and more narrow.” Gibbs notes the growing authoritarianism of Xi’s China over the past decade was already pushing foreign businesspeople to leave, even before the pandemic. The draconian Covid lockdowns, particularly in Shanghai, were the last straw for many. In a few years’ time, American firms in China may no longer be run by Americans.

The same exodus can be seen in Hong Kong, once the “Gate to China” but increasingly just another Chinese city. Xi’s crackdown on free speech, the Party’s assault on the rule of law, Covid restrictions and the slow but constant “mainlandisation” of the territory are steadily diminishing its attractiveness. Hong Kong is still an “air lock” through which China can access foreign capital, but foreigners are leaving, which is exactly what the Party wants.

More from this author

How Chinese is Taiwan?

By Bill Hayton

At the same time, the Communist Party is pushing foreign enterprises to facilitate the establishment of party cells inside their operations. There will be twin chains of command, with one from head office and another from Beijing. When push comes to shove, head office will be far away, and Beijing will have the guns. Fearing the consequences, some businesses are taking the money and running. In the process, the Chinese economy is becoming insulated from foreign pressure.

At the beginning of 2022, when international concern about human rights abuses in Xinjiang became focused on businesses operating there, two Western companies responded in strikingly different ways. While American-owned Walmart took some products off its shelves and hunkered down, the French supermarket chain Carrefour did the opposite. It launched a “Xinjiang fine foods week” promotion. The reason is simple. Carrefour, once the largest foreign retailer in China, is no longer French. In 2020, it sold 80% of its Chinese business to a local company, Suning International. Chinese capital, and the Communist Party, now controls the business. And as a result, the ability of Western governments to influence the company’s behaviour or pressure China to change its policies in Xinjiang is now minimal.

In China, then, the walls are going up. A country that once headed towards openness is now closing. For all the Chinese leadership’s talk of globalisation, it has chosen to deliberately decouple from the world to ensure the survival of Communist Party control. When Xi is once again anointed on Sunday, he will do so knowing that his decade-long inward turn is finally bearing fruit.

The live fire military drills around Taiwan that China launched in response to Pelosi’s visit — which included the firing of ballistic missiles over the island — were scheduled to end on Sunday. But on Monday morning, this dress-rehearsal of coordinated manoeuvres for a potential future invasion had shown no sign of stopping. China also announced on Friday that it was cancelling high-level military consultative talks with the United States, and suspending cooperation talks on illegal immigrants, narcotics and climate change, among other things.

We can probably expect military matters to cool off in the coming weeks, ahead of the 20th Congress of the CCP in autumn. But for the moment we can be sure of only two things. First, China is bound to take further opportunities to put pressure on Taiwan using both commercial sanctions and military or diplomatic tactics. Second, for the time being, China is likely to avoid anything that might push its own faltering economy into a tailspin.

Any serious escalation of the tension could have grave implications for Beijing. Not only would it limit or cut off China’s access to semiconductors and Western technology, but it could see Chinese firms subject to further sanctions. It could also compromise trade with China’s biggest markets, namely the United States, the EU and developed Asia. China is dependent on the rest of the world for more than 80% of its semiconductor demand, three-fifths of which comes from the US, Japan and the EU. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces almost all of the most advanced varieties.

More from this author

Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

The Chinese economy, meanwhile, is in bad shape. The target for economic growth this year cannot be met, and the property market, which accounts for over a quarter of GDP, is in disarray. Youth unemployment has shot up to 20%, and the labour market is far weaker than official statistics portray. Zero Covid policies, rigorously pursued both for public health and social control purposes, are stifling demand and turning foreign firms away from future investment in China. The nation’s development model is failing, but the government has no plausible strategies to re-energise it — or at least, none that is politically acceptable.

Beyond its borders, China faces the most extreme challenges since Mao, partly due to the imposition of commercial controls, restrictions and sanctions by foreign governments, and partly because of its own policies of disengagement and self-reliance. Its “no limit” friendship with Russia has only made things worse, and its behaviour towards Taiwan could also go awry. China may end up alienating not just the usual suspects — Japan, India and Australia — but also nations that prefer to stay above the fray, such as South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam. They could be drawn further into security alliances championed by the United States — which is exactly what China’s Global Security Initiative is meant to stop.

Given these circumstances, there’s little chance China will stage any form of assault on — or wage all-out war with — Taiwan anytime soon. But that’s not to say it will end the so-called “grey-zone” warfare that began before Pelosi’s visit. China could pressure or occupy any of the 100 islands that belong to Taiwan, especially the populated ones in the Taiwan Strait such as Matsu, Kinmen and Penghu, the first two of which are just 10km off the Chinese coast. It could from time to time warn off air and sea traffic in the form of a quarantine, trying to regulate the inflows and outflows of people and goods. In extremis, it might even try to blockade Taiwan, restricting its access to imported energy (which meets about four-fifths of the island’s demand for energy), LNG (which provides most of Taiwan’s electricity), or even certain foodstuffs and raw materials.

Suggested reading

How Chinese is Taiwan?

By Bill Hayton

The aim would be to force the Taiwanese government to in some way cede autonomy to the CCP. The likelihood of this happening is about nil — and Beijing knows it. Local Taiwanese elections later this year, and national ones in 2024, may further strengthen the country’s backbone and remind Xi Jinping that bullying and coercion are leading China down a blind alley.

At every point, then, China runs the risk of incurring greater economic and political pushback by putting further pressure on Taiwan. As it is, global firms are starting to reconsider their supply chain structures and investments in China, and a deepening Taiwan crisis would create major strategy headaches for foreign firms. No company wants to be caught in the crosshairs of conflicts, sanctions, higher insurance costs and conflicted legal positions. Decoupling, and the rebuilding of global supply chains, are both likely to increase as a result.

For the same reason, China’s desire to de-Americanise its own supply chains, sanction-proof itself, and re-orientate markets towards domestic firms, will likely increase. But following this path would probably take China further away from its quest for higher productivity and undermine the nation’s lofty economic aspirations. Engagement with the global economy was the essential handmaiden of China’s economic eruption; disengagement is likely to reverse that process.

Besides, if China decided to introduce something as severe as a blockade, in an attempt to sap Taiwan’s political will and stifle its economy, it would almost certainly trigger not only sanctions but also resistance. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the United States would consider boycotts and embargoes a threat to both global and domestic peace and security. This doesn’t guarantee American intervention to break the blockade, or tit-for-tat measures, but there is a strong chance that Washington would react — and that other Asian nations would fear for their security.

Suggested reading

Zero Covid has radicalised Shanghai

By Austin Williams

Short of outright invasion, therefore, it does not seem that China could really mount any campaign that would force Taiwan to capitulate. With every move to escalate tension, moreover, Beijing would confront political, commercial and perhaps even low-level military pushback — and significant economic consequences.

But what if circumstances changed? What if Xi went all in, and ordered an assault on the island? Even then, his chances of a successful occupation are slim. Whether China has the military capacity and logistics, now or in the future, is almost beside the point. The issue is whether it has the political will. As we know from Russia, the best laid plans can go awry, and in Taiwan an invading army would meet with spirited local resistance from 23 million people. Suppressing them would make China a pariah state for years, if not decades. The Chinese Dream would become a nightmare.

The CCP has placed huge importance on “reunifying” the renegade province of Taiwan with the mainland, but it would exhaust its political capital by mounting an invasion — successful or not. No one can dismiss the possibility that it might one day happen — especially if domestic pressures caused CCP rule to fray. But the party may well take a leaf out of the Western playbook by kicking this can down a long road, risking unknowable consequences at home.

Think of Taiwan as China’s Ireland. Even the timelines are similar. In the late seventeenth century, just a couple of decades after Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed the Irish Catholic Confederation, the Qing Empire invaded Taiwan, bringing part of it under colonial rule for the first time. Even after its partial annexation in 1684, the Qing treated the island as a dangerous frontier, notable mainly for its wild “aborigines” and deadly diseases.

Some parts of the island were never conquered; upland areas with difficult terrain were left alone, so long as they did not interrupt the peace of the lowlands. The Qing regarded these areas in much the same way as British India regarded its Northwest Frontier: places of savagery in need of management and occasional punitive expeditions.

Taiwan only formally became a distinct province of the Qing Empire in 1887, two years after the end of a war with France, in which control of the island’s ports had become strategically important. The new provincial administration made a display of bringing the benefits of civilisation from the mainland: railways, medicines and taxes. Local reactions were mixed.

The island remained under Qing control for just eight years before it was snatched by Japan at the humiliating end of the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War. The treaty signed in the port city of Shimonoseki granted Japan control of Taiwan “in perpetuity and full sovereignty”. Taiwan became a colony again, this time to a different master. There was some resistance on the island, but it was rapidly snuffed out. Another set of railways, medicines and taxes were introduced.

Within a few years, people on the Chinese mainland forgot the cause of Taiwan. There was no agitation to “restore” the country to mainland control. Even the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen ignored its plight. He used the island as a revolutionary base during his campaign to overthrow the Qing Empire, but did nothing to try to foment anti-Japanese activity there. For the Nationalists, Taiwan had been lost and that was that.

Suggested reading

Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

This loss was then written into the country’s new constitution after the Nationalist Revolution of 1911-12. Article 3 stated simply: “The territory of the Chinese Republic consists of 22 provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Tibet.” The choice of “22” provinces explicitly excluded the former province of Taiwan. This vision of China’s territory, one limited to the mainland, was printed on all the country’s maps throughout the Twenties and Thirties. Taiwan was not part of the country.

This view was also shared by the Communist movement. At its sixth congress in 1928, the Communist Party recognised the “Taiwanese” as a separate nationality. In November 1938 the party plenum resolved to “build an anti-Japanese united front between the Chinese and the Korean, Taiwanese and other peoples”, implicitly drawing a distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese. Both Nationalists and Communists regarded the “Taiwanese” as a distinct minzu — which can mean both “nation” and “ethic group”.

It was only in the middle of the Second World War, once it looked like Japan was going to lose, that the rival Chinese leaderships “rediscovered” Taiwan. From mid-1942 onwards, the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek went to great lengths to redefine Taiwan as truly Chinese and to stretch the “national geobody” to include the island. This was, in large part, motivated by the idea that Taiwan was vital to the defence of the country.

A few months after Japan’s surrender, a nervous group of Chinese officials arrived on the island and began to set up a new administration. But there were many in Taiwan who had no wish to be incorporated into the Republic of China. Some had benefited from the Japanese occupation, some objected to the corruption of the Chinese government, while others were simply hostile towards incomers from the mainland. Protests finally exploded on 28 February 1947 and were met with extreme violence. By the end of March, at least 5,000 Taiwanese (some say 20,000) had been killed by the mainland forces.

These colonial attitudes towards Taiwan are clearly displayed in Chiang Kai-shek’s 1947 book China’s Destiny. There, he writes that “Formosa [meaning Taiwan], the Pescadores [the islands just west of Taiwan], the Four Northeastern Provinces [Manchuria], Inner and Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang [Xinjiang], and Tibet are each a fortress (or strategic area) essential for the nation’s defense and security.” For Chiang, these outlying areas must be attached to China purely to protect the core areas of the ‘motherland’ from foreign attack.

Suggested reading

Will China invade Taiwan?

By Tom Chivers

Ironically for Chiang, Taiwan became a shield that protected him not from foreign attack but from communist control of the motherland. In 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, the Guomindang government fled to the island. Initially this was only intended to be a temporary redoubt, a place to regroup before the recapture of the mainland. The Guomindang continued to present itself to the world as the legitimate government of the Republic of China and occupied China’s seat at the United Nations until 1971.

This fiction obscured the basic fact that Taiwan had only been ruled as part of the mainland for four years, from October 1945 to late 1949. But during this time the Guomindang brought, in effect, yet another colonial administration to the island. The party acted as if it were a Chinese government ruling the entire country including the mainland. With the force of military dictatorship, it imposed Mandarin over the local languages of Hokkien and Hakka and those spoken by the upland peoples. They imposed mainland norms under the banner of Chinese nationalism and attempted to impose a homogenous ‘Chinese’ identity.

The legacy of these impositions, and the resistance towards them, still divides politics in Taiwan today. The ranks of the Guomindang are still largely filled by the descendants of those who came to the island with Chiang Kai-shek. The current ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party, represents that part of the population that resists the idea of mainland control. The family of Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is of Hakka origin, for example. Just like Ireland today, the country’s politics divide over relations with “the mainland”. Even the use of that term raises hackles in Taiwan, just as it can in Ireland.

Over the 77 years since Taiwan was reincorporated into the Republic of China, the political and demographic situation has changed radically. Only a very few diehards believe the “Republic of China” will ever recapture the mainland and “reunite” the motherland under non-communist control. The island is a de facto independent state, albeit one that is not formally recognised as such by any other country. If you visit the British “Representative Office” in Taipei, you’ll discover that it has exactly the same crockery as every British embassy around the world, except that the royal coat of arms is missing from the plates. The UK, just like everyone else, treats Taiwan as an independent government, but doesn’t want to advertise the fact.

Suggested reading

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Tom Chivers

Taiwan’s non-existence has not prevented its businesses from exporting or its people from enjoying a standard of living equivalent to that in the United States, one that is vastly higher than China’s. Its passports (issued in the name of the “Republic of China” in Chinese but ‘Taiwan” in English) grant visa-free access to 145 countries, almost double China’s number. But turning this de facto independence into constitutional reality would, in the eyes of Beijing, be grounds for war.

Most Taiwanese — let’s call them that — enjoy the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. The PRC is Taiwan’s biggest trading partner, many Taiwanese are related to families living on the other side of the water, and in normal times the island benefits from the relatively free flow of people and trade across it. Aside from a few fantasists, no-one in Taiwan wants a war with the PRC, but nor do they want to be “reunified” with an authoritarian state that appears to be on a political journey from “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Xi Jinping learnt his history from the simplistic nationalistic books of his youth: just like Chiang Kai-shek, he is a colonialist. As the people of Tibet and Xinjiang can testify, he has a “steamroller” view of national unity. He orders homogeneity in the name of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. He will not rest until he has ‘restored’ every rock and reef in the South China Sea and barren Himalayan mountainside to the motherland. Taiwan would be the jewel in his proletarian crown.

That was Wodehouse in 1941, from one of his Berlin broadcasts. But pretty much the same has applied 80 years later in Hong Kong, just with fewer Germans. If your goal has ever been to get locked in a room for weeks on end, then Hong Kong has become the place to be. The authorities would lock you up if you had Covid. They’d lock you up if you’d been close to someone who had Covid. At one point, they’d even lock you up if you’d been close to someone who’d been close to someone who had Covid.

You also got locked up just for getting into the country. You paid for the flight and the Hong Kong authorities would do the rest. Actually, that last bit wasn’t quite true: you had to book and pay for your room as well. But you get the point.

Brutal as it was — caring little for minor things like family separation or childcare — this system worked relatively well by its own standards until earlier this year. For extended periods there were no Covid cases at all and overall deaths remained low. But then Omicron broke through, as almost everyone knew it would: ironically, as the result of a cross-infection in a quarantine hotel, something the government had been warned about repeatedly.

There soon became too many cases to make asymptomatic people spend weeks in hospital and there were not enough isolation units to lock up close contacts. By the start of March, the death rate went through the roof, becoming the highest in the world at any point in the pandemic. They couldn’t process the dead quickly enough, with bodies stacked next to the living, in overrun, under-staffed, public hospitals. Hong Kong ran out of coffins as well as smugness. It became the premier place to be if you wanted to die from Covid.

The tragedy was how avoidable all this was. Having broadly succeeded in the initial stages of the pandemic, cutting down local case numbers down zero for months, Hong Kong had an opportunity — almost unique in the world — to transition, with as few deaths as possible, to a sustainable mitigation strategy.

More from this author

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

Its failure not to take that opportunity has now been widely noted — as has its recent announcement that it would begin to relax some of its stricter restrictions. From outside, this has been presented as a pragmatic shift away from its policy of “dynamic zero Covid” to something akin to co-existence. The idea of “living with Covid” was previously verboten here, a sign of Western decadence and a failure to care about the value of human life, so any such shift would be profound.

Yet from within Hong Kong the shift seems less significant and reaction to the policy changes here have been more muted than some of the overseas coverage might suggest.

This is partly because the details are less dramatic than the headlines. Schools were told they could go back to face-to-face teaching, only for the government to then announce that they need to have achieved a 90% vaccination rate among staff and students before they could return to full days, something many will find next to impossible to achieve in what remains of the school year. Some of the more extreme rules remain: mask wearing is compulsory outside, even if exercising, even in remote country parks. There are still stories of the police lurking behind bushes to catch out knackered joggers who have pulled down their masks to catch their breath.

While the outright country flight bans that previously existed are to be dropped from April, and quarantine has been reduced to seven days (until recently it was 21), it’s still seven days more than most of the world insists on and it is also open only to vaccinated residents — no visitors at all. At any point, if an airline is found to have brought too many positive cases into Hong Kong, they are banned from that route for seven days. Travellers then have to rearrange everything, including the quarantine hotel, which is often simply not possible given the demand, and means not getting into Hong Kong for months. All of this remains a serious problem for Asia’s self-proclaimed “world city”.

But my suspicion is that the real reason people here are less impressed goes beyond the details of the changes; it is now a broader issue about lack of faith in the government, and the absence of any strategy.

For some, this is inextricably linked to the protests in 2019 and the government’s heavy-handed response — something for which a fair few people have been locked up, and for longer than three weeks. A significant proportion of Hongkongers wouldn’t trust the government whatever they did. But even if you are one of those who thinks that the Hong Kong government was right in its approach, it is difficult to say that it has recently demonstrated competence. It is not just the failures to prepare properly for the current outbreak — although that alone should have been enough to have ended multiple political careers. There have also been constant U-turns on policy.

Suggested reading

New Zealand's lockdown fairytale is over

By Tom Chodor

Perhaps the worst recently was the announcement that all the school term dates were to change, bringing forward the summer holiday to Easter — I am not making this up — to allow school buildings to be used for a city-wide testing programme. Then it was floated that this might also simultaneously involve a lockdown, which triggered panic-shopping; only for the government to then decide that maybe they didn’t want to do any of it after all.

Given the U-turns so far it would be a brave person who would bet against another massive reversal of policy months down the line. What happens when case numbers start to rise again? Or there are the inevitable outbreaks in schools?

One common response to this is to say something like: “Of course, they can’t say they are going to live with the virus. That would involve too much loss of face. But that’s obviously what they are doing”.

But there are two problems with this argument. The first is that there is plenty of evidence that this is not what they are doing: at the same time as there is talk of reopening the schools and the borders, the government has also been building multiple new isolation centres. Mass testing may have been put on hold, but compulsory testing of people who have been in places with Covid cases has restarted. As case numbers have fallen to more manageable levels, so people have begun to get put back into isolation. None of this looks like living with the virus.

Second, even if this were true, it is never a good sign for any government to say it is doing one thing while doing another. Even if the people at the top of government think they are following a plan, it makes it less likely for there to be a proper alignment of strategy and implementation. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said that Hong Kong’s struggle with Covid is akin to a war, so it’s worth considering what Clausewitz said about military strategy. It was “to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives”. We shouldn’t necessarily have expected the Hong Kong authorities to have read Clausewitz — but at times they act as if they have read him only so they can work out how to do the exact opposite. There is no identification of the decisive point, no concentration of resources, and there’s always a host of lesser objectives.

Suggested reading

China's Communist Party owes it all to colonialism

By Bill Hayton

In the same way that the massive focus on locking people up and keeping out those from overseas distracted what should have been the main priority of vaccinating people in care homes, only last week Lam argued that Hong Kong needed both to reopen the mainland border and to open up to international travel. Yet these are in direct tension. As long as the policy on the mainland is for Zero Covid, the mainland border won’t open up while there are outbreaks in Hong Kong — but if you allow international travel without quarantine, you will get outbreaks. “To govern,” as Pierre Mendès-France put it, “is to choose.”  Hong Kong’s administration cannot choose, and thus it cannot govern.

One of the curiosities about Hong Kong — at least to a polling junkie like me — is the almost complete lack of decent opinion polling here. When asking awkward questions can get you threatened with the National Security Law, it is difficult to ask tricky questions or expect honest answers, and to know what people really think.

But for many the tipping point has been reached and people are voting with their feet. A full 1% of the population left last month. Some may be coming back, but lots are not. And sure, in time, when all this is a distant memory, others will come in to replace them, but the immediate consequences are significant. Talent drains, organisations relocate, businesses fold. The infrastructure won’t return, the diversity is lost. It is said that the recent promised policy shifts came in response to pleas from the city’s great and good, worried that irreversible damage was being done to Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre. These pleas were too quiet, and, for many, too late.

China’s vast lucrative web novel industry, the largest in the world, brilliantly illustrates the peculiar nature of “Chinese socialism” in recent years. The combination of unfettered economic growth with often severe restrictions on free speech has transformed online authors from writers into aspiring tycoons. The result is a consumerist vacuum, where authors hoping to follow in Tang Jia San Shao’s footsteps churn out vast quantities of work with little literary value or originality.

Tang Jia San Shao is known for both for his epic xianxia (immortal hero) fantasies in which lowly “cultivators” rise up the ranks to unmatchable omnipotence, as well as his dogged work ethic: he holds the Guinness World Record for 86 months of daily serialised chapter updates on Qidian, a webnovel platform backed by Tencent, one of China’s most influential tech giants.

He may be one of the rare success stories, but he has inspired millions of xieshou (writing hands) to churn out thousands of words a day in the hope of selling their own IP. As a rule, titles with the highest number of readers within a pay-per-view system, including Ashes of Love and The Untamed and Duolou Continent, are turned into lucrative TV dramas, computer games or manga series.

Tech companies such as China Literature and Qidian have morphed into shameless “IP cultivation” empires, overseeing a somewhat psychotic, dog-eat-dog world in which popularity is the only metric that matters. “Help readers fantasise about what they lack,” instructs the testosterone-heavy platform Qidian in its writing guide. With an estimated 450 million active readers, and as many as 25 million titles to choose from, competition is merciless and exhausting. If a title doesn’t get enough eyeballs, the platform cancels the book.

Suggested reading

How sensitivity readers corrupt literature

By Kate Clanchy

Writers, desperate to keep readers, often resort to brazen and desperate tactics — offering “red packets” (bribes) or plagiarising so they have more content to post. One trick to getting more views is to make novels insufferably long, with some online books exceeding six million words. Another is to turn each chapter into a cliff-hanger. Owing to its trashy, short-term thrills, Chinese readers dub webfiction yiyin or “YY” for short, a phrase that has evolved to mean “mental porn” or an addictive, guilty pleasure.

Writers’ grasping tactics are mirrored in the personalities of their status-obsessed and borderline sociopathic protagonists. Heroes are known for their “shamelessness” and for intentionally humiliating (“face-slapping”) their opponents. Many will stop at nothing to acquire wealth and status, smiting anyone who obstructs their path to becoming the richest tycoon in the world or the most supreme being in the universe. In short, online fiction is often a fantasy in which brute individualism pays off, written and read by self-described diaosi — “penis hairs” or “losers” — for whom reality is a communal struggle.

Last year, all this suddenly ground to a halt when beleaguered and exhausted writers downed tools following a regime change at Tencent. By temporarily making content free to read and taking over the copyright of all works until 50 years after the death of the authors, Tencent planned to both strip writers of their revenue and deny them any hope of precious IP.

The dispute was eventually resolved, but it lit an old ideological fire amongst writers who are both victims, and advocates, of this mercenary genre of fiction. “This is class struggle,” said one writer. “The bourgeoisie and capitalists only pursue profits, their pores ooze dirty blood, they squeeze the proletariat for every drop of oil they can.” And they are not wrong.

This is a time of yawning differences between rich and poor in China, with the old Communist guarantee of lifetime employment — “the iron rice bowl” — a distant memory. The CCP has failed to protect gig economy workers from exploitation by big Chinese corporations. An obvious example is the country’s 300 million “floating” migrant workers, once foregrounded by the socialist revolution, who work gruelling hours and are denied basic rights in Chinese cities.

People have been trying — and failing — to remind the CCP that it is supposed to be a Left-wing party for some time. This may explain Xi Jinping’s current “Common Prosperity” drive promising to close a gaping wealth divide in Chinese society — and re-assert the primacy and socialist credentials of the Party. Actors, representative of a burgeoning idol culture and the new uber-class of celebrity, have become a soft target: they are conspicuously rich and have legions of adoring fans.

Suggested reading

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

Thirty-year-old Deng Lun, swooning star of hit TV show Ashes of Love, is just the latest celebrity to be put in the stocks in China for tax evasion, resulting in a grovelling public apology, a $16.6 million fine and the suspension of all his online social media accounts. He seems to have got off lightly: Alibaba’s Jack Ma, tennis star Peng Shuai and actress Vicki Zhao all briefly disappeared. The CCP doesn’t take kindly to any individuals, except the great leaders of course, having that kind of kudos. Popularity or influence can be as dangerous as dissidence.

Yet Xi’s crackdown extends well beyond celebrities. Chinese writers are also being reined in, with the CCP insisting that all art needs to “take patriotism as its muse” and “serve the people and socialism”. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of online fiction and its TV spin-offs, the government has imposed “socialist ratings” upon online writing platforms, and a “rectification” process if the score is too low. Tang Jia San Shao’s latest novel about a cultural relic restorer is apparently intended to support an application for Beijing’s World Heritage Status.

Writers are now encouraged to write fantastical tales about “red heroes” to support the CCP’s re-booted socialist agenda. “Heroic figures that save the world and humanity, as created in the work of many internet writers, are in essence or spiritually the same as the heroes in red stories,” says the deputy general of the Shanghai Writers Association, Xue Shu.

What’s more, online writers and readers are incentivised to personally censor any inappropriate content they come across: suicide, effeminate men, the past, politics, sex or, in fact, anything below the neck. A moral society is seen as integral to the legitimacy of the Party, following an ancient Confucian principle that the government should uphold good behaviour. This is one of the main reasons why Chinese literature has long been co-opted as a didactic, rather than artistic, medium.

So, what is left when cultural industrialists and authoritarian governments have had so much control over content? Both have contributed to the homogenisation of mainstream Chinese culture, gutting it of distinct, individual voices and replacing it with dull, lifeless tropes. And both big business and Big Brother keep asking young writers to effectively saw off the branches they are sitting on.

Suggested reading

How China ghosted Hollywood

By Christian Toto

One online writer, who goes by the name of Tiaowu, tried second guessing what would prevent his webnovel from being censored: he removed any details involving fights, religion, or lesbians. But chunks of his story kept disappearing. “You can cut off the leaves, you can cut off the branches, and the tree will live,” he wrote. “But they had me f**king cut off the entire f**king trunk.”

But there is still hope. A number of Chinese artists and writers follow neither the restless opportunism of the market, nor submit to the ever shifting and growing demands of the Party. These people, according to novelist Ge Fei, “go the other way”, often using publishers in Taiwan or, until recently, Hong Kong.

There are the surrealists born in the Fifties and Sixties — Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, Can Xue, Su Tong Mo Yan — who grapple with censored history and the absurdity of the present day in an innovative and bewitching mode known as May 35 (the imaginary date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre), in which they use metaphor, satire, surrealism, and fractured time frames to address difficult topics. Yan Lianke’s novel Dream of Ding Village is a haunting account of China’s hushed-up AIDs crisis in rural Henan, written as fiction to avoid censorship.

Meanwhile, lowly migrant workers sublimate their unacknowledged hardships on the production lines into beautiful verse in self-published magazines. Cheeky comic book writers foreground strangely subversive themes such as laziness and mediocrity as a way to poke fun at both online superheroes and the hard-working and tech-savvy youths that throng propaganda posters. And science fiction writers conjure up future societies that sit beyond the reach of political correctness and accountability.

It is unlikely these writers will ever build their own Disney World — let alone earn $18 million a year. But that’s not their aim. The diverse, not often read, landscape of Chinese fiction is full of free spirits, who stay under the radar to paint a truer portrait of Chinese society than economics and party politics reveal. According to an ancient Chinese proverb, which might be banned were it written now: “The twisted tree lives its life, while the straight tree ends up in planks.”

The concept of the incel election first went viral a few months ago after a thoughtful piece by S. Nathan Park described the influence of People Power Party’s Chairman Lee Jun-seok – a conservative pundit and “anti-feminist” – on young men, and the potential impact of this demographic on the presidential election. Subsequent articles speculated not only about whether this victory signifies the end of gender equality in South Korea, but whether this election is a harbinger of things to come.

But before everyone gets carried away, a corrective. This election has nothing to do with incels; the voters in question were probably not incels; misogyny is not unique to incels.

It stands to reason that the high rate of “sexlessness” in Korean adults – particularly young men, though it’s high across genders and age groups which is probably indicative of a nationwide unipolar depression — may very well alter people’s overall sense of well-being, fulfilment and belonging in the world, and thus, their political beliefs as well. But there is no evidence that the issue of sexlessness or celibacy played any role in this election. Despite their best efforts, not a single journalist was able to furnish a quote from anyone hoping to finally get laid under the Yoon administration. So we’re really not talking about an “incel movement” at all. And when a term has implicit associations with violent extremism, flippantly using it to describe a group of young men whose views one finds abhorrent is ill-advised.

Unfortunately, the term has become shorthand for exactly that: angry young men with bad political takes. These are men who feel marginalised, who don’t have families, who are struggling to find purpose and their place in life. Many of them are unemployed, underemployed, or struggling in school. In the West, they’re often described as white or working class, and they live in progressive, economically developed societies. They probably also live in a society where income inequality is growing and unemployment rates are high.

That profile fits for incels, at least for the media’s portrayal of them, and it fits for the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, and also for extremists on the far Left – such as Antifa’s Black Bloc. Details about race and class vary depending on the cultural context, but the fact that young men with nothing to lose is the demographic most likely to embrace a radical or subversive new political ideology is consistently true, and it has been throughout history.

In The True Believer, published in 1951, Eric Hoffer brilliantly described the conditions that compelled people to join “mass movements” of social or political protest with Twenties Germany as the backdrop. Mass movements appeal to people who feel powerless and unappreciated in their lives and who tend to externalise their frustrations rather than looking inward. The group most likely to embrace a radical new ideology is one Hoffer called the New Poor, who may in fact be middle class, but perceive a recent loss in income, social status, or security that was out of their control.

Suggested article

South Korea's incel election

By S Nathan Park

Hoffer’s account was written in response to the turn toward Communism and Fascism, but extreme or subversive political movements have been drawing in a new crop of New Poor with remarkable agility over the past decade, with the aid of technology. Social media and alternative platforms have given independent content creators and their ideas exposure to a global audience of like-minded fans who can instantly communicate with each other. These platforms have also contributed to and benefited from a climate of hyperpolarisation by promoting provocative, contentious speech.

Indeed, most of the “anti-feminist” ideas espoused by Yoon and his supporters during the campaign should be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the online ecosystem known as the Intellectual Dark Web, or the Manosphere, or parts of the Alt-Right: the advantages of social programming and affirmative action in favour of women, the suggestion that the pay gap is not real but the result of women’s lesser contributions, the issue of false reporting of sex crimes, the fact that men are conscripted for military service.

When applied to the United States, some of these arguments may seem exaggerated — but they do have an essence of truth. Data about rates of false reporting are inconsistent, but it does occur, despite #MeToo’s directive to “Believe women”. Family courts often rule in favour of women; the criminal justice system gives men harsher sentences for comparable crimes. These facts are generally ignored by feminists and frequently cited by their opponents.

Anti-feminism, like the other identitarian ideologies that have risen to popularity over the past decade, is characterised primarily by feelings of victimhood experienced by the in-group, and hostility toward the structural powers and privileges afforded the out-group — rather than actual hostility toward members of that group, as in overt misogyny. Anti-feminist groups are not necessarily misogynists for suggesting that if equality is the goal, then it might be time for men to get a push in some areas. Thanks to gains made by feminists in the latter half of the last century, women are outperforming men in many areas where they once lagged behind, or were not even allowed entry, such as higher education, where women currently comprise 60% of students. Whether this is due to an inherent difference between the sexes that allows women to better utilise certain aspects of the system, or a structural difference that directly benefits them more is an interesting question, but it’s ultimately irrelevant. When the current system similarly favours men, we rightly recognise it as sexist, and wouldn’t call its opponents “incels”.

Suggested article

What the media gets wrong about incels

By Naama Kates

Of course, in South Korea, where the deeply patriarchal society is already much more divided along the gender line, anti-feminist talking points don’t land the same way. The country has a 35% pay gap between men and women, and is ranked lowest among the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the “Glass Ceiling Index”. Two years ago, police uncovered a widespread network for trading non-consensual sexual images over Telegram, and Park Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, died in a probable suicide amid rumors of sexual harassment complaint against him. Most troubling of all is the fact that despite a very low overall homicide rate, women in South Korea represent more than half of the victims, in stark contrast to the international average of 21%. High-profile events and statistics like these sit uncomfortably alongside tirades about how the wage gap and most sexual assault reports are all fake news.

Over the past six or seven years, populist candidates have been exploiting the grievances of young men all over the world, often with traditionalist messages that are underpinned by anti-feminist ideas. This resonates, in part, because most young people have issues with dating and the opposite sex, and unhappy young men almost certainly do. In Western countries with large immigrant populations, race and immigration are more potent issues than gender, partly because these countries have always had more equality between the sexes than traditionally Confucian South Korea, which has virtually no immigrant population, and where the reverse is true.

President Yoon is married and is certainly not an incel, and probably doesn’t really much care for this. But politicians opportunistically exploit the deeply held grievances of their constituents, appeal to their basest impulses, fears and prejudices. Not as a matter of ideology, but of political expediency. So Yoon pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in his campaign, which is unlikely to happen in a democracy like South Korea without a lot of bureaucratic gridlock, and even if it does, it’s unclear what programs would actually be affected or how. But, then, even his liberal opponent promised to remove the word “Women” from the Department’s official name.

Right now, though, there are more important issues to consider. Yoon, who was a prosecutor for 27 years and has no previous experience in politics, has voiced strong opinions about issues of foreign policy, expressing a hard line on North Korea, and a stronger alliance with the United States than with China, compared with the more diplomatic position taken by the previous administration that his liberal rival pledged to continue. Given the war in Ukraine, and current tensions with China, his position has been praised by the Washington Post as “a welcome turn toward the US”, and the Wall Street Journal as “an opportunity for closer security ties between Seoul and Washington”. Maybe in light of the recent eruption of conflict on the world stage, it is more important to focus on the foreign policy of the new “incel” president, rather than jumping to the conclusion that stunts from his campaign trail are putting human rights under threat.

Something similar applies to a story unfolding here in Hong Kong. It too involves dozens of senior officials ignoring the advice of their own government by going to a party — although many of the details reveal the differences between the two approaches to Covid.

The basic facts are straightforward. With Hong Kong on the brink of its fifth Covid wave, the Government this month advised people to avoid large gatherings. Yet last week, dozens of government officials and politicians instead went to a birthday party in a tapas restaurant, hosted by Witman Hung, Hong Kong’s delegate to the National People’s Congress. Estimates of the number of people present vary — and indeed, keep climbing as more information seeps out — but more than 200 seem to have been involved at various points in the evening.

A few days later, one of the women at the party then tested positive for Covid.

If you are a close contact of a known Covid case in Hong Kong, you don’t get pinged and asked to stay at home for a bit. Instead, you are taken off to a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks. It is common to see these rooms described as spartan or like being in prison, albeit by people who have never been to prison and wouldn’t have lasted long in Sparta — but they are not the Mandarin Oriental and three weeks stuck in a single room is far from pleasant.

This policy is stern and unbending. Currently sitting in quarantine, for example, are a class of kindergarten kids, aged three and four. Even contacts of close contacts have found themselves locked up, albeit it for shorter periods, while they are tested.

More from this author

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

The result is that multiple members of the Government, including the home affairs secretary, the head of immigration chief, and the secretary for financial services, now find themselves in quarantine. Others escaped by being able to prove they left the party before the Covid case turned up — although at one point, when a second case was identified, it looked as everyone might get locked up, only for the second case to turn out to be a false positive.

A key difference between the stories in the UK and Hong Kong is that the Chief Executive Carrie Lam wasn’t at this party and moved swiftly to distance herself from those present, in an event one Hong Kong observer referred to as the Night of the Long Ibérico Ham Knives. To paraphrase Jeremy Thorpe, when Harold Macmillan defenestrated multiple colleagues in an attempt to save his own political skin: greater love hath no woman than this, that she lay down her friends for her life.

It is not that those attending Witman’s party had necessarily broken any laws, although things are a bit murky as to whether everyone had been entirely on it when it came to using the tracing app required to enter restaurants. But they had all gone against their own government’s clear advice.

And then there’s the public reaction. The overwhelming response of the public to the various Downing Street beanos has been anger at the hypocrisy of politicians who appear to have been behaving in a way that they were preventing others from doing. All those people who couldn’t visit a dying parent — and, as one of this group, here I declare an interest — look askance at politicians going on the razz.

In Hong Kong, there is anger at the behaviour of their politicians, but it is mixed with massive dollops of schadenfreude. By European standards, Hong Kong’s fifth ‘wave’ is less of a wave and more of a millpond. It has involved fewer than 50 cases thus far. In a territory of more than seven million people, one of them just happened to attend a party containing many of its most senior political figures; of all the tapas restaurants in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Depending on your point of view this is either a sign of how unlucky the politicos were or, and this seems to be the view taken by many of the people I speak to, it proves that that there is indeed a God. Because it is, bluntly, hugely enjoyable to see people who have inflicted such heavy-handed measures on the population hoist by their own petard like this, especially when not all of them have handled their incarceration with grace and dignity.

Suggested reading

Inside the Austrian lockdown

By Philip Cowley

As an example of how heavy handed it is, consider this. At the same time as the Witman story unfolded, a four-year old girl tested positive for Covid — and was put on her own in an isolation room in hospital, with a bell to ring should she need anything. Somehow, and because she was bored or terrified or lonely, she managed to escape. When she was spotted, maskless, outside of her room, she was sent back in, for what could be weeks of isolation, while the two staff who found her were themselves carted off to quarantine. In almost any other place in the world, isolating children like this would be a huge story; in Hong Kong it has somehow become accepted as normal. It, and the many other restrictions in place here, are not normal.

The flipside of how easily we understand some scandals is that sometimes we fail to comprehend the more complicated, duller, but maybe more serious issues. And however enjoyable the Witman scandal is, there is a danger that it all distracts from the broader points about Hong Kong’s record of dealing with Covid.

The cautious approach that initially served it well is now crippling it. The death rate remains staggeringly low relative to the rest of the world; per capita, the UK’s death rate is 78 times higher. But this policy is becoming increasingly unsustainable, the measures required increasingly harsh. What once advertised itself as ‘Asia’s global city’ is becoming ever more isolated. Multiple travels bans are in place; even of those who can fly in, most have to spend three weeks in quarantine. Hong Kong’s airport is now a ghost town, save for the families leaving. The goal of reopening the border with the mainland — which Lam and others see as their priority — appears no closer to fruition either.

The vaccination programme has been a disaster. Despite ample resourcing and availability, fewer than a fifth of the over-80s are vaccinated. The Government’s approach to driving up the vaccination rate has been woefully hands-off, wasting months when the city was effectively Covid-free which could have been used for a vaccination drive.

Suggested reading

The agony of the anti-lockdown centrists

By Daniel Hadas

The result has been that the handful of cases seen since January have led to a widespread reintroduction of restrictions, including, as I write this, the suspension of face-to-face teaching in primary schools. This will be the third time since Covid began that primary teaching will have been suspended. (All local schools, including secondaries, were anyway still not back to full face-to-face teaching anyway, even two years into the pandemic.) Announcing the closure of schools, Lam said that she didn’t want to see young children sent into quarantine; that there may be other ways of dealing with this appears not to have occurred to anyone.

The inter-generational tensions caused by Covid are evident all around the globe, with the young, mostly safe, forced to undergo restrictions to protect the more elderly. But nowhere is this issue starker than in Hong Kong, where the youngest are again being punished to protect an elderly population that has done next to nothing to protect themselves — and by a government that has also done next to nothing to make them protect themselves. This, rather than a piss-up in a tapas restaurant, is the real scandal.

And that greed could prove fatal. China’s “civilisation state”, deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, represents the most profound philosophical challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War. But our oligarchs choose to ignore this, preferring instead to genuflect to Beijing for financial gain.

The cost of such avarice is slowly coming into focus: China’s economy may surpass the US by as early as 2028, and by some measurements already has. Of course, China deserves credit for its remarkable performance, which is mostly thanks to the efforts of its citizens, in particular its rural migrants, the key fodder for the country’s dominant manufacturing base.

But the Middle Kingdom’s ascendency would not seem as inexorable if not for the efforts of the West’s ‘kowtow crowd’, a group of self-interested cheerleaders and enablers of China’s autocratic state. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened that the USSR would “bury” the West. China’s President Xi can count on the West burying itself.

Some of this can be traced to naivety and an underestimation of Chinese capabilities. Rather than recognising a potential threat, our political and financial elites saw a potential economic partner and huge market. China was still a poor, developing country; when welcomed into the World Trade Organisation 20 years ago, it dutifully supplied cheap products to a welcoming market. In the meantime, it was hoped that exposure to the West would create an increasingly liberal China.

Yet for at least a decade, particularly since Xi Jinping assumed control of the Communist Party, these assumptions have been proven fatally wrong. Xi and the Party have clearly made clear that their ambition is not any old seat at the table, but the one at its head.  

Given what seems a clear and present danger to the West and its East Asian allies, one would expect our ruling class to seek ways to fight back. Donald Trump may have been a blustering fool but at least he saw, and identified, the threat. President Biden, to his credit, has also proposed some steps to reinforce US competitiveness, and there is rare bipartisan consensus, including on the Left, to resist China’s hegemony.

Yet prospects for standing up to China from the White House are limited. As recently as 2019 Biden, a stalwart cog in the Washington consensus, minimised the Chinese threat to our economy, recently claiming, incredibly, that: “you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” More worrisome still has been the Biden family’s close business ties with Beijing. The somewhat dissolute Hunter, in particular, has profited hugely and gained expensive gifts working for the Chinese. Most recently, he helped a Chinese firm to corner the cobalt market, a key component in the administration’s  green energy strategy.

But kowtowing is hardly a partisan phenomenon. Prominent figures from both parties, including former GOP Speaker John Boehner, and many connected Washington think tanks receive funding from Beijing. Even members of the Bush family have cosied up to CCP apparatchiks, including one with strong ties to that country’s rising military.

Europe’s leaders, if anything, are even less committed to confronting the Chinese challenge. Some, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, seek to play the US against the Chinese civilisational challenge by treating them as moral equivalents of their long-time American allies. Meanwhile, Beijing is busily extending its presence on the continent with infrastructure investment to weak European countries such Greece, Hungary, and Romania.

Nowhere is the ineptitude of the Western policy towards China more evident than in climate change. Like its human rights record, China’s environmental footprint should be a source of embarrassment and condemnation. While the West hamstrings itself with its eco-commitments, China, not mandated to reduce its carbon emissions till 2030, continues to build coal plants to maintain its industrial engine. By 2030, when China will be able to shift to nuclear and other alternatives, the West will be effectively de-industrialised, and hopelessly dependent.

But such dependency is nothing new. For decades American companies have been handing Beijing the basis for economic hegemony: since 1990 US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned from under $10 billion annually to $419 billion last year. China’s ratio of imports to exports was four to one in 2018. This has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — while costing an estimated 3.4 million job losses in the US since 2001.

Meanwhile, these corporate kowtowers actively promote China’s model. Apple, for instance, props up and profits from China’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Acting as if it were its own country, Apple has essentially negotiated its own $275 billion deal with China, promising to keep production there while assisting with the country’s unhidden goal is to supplant the West as a tech leader.

For its part, Wall Street, even amid the threat of government interference, plays its part the kowtow crowd. Ray Dalio, founder of giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and self-promoting author, has dismissed China’s repression of its Uighur population as the result of a “sacrosanct” desire for sovereignty. Even powerful figures such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan have decided to publicly apologise after upsetting the CCP. It’s in their interest, after all. Xi knows fully well that Western investment bankers and tech companies will do his bidding, as long as they get what Mafia dons may call “a taste”. China may be miffed if US diplomats boycott the 2022 winter games, but they can be sure that the corporations and investment bankers will likely be there, heads bowed on the floor.

All of this is made even more humiliating by the fact that China’s rise may not be as unstoppable as its Western admirers believe. China’s economic growth rate is slowing, its bloated real estate markets are showing signs of implosion, and industrial production has slowed to the lowest level since 2004. Meanwhile, its tech and innovation sector is being pummelled by continued government crackdowns.

More serious still are demographic forces. By 2050, China is projected to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2050 it will be roughly 20% higher than that of the US; 15 years after that, according to the South China Morning Post, China’s population will be very old and about half its current size.

None of this suggests resisting China will be easy, particularly given the disposition of our rulers. But it does mean it’s possible.

That is the real tragedy of the kowtow crowd. Just as in the Thirties, their prostration only makes their adversary stronger and more confident. Inevitably, it will be the rest of us, and future generations, who pay the price.

Two months ago, Xianzi (real name, Zhou Xiaoxuan) lost her fight against the Chinese media establishment. She had only intended to prosecute Zhu Jun, a prominent TV host, for an alleged sexual assault. But in the court case that followed, she found herself on the receiving end of the full force of the Chinese TV network and the legal establishment. Somewhere in the middle, she also managed to rekindle a feminist movement that the Chinese state is struggling to contain.

The initial incident occurred in 2014, when Xianzi was a 21-year-old intern at the Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV, and was sent to interview Zhu in his dressing room. As one of the most recognisable TV hosts in the country, Zhu regularly presents the annual New Year TV spectacular, the most-watched TV show in the world. He is also a leading member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the Chinese state. He is, suffice it to say, a figure with not inconsiderable political weight.

During that interview, Xianzi alleged that Zhu sexually molested her and that she was only able to escape his clutches when someone came to the door. The next day, she went to the police, who told her that she shouldn’t slander such a prominent personality’s reputation and threatened her parents’ jobs if she persisted. Her case lay dormant until, empowered by the burgeoning #MeToo movement in 2016, she felt that her only course of action was to write a 3,000-word essay about the incident online.

Immediately, the tables were turned when Zhu accused her of libel; of sullying his illustrious 20-year career. He denied all charges and launched a counterclaim for “smearing” his good name. In the ensuing court case — where much of the defence evidence was deemed inadmissible — he was cleared with no case to answer. Immediately afterwards, Xianzi announced that her battle had been “an extremely arduous and glorious journey” and she intends to appeal. The following day, the Chinese state responded in the only way it knows how: by closing down Xianzi’s social media accounts.

Suggested reading

Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

Xianzi had posted her original article on Douban, a social media platform in China that has increasingly become a forum for radical feminist voices. Such chatrooms have been allowed to flourish by a Chinese state happy to platform discussions that highlight the failings of the West and the superiority and stability in China. These forums are acceptable, that is, until Chinese activists begin to turn the conversation inwards.

As a consequence of Xianzi’s case, the state has become increasingly worried about the potential for “extremism and radical political and ideological thoughts” conveyed by feminist discussion groups. In April, for example, Douban closed a number of feminist channels, such the popular magazine forum “Feminist Voices” under the innocuous charge of “violating relevant laws and regulations”.

But even in China, even though it is difficult for them to express themselves or to find representation against the Party machine, activists continue to organise. In order to circumvent the ever-menacing presence of the state monitors and censors, Chinese netizens use codes and abbreviations to disguise their intent, often becoming memes in the process. For example, the phrase “rice bunny” in Chinese (mi-tu) is a homonym for #MeToo.

Similarly, the “6B” movement (the letter stands for “bu” meaning “no”) is a new feminist community that unites around a lifestyle encouraging no marriage, no child-bearing, no boyfriends, no romantic relationships with male partners, no accommodation to married women, and no sexist brands. Adapted from a Korean network of radical feminists, the addition of the “4T” hashtag in online discussion forums represents the refusal to accept mainstream sexual depictions of women, female beauty, religion, and fan culture. (“T” stands for “tal” meaning the removal of corsets.) It is an enigmatic mixture of bra-burning and Mao’s Four Olds campaign (the authoritarian Cultural Revolution slogan demanding the destruction of old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs).

Chinese radical feminism, then, seems to be a mash-up of Seventies US feminism and Chinese statist fundamentalism — something which President Xi is learning to exploit, subverting the conversation to suit his ends. When Chloé Zhao became the first female Chinese woman to win best director at the Academy Awards for Nomadland, her film was blocked in China and all references removed from the internet because she once said nasty things about her country of birth. Within a matter of days, however, the Party machine recognised her popularity, and used her status as a woman to criticise the lack of diversity within the Hollywood cinema industry.

Suggested reading

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

But this kind of culture war is a dangerous game for China. Ever keen to expose the travails of the West in order to show up America’s decadence and political malaise, such campaigns only bring attention to its own shameful record on women’s rights: while the UK enacted its first legislation on domestic abuse in 1976, China only did so in 2015.

Xi, of course, is well aware of this. And in response, #MeToo cases in recent years have been used by the state media to demonstrate how the Party is rooting out vulgar elements and maintaining order. At the moment, two going through the courts — one of Kris Wu, a Canadian-Chinese singer who has been arrested in Beijing on suspicion of rape; and another of an Alibaba executive accused of sexual assault — are being publicised in order to “rectify” behaviour that the party considers damaging to its vision of a healthy and stable society.

Similar exposures of the excesses of machismo corporate culture have recently been revealed with young women bringing charges of sexual abuse against a series of executives of the taxi-hailing company Didi, and luxury drinks brand, Moutai. Immediately the Chinese Communist Party released a statement: “we must work together to establish rules for celebrities’ words and deeds, keep the influence of capital in check, curb the barbaric growth of pan-entertainment, strengthen industry self-discipline, and urge entertainers to establish correct professional values”.

But in reality, this only happens in select cases, and it is hard to marry the CCP’s recent statement with the rest of its actions. Take the current case of tennis player Péng Shuài, who has accused former Chinese vice premier Zhāng Gāolí of rape. Last week, her identity — even as a former World Tennis Organisation Number 1 doubles player — was wiped from the Chinese internet. She has effectively been erased: China’s censors are clamping down on any show of support. Even the hashtag #tennis has been banned.

Yet even this hasn’t silenced debate. It has just created more imaginative ways of sharing the criticism. One Douban social media post shared the story using proxy tennis and political characters, Serena Williams and former U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence. It too was taken down soon afterwards.

Suggested reading

The myth of monolithic China

By Lee Jones

Will China’s censors win this game of cat and mouse? It’s hard not to imagine that Beijing is increasingly concerned about the possibility of Chinese students returning from abroad and introducing the West’s subversive gender-critical militancy at home. Still, as long as the Party is seen as the arbiter of justice and can portray individual cases as random aberrations, it can be controlled. And if Chinese feminism follows the American model’s shift towards divisive identity politics, this will only become easier.

But whether the Chinese state can maintain supremacy under sustained cultural assault remains to be seen. The Party this year stressed its role in “coordinating protection of women and children with economic and social development”. But in the face of cases such as Gāolí’s, it seems only a matter of time before such claims are called into question.

Over the past year, the question of whether or not the United States will defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion has shifted from abstract speculation to an almost existential question for America’s foreign policy elite. For decades, the US has pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this question — an ambiguity arguably heightened by Biden’s recent claims that it will defend Taiwan, swiftly followed by the State Department’s corrections that US policy on the matter has not changed (whether or not Biden’s personal ambiguity is intentional is of course another matter). 

In a new book, The Strategy of Denial, the American strategist Elbridge Colby aims to resolve this ambiguity once and for all: not only should the US defend Taiwan, it must — for the crucial reason that the integrity of the American empire depends on its winning or preventing this looming conflict. As one of the writers of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reset America’s defence posture away from the greater Middle East and towards strategic competition with China, Colby is an influential voice: and if followed, the policy prescriptions within this book will affect Europe perhaps more than European policymakers realise.

A foreign policy Realist, Colby aims to bury the atmosphere of triumphalist liberal imperialism which has served America so badly since the fall of the Soviet Union. “The generation of post–Cold War primacy unmoored some Americans, or at least some of their leaders and eminent thinkers, from underlying realities, giving them a highly exaggerated sense of what the United States could and should accomplish in the international arena,” he notes at the beginning. But “that world is gone. The fundamental reality is that there are now structural limitations on what the United States can do — it cannot do everything at once. Thus it must make hard choices.”

Stripping away all the accretions of “defending liberalism” or “promoting democracy” with which American politicians are accustomed to shroud their defence of empire, Colby breaks down the raw facts of power to their essentials. Asia is the most important economic sphere in the world, and thus, to maintain its global preeminence, America must maintain hegemony in Asia. 

Europe is of secondary importance, and with no realistic hegemonic challenger to American dominance, can be relegated to a second-order priority. The rest of the world is of very limited importance: there is no challenge in the Western Hemisphere, and Africa, if of interest at all, will likely be dominated by whoever wins hegemony in Asia. 

To prevent China dislodging America from hegemony in Asia is, therefore, the central task of US foreign policy: but it is not an easy task. As Colby notes: “Restoring military dominance over China is infeasible, given its size and growth trajectory.” China’s economic growth has been of such historic, transformative proportions that “in purchasing power parity terms it is already larger than America’s, and China has been vigorously turning this economic strength into military power”.

More from this author

The humiliation of the British Army

By Aris Roussinos

As Colby notes, the result is that a simple Cold War arms race to maintain military dominance is out of the question: China currently spends far less of its GDP than the US on defence, and can potentially vastly outspend any American increase. Moreover, he adds, “given the enormous demands of attempting to attain dominance against a power like China, the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the US economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength”.

Instead, the US must pursue a role as “cornerstone balancer” in International Relations terminology, the central linchpin of a vast multinational alliance which, when combined, will outweigh China’s military might. Rattling through the list of potential allies, Colby observes that Japan is central, and India, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia highly desirable, along with the militarily insignificant but geographically useful island nations of the Pacific. Other countries, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, should be armed so that they can mount a solid defence of their own territory, without the US extending them a security guarantee it will find itself unable to fulfil. 

But for Colby everything centres on Taiwan: exploring all the potential rationales and options for China, Colby settles on a military fait accompli by China — an invasion — as the most likely course of action. Taiwan, internationally recognised as part of China even by the US, is politically the most obvious target, as the ratcheting up of bellicose Chinese rhetoric makes clear. Strategically, not taking Taiwan will prevent Chinese expansion in the wider Pacific, and taking it will offer China greater ability to project its power in the region. And invasion it must be: strategic “Greyzone” tactics short of war like a blockade, or “punishment” tactics like bombardment, are unlikely to succeed, he argues, as they would firm up Taiwanese and international resolve against China without delivering victory to Beijing. 

Having focused on the most likely Chinese course of action, Colby war-games how to defeat it. Allowing China to invade Taiwan is highly undesirable: to wrest back control of the island once the Chinese have gained a foothold and erected defences would place the US at a great structural disadvantage, forcing it to escalate the conflict into something akin to the great amphibious campaigns of the World War Two Pacific. This would, Colby notes, be “a highly costly, risky, and arduous venture for the United States,” in which America and its allies “would need to redirect their economies to develop and sustain the forces needed for such a conflict, which would likely involve high rates of attrition,” and in a situation, unlike World War Two, where “the United States would not enjoy a decisive advantage in industrial capacity”— indeed, where industrial advantage has already passed to China.

More from this author

Crisis is the new normal

By Aris Roussinos

With recapture out of the question, the American focus must be one of denial: denying China the ability to seize Taiwan, and preferably, dissuading it from even attempting it. Colby suggests that the US and its allies “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips,” to “try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance networks; or attack other critical enablers, including other targets on the Chinese mainland, so that surviving assets were more vulnerable to interdiction when they entered the Taiwan Strait” — and then disabling or destroying any ships that made it through.

Yet here we enter the most contentious aspect of Colby’s strategising. As he himself observes repeatedly, once the shooting starts, it will be very difficult to prevent a Taiwan conflict between the American-led alliance and China escalating into a broader war. Colby is bullish at the prospect of avoiding a nuclear exchange, reasoning that the consequences would be as catastrophic for China as they would for the US. Instead, he argues, America should make clear that it is interested only in fighting a limited campaign centred on the defence of Taiwan. 

But such a campaign would not be limited to the Taiwan Straits, with Colby observing that “if the United States forswore the ability to attack targets on the Chinese mainland that were materially involved in the war, it would gravely weaken its ability to defend Taiwan. After all, treating mainland China as off-limits would raise questions about American resolve.” And yet the consequence of such an approach would surely be retaliation, which “would likely include at least some air and naval bases in the United States as well as cyber and space assets. The defenders should therefore propose and seek acceptance only of rule sets, Colby argues, “whose implications they can live with”. How much bombardment of the American mainland the American public can live with for Taiwan’s sake is, of course, an open question.

The essential thrust of Colby’s argument is that America is unlikely to win an all-out war with China: the costs for America will be too high, and China’s geographic and industrial advantages are too great. In his words, “The plain reality is that China is too powerful for the United States simply to make it cease fighting; the United States and any engaged allies and partners would therefore need to persuade it to do so.” Ultimately then, it is on America’s diplomatic and military powers of persuasion that his strategy stands or falls. Firstly, he proposes to “bind” American partners and allies into a web of Pacific alliances, through treaties and joint military basing and operations in the region (we think here of AUKUS). Even if, for European allies like ourselves, our military contribution will be marginal to any Pacific campaign, the moral shock of being targeted by the Chinese in a pre-emptive strike might “bind” us further into the American-led system, Colby argues, as the outraged public demands a response to Chinese aggression.

More from this author

The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

Indeed, such political considerations are essential to maintaining the great, if loose, alliance system to maintain American hegemony in Asia. China must be provoked into initiating any escalation of the conflict, so that it will always appear the aggressor; it must be permitted to strike as indiscriminately as possible (Colby urges the US not to provide potential civilian targets with air defences, reasoning that collateral damage will whip up the public anger against China necessary to winning a war); at every stage, China must be manoeuvred into situations where it is forced to escalate the conflict and so lose world sympathy, or back down. Over time, he reasons, the Chinese leadership will realise that the costs of seizing Taiwan will outweigh the benefits, and will be reassured enough by American pledges that the US will not aim to launch a wider war or dismantle their state that they will sue for peace.

Perhaps. It is a strategy that involves a great deal of careful, narrowly applied violence, which depends on what is ultimately the hope that China agrees to fight a war on America’s terms, playing to America’s advantages and negating its own. His hope is that by forcing Beijing to escalate the conflict beyond Taiwan, the American public, along with the publics of its allied nations, will fling themselves into support for a war to deny an aggressive China mastery of Asia; and that by forcing China to escalate, the war is, paradoxically, kept limited to the narrow bounds in which American victory is, though far from certain, at least possible.

This is a difficult balance, as Colby himself makes clear, “it is hard to overstate the scale and sophistication of the resources Beijing can bring to bear to subordinate Taiwan,” and even fighting a war against China on America’s chosen terms “would be exceptionally challenging”. And yet, Colby argues, it is necessary. Will the American public agree? It is difficult, from where we stand, to see that they agree on anything much. As Colby himself observes, “Americans may not be convinced that taking a leading role in denying another state hegemony over a distant region, however key, is worth the sacrifice and risk entailed”. Colby argues his case well, but there are a lot of ifs to think about here, not least for modestly capable allies like Britain plunging headlong into an Indo-Pacific tilt.

Colby himself argues that European countries such Britain would serve the American war effort more effectively by taking a greater role in the defence of Europe itself. Unlike British and German defence analysts who, for their own different reasons, are aghast at the prospect of American diminution of its commitment to Nato, Colby stresses that America’s interests in Europe are by a long way secondary to its interests in Asia, and that European countries — particularly Germany — should be obliged to take up the slack.

Suggested reading

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

A foreign policy Realist, Colby rightly urges America to give up its draining Middle Eastern commitments, to force Europeans to defend themselves, to extricate itself from the web of defence guarantees it has given to nations of no meaningful strategic importance and to focus all its efforts towards maintaining its global dominance through the defence of Taiwan against a rising China.  Colby’s strategy rightly roots itself firmly in a clear-eyed understanding of America’s diminished global reach following its unchallenged period of post-Cold War dominance, and indeed, Biden’s foreign policy so far has followed Trump’s (and Colby’s) Realist lead. Yet even after its pragmatic listing of all the ways it could fail and the great odds stacked against victory, Colby’s analysis seems to glide over what is surely America’s greatest weakness. 

Which actual or potential ally can be certain that an internally-divided America, whose chaotic politics is beamed daily across the world, has the solidarity and wherewithal to maintain even a limited shooting war at the other end of the world against the most powerful rival it has ever faced? How well-placed is 2021 America to walk such a narrow political, diplomatic and military tightrope, where the prospect of success is so slender, and where the risks of escalation are so great? Colby places great emphasis on the difficulties the US will find in holding together a fractious alliance in East Asia: yet whether it can hold itself together long enough to fight and win a costly major war is surely the greatest question challenging the empire’s survival.

For Indian nationalists, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, the subcontinent was tainted by an Islam that has subsequently exported itself to Pakistan and Bangladesh. And secondly, it was part of the Raj, and thus tainted by Britain. It is politically unbecoming, then, to equate a sense of Indian-hood with what Marxist historians in the West and Hindu nationalists in India tell us was India’s slave status.

As a British historian researching India’s role in the Second World War, I’ve encountered this view repeatedly. And not just in India; to be fair, it is equally rampant in the UK, especially in parts of academia. But it is hardly logical. In fact, it is deeply unhelpful.

The problem is that the post-colonial interpretation makes slaves of Indians. It argues that they had no personal control of their destiny because their government was in the hands of others. When the British declared war, India became an unwilling participant. This argument, simply stated, is that the colonial government, together with its systems, structures, cultures and attitudes, were deeply and inherently exploitative, such that it cannot properly be argued that colonial intentions were anything other than unfair and abusive.

In this view, Indian men fought and strived against their will, even though they weren’t fully aware of it, as cultural coercion blinded them to the reality that they were fighting a British war against Britain’s enemies. The absurdity of this argument suggests, to give but one example, that the efforts of Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, to raise the pay of Indian Commissioned Officers to the levels of their British colleagues in 1943 and 1944 were for the purpose of buying their loyalty rather than of giving them equality with their peers.

Suggested reading

British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

It is also seriously suggested in some quarters that the offer of money likewise persuaded millions of otherwise impoverished Indians to sign up for war work during the industrial expansion of India. According to this narrative, illiterate peasants knew no better than to take the financial bribes offered in exchange for their labour. It is argued that others were forced by convention and the belief that family and personal honour depended on a military career. Millions of men thus became mercenaries of the British, subject to intense and relentless propaganda which bound their minds and wills in an unprecedented and highly successful, coercive, manipulation.

Rather than being taken as fact, these assertions must be recognised for what they are: exaggerations and political point-scoring, with the purpose of proving that the Raj was evil and that the Indians who willingly fought against fascism and totalitarianism weren’t doing so for India, but because they were forced against their conscious will to do so.

It needn’t matter that there is no evidence that 2.5 million men joined the Indian Army between 1939-45 as the result of what one leading historian described as a “propaganda offensive” by the British government which “secured the partial allegiance or at least acquiescence of part of the population”. This argument fails to explain why the men thus recruited were prepared to die for this compulsion, and why Indian soldiers went on to win 22 of the 34 Victoria and George Crosses awarded, for example, during the Burma Campaign.

Instead, it seems rational to conclude that most Indians who joined the armed forces did so because they had weighed up the options and assessed the nature of the sacrifice they were willing to make for the sake of the government in India, regardless of its political colour. In this sense, their decision was made on the basis of a conception of India much larger than the framework of politics as it existed within Indian polity at the time. Even before 1947, the threat to their conception of what India was and could be therefore far outweighed the rights and wrongs in their minds of colonialism, if the issue or argument ever surfaced at all.

The truth is that reality trumped ideology in the face of the imminent and existential danger to the Indian state by the Japanese. Most Indians accepted that the Raj was, rightly or wrongly, or for the time being, the legally constituted Government of India. Like all governments, it had supporters and opponents. Few who opposed it on nationalistic or self-governance grounds questioned its legitimacy, as that would have invalidated their own claim to be its successor in due course. Likewise, the Indian Army was India’s army, not Britain’s.

Suggested reading

How the culture wars came for history

By Dominic Sandbrook

As Professor Roger Beaumont has observed, “it is most interesting to weigh the charges that the Raj built its army in India as an oppressive instrument against what one sees in how lovingly and energetically the Indians have retained the model”. Rather, the evidence suggests that the theory of “prosaic oppression” and its common language of “unconscious bias and systemic structures of power” is a fabricated political construct that does not relate to everyday human experience in colonial India. The facts are being squeezed to fit within a fixed and unbending theoretical, political and ideological model.

It was true that India did not have political independence, but in every other sense the freedom to make social, economic and political choices within this environment cannot be said to have been constrained by such oppression that human agency was so deviously manipulated to suit ruling British interests. Young Indian men and young Britons both joined the Indian Army for the same purpose in times of peace; for adventure, employment, the lure of military glory, the age-old attraction of the sword.

Indians were no more victims of their polity than were Britons, both of whom were, of course, victims of the fascist militarism that dragged the world into a second great slaughter of world war. The tyranny to which some refer, if it relates to anything, can only do so to the prosaic constraints of ordinary civic society — such as obeying the law, as can be seen during the Quit India protests in 1942 — rather than that of an unbending and devious oppression.

Looking back at the imperial period through the lens of victimhood is therefore deeply problematic both historically and philosophically. It ensures that we never see the 350 million Indians of the time as they saw themselves, collectively or individually: as a people with acute political agency (as evidenced by the burgeoning nationalist movement), on a journey to self-rule. Likewise, it treats every Briton in India at the time, every level of power exercised and every action undertaken in response to a decision by London or Delhi, as oppressive. It also forgets that agency in imperial power relationships is never one-sided; for instance, it ignores the importance of Indian political, social and economic agency in the Twenties and Thirties (combined with Japan’s pricking of the imperial bubble) in enabling India to achieve independence in 1947.

Suggested reading

How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

Our sense today of the size of the nationalist protest against colonial rule has almost certainly exaggerated its impact on ordinary people. This is not to underestimate its ultimate importance, rather the influence it had on the behaviour of men considering joining the armed forces, and the impact it had on those who had already enlisted. History remembers the noisy minority, whose views tend to be over-represented in any analysis of the past, while generally neglecting those without a voice.

Fortunately, nationalism and respect for the Government’s legitimate role in defending India (even a colonial one) were not mutually exclusive in 1942, or the ranks of the Armed Forces might have remained empty, and India’s door opened for the Japanese to march in. Perhaps it is precisely because the ranks of the army were so large between 1942 and 1945 that so much effort is generated today in post-colonial studies in explaining away why these men joined in such numbers and with such alacrity.

India, therefore, has every right to recover the history of the pre-1947 period, for it was then that the foundations of modern India were established. The Japanese in Assam and Manipur in 1944 and in Burma in 1945 were defeated by an Army that was 87% Indian. Victory in Asia could never have taken place without Indians coming forward in large numbers, and of their own volition, to serve their country. And that is surely something in which India can take great pride.

Since then, things have improved. But smogs are still a feature of everyday life, serving as a potent reminder of the toll that four decades of rapid industrialisation have taken on the Chinese environment. This is far from a modern problem. Historian Mark Elvin, in The Retreat of the Elephants, plots an almost continuous process of environmental instability in the People’s Republic of China. He traces today’s crisis back almost 2,000 years: to deforestation during the Han dynasty, which accounts for the lack of trees in large parts of central China today.

Certainly my own experience of how this looks in China extends beyond 2012. Seventeen years earlier, while living in Hohhot, inner Mongolia, I remember smogs every bit as dramatic, caused by the high use of coal and fossil fuels. A few years later, one April in Beijing, the skies grew dark in the middle of the day; a severe sandstorm had arrived, and people were forced to flee indoors. Desertification, over-building, lack of water, poor soil quality, destruction of species, appalling air quality — all have been the cause of deep concern to the Chinese Communist Party for decades.

Faced with this weight of evidence, it would be strange if the Chinese government adopted the kind of sceptical attitude that, for instance, some Australian leaders have about any links between human activity and climate. Indeed, much has been written in recent weeks about President Xi’s expected absence from COP26 next week, but it would be reductive to take that as a sign of climate change apathy. China, after all, is situated in a region that has been historically affected by earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters. And in recent decades, let alone months, these have grown more severe.

But China’s politicians find themselves in a quandary: how should they balance these concerns with the country’s imperative to grow at whatever cost, just as the West did during the high phase of industrialisation? Most Chinese citizens seem, even today, to know about the smogs that blighted London in the late Forties and early Fifties. The tactic seemed to be that this sort of occurrence was inevitable, and could be cleaned up once industrialisation had been achieved.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson is no green superhero

By James Rebanks

That’s partly why, at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, the Chinese delegation, along with 76 other developing countries, largely insisted that the greatest number of carbon emission cuts needed to come from the US and Europe. Most of these places had outsourced much of their most polluting industries to China; per capita emissions comparing an American with a Chinese made the latter pale into insignificance. Looming over all of this was a suspicion among some in China that the whole climate change negotiation was just another attempt by Washington and its allies to put a break on Beijing’s economic development.

By 2015, and the next major conference in Paris, things had changed. Smogs such as those in Beijing in 2012, along with a rising sense of frustration and concern among Chinese citizens, meant a more proactive stance had become necessary. But the most important development had been the appointment in late 2012 of a new national leader, Xi Jinping.

Xi’s politics were focused on appealing to the new middle class — those who lived in cities, worked in services, and were concerned about the cost of living and their quality of life. For them, water, food security and clean air that didn’t kill them were priorities. Yet Xi was by no means an environmentalist for convenience’s sake; earlier in his career, as party leader of the huge, eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, he had been unusual in often talking about the importance of care for the environment.

Suggested reading

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

And so, “Greening” China has become a major policy preoccupation, with Xi’s announcements becoming increasingly bold. After supporting, and then signing up to, the commitments to cut emissions made in Paris in 2015, China’s stance was enhanced by the withdrawal from the deal of America under Trump in 2017. Biden may have later rejoined the Paris agreement, but the damage to America’s image had already been done: Xi was able to claim he was doing more to save the environment than the US. Indeed, this is one of the few issues where China has managed to improve its reputation in the last few years.

A series of pledges to be carbon neutral by 2060, and to aim for peak emissions by 2030, culminated in Xi’s surprise announcement at the UN General Assembly last month that China would no longer build coal-fired power stations abroad. Despite all their perpetual arguments in other areas, in this one, Europe, China and the US at least have some common ground.

Yet paradoxically, China still needs to grow and remains fundamentally reliant on fossil fuels, which constitute the source of two thirds of its energy. The aim to focus on quality of growth rather than quantity is clearly stated by the Xi government. But just how far they can go in squeezing people’s material development by demanding higher costs for energy, and use of more expensive alternatives, is another question. On top of this, it remains unclear whether the targets referred to above — particularly having emissions peak in 2030 — will be sufficient, let alone achievable.

That isn’t to say there aren’t any positives. However critical we might be of the Chinese government, and the political system it operates under, and however sceptical we might be about its real commitment to combat climate, it is surely better that we start from the position we are currently in: one of broad alignment. China led by climate change deniers would be a disaster.

Suggested reading

The myth of monolithic China

By Lee Jones

And even if it is self-interest that motivates Beijing, it is also reassuring that, in this area, that self-interest works in the rest of the world’s benefit. It is also hugely important that Xi has committed, through the 14^th Five Year Plan passed earlier this year, staggering amounts on research and development. With approximately 7% of GDP — more than 500 billion US dollars — being spent on different forms of research, much of it dealing with environmental sciences, China has placed its formidable financial resources in an area where, once more, the benefits will flow to the rest of the world, particularly if it succeeds in finding carbon capture technologies, or other forms of energy that can quickly and safely replace coal.

Xi’s expected absence from COP26, then, is far from the end of the world. He still styles himself as an environmentalist. Witness his attendance at a biodiversity summit in Kunming earlier this month: “We shall take the development of an ecological civilisation as our guide to coordinate the relationship between man and nature,” he said in his keynote speech.

Yes, recent power shortages in the northeast of the country have underlined the need for China to produce more energy. But the underlying imperative to protect the environment still holds for Xi. Achieving that while continuing to industrialise is unlikely to be easy — but that doesn’t mean cautious optimism is misplaced.

The pivot point of Squid Game, the captivating South Korean miniseries that has become Netflix’s most popular series at launch, is its second episode. By now the premise has been vividly established: 456 financially desperate people have been transported to a private island to compete in a series of homicidally souped-up children’s games to win a jackpot of 45.6 billion won (£29 million). The winner takes all; the losers die.

It’s not hard to track the DNA of this death-game concept through The Hunger Games and Purge franchises, the 2000 Japanese smash Battle Royale, and the 1970s Stephen King novellas The Running Man and The Long Walk, all the way back to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. Usually, though, such contests are conducted by the state in a near-future dystopia. While the island resembles the micro-dystopia seen in the Sixties TV show The Prisoner — with which Squid Game shares a playground colour scheme, tone of sinister courtesy and replacement of names with numbers — the world it inhabits is present-day South Korea.

Another traditional premise that showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk rejects is the idea that there is no escape. According to the rules, contestants are free to abandon the game and return to society if a simple majority votes to do so, which is what happens in episode two. Game over? Of course not. The show then explains how the characters’ everyday lives are so brutally, intolerably restricted that even near-certain death seems like the better option. During the vote, one character says: “Will it be any different if we leave? Life out there is hell anyway, damn it.” Another agrees: “I’d rather stay here and die trying than die out there like a dog.” Ultimately, 93% of the contestants choose to rejoin the game. The episode is called “Hell”.

These scenes of lives under hideous financial pressure are not a world away from the work of Bong Joon-ho, whose 2019 film Parasite, the most successful South Korean movie ever, won four Academy Awards. Whether he’s working in a realist mode (Mother), science fiction (Snowpiercer) or a hybrid of the two (Okja, The Host), Bong is obsessed with inequality and injustice, although his conclusions, especially when it comes to solidarity among the have-nots, are diverse and contradictory. He is not alone: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 arthouse hit Burning also depicts the human cost of economic desperation.

Squid Game may not have the thematic complexity of Parasite but both are thrilling class-war allegories with mass appeal. (It has received the ultimate phenomenon-confirming accolade of a ridiculous moral panic about schoolchildren mimicking games which are, minus the fatalities, simply old-fashioned children’s games.) But even though inequality has recently become a common undercurrent in Hollywood movies, from Nomadland to Joker to Us, there’s no equivalently popular explicit satire in the US, which raises two questions: Why are these stories coming out of South Korea? And why are they sweeping the world?

More from this author

The dark origins of the Sopranos

By Dorian Lynskey

“Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology,” Bong told the Guardian last year, “but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”

Starting in the Sixties, South Korea experienced a hyper-accelerated version of capitalism which pulled tens of millions out of poverty. In recent decades, GDP growth has only dipped once, during the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis. But this frantic expansion also introduced an unfamiliar dog-eat-dog mentality to Korean society. “Korea achieved economic development in a short span of time, which is why competition can be more intense here than in other countries,” says Jung Ho-Yeon, who plays the sullen North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok. The net worth of the country’s top 20% of earners is 166 times that of the bottom 20% and rising fast. The birth rate is falling because many young people feel unable to afford a family.

Hwang, who conceived Squid Game in 2008 when his own family was struggling with debt, believes that inequality in South Korea had to get worse before anyone would commission it. “Sadly, the world has changed in that direction,” he recently told Korea Times. “The series’ games that participants go crazy over align with people’s desires to hit the jackpot with things like cryptocurrency, real estate and stocks.”

South Koreans work some of the longest hours in the world but that is not always enough to stay on top of rocketing house prices, inflation and medical bills, so many workers turn to get-rich-quick schemes. South Korea is the world’s third largest market for cryptocurrencies, some of which are fraudulent. When Squid Game’s main character, the shambolic gambling addict Seong Gi-Hun, is first invited to join the game, his initial response is scepticism: “Is this some sort of new pyramid scheme?” He’s not wrong.

The other option for the so-called “dirt spoon” is debt. Squid Game incorporates a real TV news clip reporting that the GDP to household debt ratio has risen to 96.9%, but it is already out of date: by the end of 2020 that figure was 103.8%. The average debt equals 171.5% of annual disposable income, rising to 270% for millennials in their 30s. It’s no surprise that debt is the leading cause of suicide in South Korea — or that it is debt, rather than poverty, which plagues most of Squid Game’s players.

South Korea is at a stage where social pressure to succeed no longer aligns with the chances of success. Squid Game, then, is an extreme example of a common malaise: what happens when people who have been told they can thrive as long as they work hard and play by the rules discover that the game is broken and they cannot win after all?

But the show also combines this economic reality with Korea’s long tradition of satire, to which the concept of han is fundamental. Dating back to the 1910-45 Japanese occupation of Korea, the meaning of han is so fluid and contested that it is effectively untranslatable, though the scholar Suh Nam-dong gives a taste of its complexity and inadvertently captures what it’s like to watch Squid Game: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong — all these combined.” This version of han breeds a potent satirical blend of black comedy, violence, protest and despair.

More from this author

The dying art of the hatchet job

By Dorian Lynskey

Squid Game may not be strictly concerned with class — some players never had anything; some had it and lost it — but they have all encountered more snakes than ladders. Debt and desperation are the great levellers. Key characters symbolise different fractures in Korean society. Kang Sae-byeok speaks to the lasting trauma of a country split in half in 1945. Player 244, a corrupt pastor, represents the evangelical megachurches that sprang up in the Eighties and Nineties. Abdul Ali is an undocumented Pakistani migrant trapped by an employer who refuses to pay him. The embezzling banker Cho Sang-woo shows that even overachievers can be destroyed by their aspirations. One of the show’s many tragedies is that nobody really needs 45.6 billion won. After a certain point, the survivors could split the pot and all escape their financial abyss, but sharing the spoils is antithetical to the rules of the game.

The black-masked “Front Man”, who runs the game for its unseen creator, insists, in an episode called “A Fair World”, that it is more just than capitalism: “Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, the players get to play a fair game under the same conditions. Those people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we’re giving them the last chance to fight fair and win.” Even before we discover that this is complete bullshit, we see how the game breeds its own inequalities, whether by fomenting division between the players or requiring them to make choices without understanding the consequences. In the second game, players must choose one of four shapes before learning that they must carve it out of thin honeycomb with a needle. “What kind of a sick game is this?” protests one doomed player. “Why do some get an easy shape when others are stuck with difficult ones?”

Squid Game’s most hateful characters are the cold-eyed realists who understand that morality is a fatal luxury in this game. Empathy and collaboration occasionally pay dividends but the gangster Jang Deok-su finds that violence and ruthlessness are just as useful in the game as they are in real life, while the canny Sang-woo proves adept at abusing the letter of the rules. Inside and outside the game, fairness and equality of opportunity are perfomatively celebrated but not practised. There is no relief from han.

The show’s only serious blunder is the introduction of some super-rich VIPs whose cartoon villainy reminded me of a line from The Simpsons episode “Kamp Krusty”: “Gentlemen, to evil!” Hwang says that they represent “the power elite, the global CEOs” but a sustained metaphor for structural injustice does not benefit from a gilded clique of irredeemable bastards. Unlike Parasite, which is smart enough to make clear that the solution to an unjust system is not simply nicer rich people, Squid Game threatens to squander its satirical momentum.

More from this author

Nirvana's teen spirit will never get old

By Dorian Lynskey

Fortunately, the finale is a suitable downer, confirming that the game is not just a sham but so corrupting and brutalising that victory cannot be enjoyed by anyone with a conscience. (Its bitterly ironic title, “One Lucky Day”, references a classic 1924 Korean novel about backfiring aspiration.) For all the memes and merchandising opportunities, Squid Game is so shatteringly bleak that I find it hard to agree with Jung Ho-yeon that it teaches viewers “to have faith in humanity”.

But even if you frown on its spectacular violence and relatively broad strokes, you have to acknowledge that this savage allegory for a splintering society is reaching exponentially more people than Burning, or even Parasite, and you have to ask why. For ultimately, the sense that the game is rigged is not just South Korea’s problem. Squid Game has the power to fill anyone with han.

Driving this increasingly confrontational approach is a view of China as a monolithic, authoritarian state embarked on a long-term strategy to overthrow US hegemony. Compared to Western states — riven by factional strife, paralysed by democratic deadlock, flailing about in the Middle East and seemingly unable to plan beyond next Tuesday — China certainly seems a fearsome challenger. Its plans cover everything from domestic Artificial Intelligence development to global infrastructure, while the top-down China Communist Party (CCP) regime ensures strict implementation and compliance. Some analysts have even suggested the existence of a 100-year strategy to displace the United States, implying an incredible capacity for long-term strategic planning.

The trouble is: this isn’t true. The Chinese party-state does not work like this. As I explain in a new book, Fractured China, the party-state is much more fragmented than many Westerners believe. Indeed, central policymaking is often loose and vague, with many competing interests shaping what actually happens on the ground.

Under Mao, the Chinese party-state was highly centralised, with top-down “command and control” systems that allowed central agencies to micromanage China’s economy and society. However, in Deng Xiaoping’s post-1978 “reform and opening up” era, these institutions were dismantled to facilitate the turn to capitalism.

Power and control over resources was extensively decentralised to provincial and local governments, as well as the emergent private sector. Privatisation and corporatisation turned former government ministries into free-wheeling, profit-seeking enterprises whose overseas activities are often beyond the ability of Chinese regulators to control. And as party cadres moved into business, and business tycoons joined the party, competing cadre-capitalist networks emerged across the party-state.

Suggested reading

China and Russia's deal with the devil

By David Patrikarakos

Over the past decade, policymaking has been fragmented across a host of national and subnational agencies, often with competing interests and agendas. Some previously domestic agencies have acquired an international role, with even provincial governments having their own foreign and commercial offices.

Provincial governments have, for example, signed a number of trade and investment deals with governments in Asia and Africa. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then, is not in control of Chinese foreign policy, and often does not even know what other agencies are up to — until some crisis erupts, such as that in Ghana when the local government of Shangli county in Guangxi province deliberately “exported” tens of thousands of artisanal gold miners to offset local unemployment, sparking a populist anti-Chinese backlash and a government crackdown.

Of course, central leaders do still retain some powerful mechanisms for coordinating the fractured party-state. And these all have some effect on how the system works. But they do not add up to strategic, top-down control of every aspect of Chinese behaviour. Top leaders may convene “leading small groups”, committees bringing together different agencies in a given policy area, to try to cohere them around common purposes. But these purposes are often left vague to accommodate competing interests and agendas.

Equally vague are CCP elites’ speeches and slogans, which set an overall “tone” and direction for policy. Subordinates must orient themselves to these slogans to win policy support, funding and promotion. But they are so general that they usually require extensive interpretation to work out what they mean in practice.

Central agencies’ policies are likewise frequently loose “opinions” that local governments must adapt to local conditions. This all creates enormous scope for subordinates to interpret central “directives” in ways that actually advance their own sectional interests, rather than any geostrategic grand strategy. Indeed, the system actively encourages experimentation within loose guidelines — what former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping called “crossing the river by feeling for the stones”.

The most important cohering mechanisms are the CCP’s powers of appointment, appraisal and discipline, which leaders can use to encourage loyalty and punish wayward cadres. Xi Jinping is making particularly strong use of these powers — having, for example, prosecuted over two million cadres for corruption. That such purges seem necessary reflects the epochal transformations in China’s party-state, which, while spurring rapid economic growth, have also weakened central control, undermined the regime’s authority, and enabled massive local corruption.

Suggested reading

The West can learn from China

By Marshall Auerback

Such dynamics have, for instance, played out in the current strife over Xi’s drive for “common prosperity”. Everyone must orient themselves to this agenda, but no one — probably including Xi himself — really knows what it actually means, and everyone tries to wrap it around their own personal preferences. Hard-line leftists in China have interpreted “common prosperity” as unleashing a long overdue attack on the rich, terrorising many business tycoons, who have quickly donated billions to state-linked good causes. But others insist that “common prosperity is not egalitarianism,” and will not involve “robbing the rich to help the poor”, bashing the Left for “triggering ideological confusion and panic”.

Or take Xi’s call for a “toilet revolution” in 2015, in a speech lamenting the often-dreadful state of China’s public lavatories. Local governments seized on this vague utterance to justify splurging a staggering $3bn on toilet upgrades over the next 18 months, doubtless enriching many state-linked construction companies, before the horrified State Council reined them in.

Indeed, Chinese local governments are especially adept at exploiting their autonomy to further their own interests, leading to highly irrational outcomes, which are often misinterpreted as some kind of cunning strategy.

For example, Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, the shadow Asia minister, recently accused China of “deliberately overproducing steel” to dump on Western markets. In reality, overcapacity has been endemic across most basic Chinese industries since the 1990s — reaching 20 to 30% by the early 2010s — as local governments competed against one another to develop local industries and infrastructure through debt-fuelled over-investment. This is why China now has more airports per square kilometre than the US, and is awash with “ghost towns” and loss-making roads and railways, and why many local governments and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are effectively bankrupt.

But it is China’s BRI that provides the best example of how these dynamics play out internationally. Western commentary tends to depict the BRI as Xi’s cunning grand strategy, designed to undermine US leadership and ensnare developing countries through “debt-trap diplomacy”. Detailed maps give the impression of a strategic blueprint being faithfully rolled out by officials and companies.

The reality is very different. “One belt, one road” emerged as a slogan in 2013 following two speeches by Xi, which largely just described what China was already doing: investing and building infrastructure in developing countries. But quickly, everyone piled in. Over the next two years, provincial governments and state-owned enterprises lobbied ferociously to get their pet projects incorporated into the BRI. Consequently, the project’s guidelines are remarkably vague and capacious, involving no clear objectives, no timeline, no dedicated resource commitments, and no real prioritisation. Practically every party-state activity has been squashed in.

Suggested reading

Science journals have been corrupted by China

By Ian Birrell

Even today, there is no official Chinese map of the BRI, and unofficial ones were banned in 2017. There is not even a clear definition of what constitutes a BRI country or project: different agencies use different metrics to suit themselves. BRI projects are not devised in Beijing, according to a strategic blueprint. They normally originate with foreign governments, seeking funds to accelerate infrastructure development, which may also be useful for securing electoral support or fuelling patronage networks through dodgy construction contracts. And they are often egged-on by Chinese SOEs — not because they want to advance China’s geostrategic interests, but because they want to win lucrative tied aid contracts. Consequently, projects are as likely to occur outside of the six broad “corridors” sketched in the BRI guidelines as inside them.

Indeed, oversight over the BRI is remarkably weak. Chinese policy banks and regulators have very little capacity to evaluate projects’ feasibility, and consequently approve many “white elephants”, such as the notorious Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Half of China’s overseas projects are loss-making. Regulators also have no real capacity to scrutinise projects’ implementation, relying instead on host countries to supervise them. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is barely involved in decision-making, and is typically only brought in when these problems spark major diplomatic incidents. China is still crossing the river while feeling for the stones, but it is stubbing its toes as it goes along.

And so responding to the behaviour of every Chinese entity as though it were intentionally planned and sanctioned by the top Chinese leadership is clearly misguided. The Chinese party-state is not monolithic — it is fractured, even when it comes to Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative.

Rather than confronting an imaginary strategic monolith, then, Western analysts and policymakers should develop a much more nuanced understanding of China and the internal struggles animating the party-state. In some policy areas, the interests involved do make cooperation difficult or even impossible. But elsewhere, there are forces and agencies that want to work constructively with foreign partners, creating scope for collaboration and mutual learning.

The UK’s decision to join and shape China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), for example — rather than boycotting it, as Washington demanded — is a good case in point. The AIIB has adopted similar standards to existing multilateral development banks, while also trying to drive up the standards of China’s overseas projects.

A new Cold War will only isolate and immobilise these groups, empowering nationalist and paranoid factions who are convinced the West cannot tolerate China’s rise. Unless we tread carefully, and develop a more realistic understanding of China, we risk provoking a confrontation that we might not be able to win.

In its officially approved history, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated internal enemies, vanquished imperialist powers and brought an end to China’s “Century of Humiliation”. The stains of defeat left by a series of opium wars and unequal treaties from the 1840s onwards were washed away by the revolutionary victory of 1949. The Chinese people, in the words attributed to Mao Zedong, had “stood up” and defeated colonialism.

But there’s a problem with this heroic narrative. Had it not been for colonialism and the imperial powers, there would never have been a successful Chinese Communist Party in the first place. If the sclerotic Qing Empire had not been forced to accommodate European military powers during the nineteenth century, the ideas and networks that allowed a communist movement to exist would never have been able to come together in the twentieth.

The CCP was not founded in Shanghai by accident. The first congress was held in the newly built home of one of the 15 revolutionary pioneers, Li Hanjun, at 106 Rue Wantz in what was then the French Concession. The French Concession and the neighbouring “International Settlement” (originally the British and American “concessions”) had been created because of the first of the unequal treaties: the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing following the first Opium War, under which China ceded Hong Kong to the British.

The two city districts were not formally colonies, but Chinese law did not apply there. By the early twentieth century, their combination of loose regulations and global connections had turned Shanghai into an international entrepôt. In the words of historian Tony Saich: “Shanghai was home to a nascent labour movement and its international ambience meant that not only people but also ideas flowed freely. Moreover, the foreign concessions meant that the activists could meet and conspire out of the reach of the Chinese authorities.

Suggested reading

Has China rescued the West?

By Aris Roussinos

Li Hanjun and his brother Li Shucheng had built neighbouring houses in the French concession precisely to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this imperial intrusion on China’s territory. Both were political activists and their ideas, like their homes, were constructed from a hybrid of Chinese and European styles. Preserved for its role in CCP history, 106 Rue Wantz (now 76 Xingye Road) is one of the few remaining examples of a once popular Sino-European architecture known as shikumen.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Shanghai was one of around 30 “treaty ports” around the coast of China and along the Yangzi River. All had been forced on a reluctant Qing Empire by the threat of European military force. Some were insignificant harbours while others played roles that went much wider than trade. Shanghai and Tianjin became enclaves of radicalism, centres of newspaper and book publishing that spread foreign ideas far into their hinterlands. One of the CCP’s co-founders, Chen Duxiu chose to found his magazine New Youth in Shanghai in September 1915.

These radicals were following in the footsteps of European evangelicals a couple of decades earlier. Organisations such as the Christian Literature Society had been created by Brits and Americans to spread the good news of both Jesus and Western culture throughout what they regarded as a decaying Asian empire. They founded newspapers to translate the latest ideas about science and society into Chinese. They may not have converted many Christians but they radically transformed the worldviews of a generation of reform-minded students and officials.

One of these missionaries, a Baptist from Carmarthenshire named Timothy Richard, is still remembered in the Communist Party Museum on the former site of Peking University as the first person to publish the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Chinese. Meanwhile, John Fryer, from Hythe in Kent, was the founder and editor of a magazine, Gezhi Huibian (known in English as the Chinese Scientific Magazine). In 1892 it published what is thought to be the first article in Chinese suggesting a division of humanity into categories based upon skin colour. These proselytisers, and many like them, helped spread ideas of evolution, social progress, racism and nationalism in the final decades of the Qing state.

Suggested reading

How to stop China's long march

By Edward Luttwak

Protected by international treaties that guaranteed them immunity from local laws, missionaries and other Westerners could preach across the country. “Extra-territoriality” allowed them to create local “study societies” in which new ideas could be introduced and debated under the noses of the authorities.

These groups and methods were copied by the leading reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao with their “Self-Strengthening Study Society”. Another historian of the early years of CCP, Hans van de Ven of the University of Cambridge, has argued that it was this “infrastructure” of intellectual networks that created the foundation for the subsequent growth of radical organisations and ultimately the Communist Party itself.

Other missionaries helped to create hybrid institutions intended to reform and modernise the Qing Empire. The Rev W.A.P. Martin, who had acted as a translator for the American delegation during the negotiations for the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, became the founding president of Peking University in 1898. Timothy Richard was the engine behind the creation of Shanxi University in 1902.

By the 1910s, Peking University was providing both the ideas, and in many cases the employment, behind the intellectual movement that gave birth to communism. Mao Zedong was the assistant librarian there, working under Li Dazhao who became the other co-founder of the CCP. By then Chen Duxiu had become head of the Literature department. Many of the other professors were key figures in the “New Culture Movement” which called for the abandonment of traditional ideas and the adoption of Western science and democracy. It was disillusionment with Western promises that led some to join the “May Fourth Movement” protests in 1919 and then to turn to communism.

In 1918, Mao and a few other students formed the “New Citizen Study Society” based on the earlier missionary-led model. Its key beliefs were also borrowed from the missionary-inspired reformist movement. Even the name — “New Citizen” — was copied from a newspaper edited by the reformist Liang Qichao who had once worked as Timothy Richard’s assistant. The missionaries, the reformists and the revolutionaries all prioritised the transmission of Western ideas to the masses.

Suggested reading

China will never stop rewriting history

By Isabel Hilton

Studying in Japan, too, was a critical element in the communist awakening, although don’t expect any mention of this from the current CCP leadership who prefer to portray Japan as a bogeyman rather than a source of enlightenment. In the half-century following 1853, when the US Navy had forced open Japan’s markets and society, the elite in Tokyo and other cities had whole-heartedly adopted Western ideas of modernisation, liberalism and nationalism. As a child in the 1900s, Li Hanjun had been sent to study in Japan and remained there for a decade. He wasn’t alone: Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu and thousands more like them lived and studied there. The ideas they acquired flowed back into China during and after the revolutionary events of the 1910s.

By the time Li Hanjun showed up in Shanghai, the foundations of what would become the CCP were falling into place. The catalyst that turned talk into action was the presence of two foreigners among the 15 delegates to the First Party Congress in Rue Wantz in July 1921. One was a Dutchman, Henricus (Henk) Sneevliet. The other was a Russian, Vladimir Nikolsky. Both attended as representatives of the Communist International: sent by Lenin to bring about revolution in East Asia.

This was just one more contribution to a globalised series of events and accidents that had unfolded without any central plan over the previous four decades. Chinese communism, just like Chinese nationalism, developed as a set of hybrid ideas — mixing elements of local culture with supposedly universal values derived from Western sources. Its hybridity was, and remains, its strength. Nonetheless, communism, as it developed in Shanghai and elsewhere, was just as much a colonial ideology as the liberal nationalism and the colonialism that it claimed to oppose.

Suggested reading

President Xi will never accept defeat

By Ian Birrell

Let’s try to imagine a counterfactual. What would have been different if European states had not mastered naval gunnery? What if there hadn’t been opium wars or treaty ports, missionaries or magazines? What if Japan had remained closed?

The Qing Empire was already in crisis by 1840. Its economy was failing to provide for its people, hardship was spreading, and rebel groups were already challenging central authority.  In time, these dynamics would have probably spelled the end of the empire. The Qing Dynasty, a Manchu lineage whose homeland was north of the Great Wall, would have collapsed and their state would have fragmented.

Lacking the “glue” of Western notions of nationalism to hold the state together, the empire’s constituent parts — Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria and “China Proper” — would have split. Perhaps those areas closest to the Soviet Union would have ended up being incorporated within it (as Mongolia was in 1921). Some parts of the empire may have ended up communist but not Chinese Communist.

Without the treaty ports, the international connections, the intellectual milieu and the organisational networks that developed as a result of imperial interference, there would have been no political space in which the CCP could emerge. The imperial powers provided it all. So, when Xi Jinping and the Politburo celebrate their party’s centenary over the coming weeks, they should really raise a glass to the colonialists who got them to where they are today.

Back in the real world, we speak of Europe and Asia as if they were separate continents. However, that too is a work of fantasy. On a map without borders what you see is one continent, not two.

The border between Europe and Asia is arbitrary. One section runs north-south along the Urals, a lengthy but far from insuperable barrier to east-west travel. After the mountains peter out, we switch to the Ural river. That takes us to the Caspian and then the mountains of the Caucasus (but not at their highest ridge line). Moving west, we cross the Black Sea and arrive at the Bosphorus – a line of separation so meagre that it’s not only the same country on both sides, but also the same city (Istanbul).

Is there a more meaningful distinction between Europe and Asia?

Europe was once identified with Christendom. These days, the former seems embarrassed with that old association, while the latter stretches far beyond its former limits. If there aren’t already more practicing Christians in China than Europe, there soon will be.

So what does that leave?

Democracy? Nope, plenty of that in Asia now.

Ancestry? Not when the closely related peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean are divided between three continents.

What about economics and trade? Not anymore, says Bruno Maçães in the Guardian:

“Europe is disappearing. Not because – as you often hear – we are returning to a world of small nations, proud and sovereign, but because Europe is being replaced by a much vaster and more interesting geographic unit: Eurasia, the combination of the two continents of Europe and Asia, stretching from Lisbon to Shanghai or Jakarta. The rise of Asia forces us to place the continents on the same level, no longer separated by different levels of historical development. New connecting infrastructure, trade and the permeability of borders are drawing the whole of Eurasia together.”

As also mentioned in a previous UnPacked, Maçães believes that Brexit Britain needs to embrace the Eurasian future:

“…the UK could yet become one of the most important hinges holding the supercontinent together… Britain can be a driver of economic growth in India, Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia – and greatly benefit from it. With Japan, it can establish privileged partnerships in the development of robotics, AI and self-driving vehicles.

“…While Germany and China head to an inevitable clash about who will lead the next industrial revolution, Britain is in possession of that elusive gold dust that Asian manufacturing powerhouses will be missing for a long time: cutting-edge services and finance.”

Recommended reading

How Brexit Britain could help China build a new world

By Peter Franklin

It is sometimes hoped – or feared – that Britain outside of the EU will become like Singapore. In this context, the south east Asian republic is a shorthand for barely-regulated, low tax, hyper-capitalism. As well as misrepresenting the real Singapore, such a vision of the future is not what Britain voted for.

Maçães, however, draws out the true lesson of Singapore’s history as an independent state:

“…Singapore was quickly able to replace access to the Malaysian hinterland with trade and investment links with more distant markets. Just as Singapore became an Asian country more deeply connected with Europe and the United States than with its Asian neighbours, Britain could in just a couple of decades vastly expand its links with four of the five largest economies of the 21st century: China, Japan, India and Indonesia.”

It’s a provocative thesis, but if the nations and businesses of Eurasia are to draw closer together, then it’s unlikely to be within the protectionist trade barriers of the European Union. The other big Eurasian powers including China, Japan, Russia and India also have their protectionist tendencies – and some nationalist ones too.

The United Kingdom, however, could provide a very different environment, not so much neutral territory, as an open venue for economic, scientific and cultural exchange.

Maçães asks if “a new Eurasian capital [is] being born on the shores of the Thames?” It’s a good question – and the answer will depend on Britain’s willingness to seize the opportunity.

“A recent review of CNN’s news coverage found 92% of it was devoted to Donald J. Trump.

“The details are astonishing. Of 13 hours, 27 minutes of actual news coverage on the day chosen, 12 hours, 19 minutes, was devoted to the Trump presidency. Everything else? ‘A mere 68 minutes – a little more than three minutes per hour’ versus nearly 40 for Trump.”

Nigel’s point is that in devoting so much attention to one story, the media is neglecting many other important stories (in particular, developments in technology that will be impacting on our lives long after a certain orange-haired gentleman leaves the Whitehouse).

I agree, but that’s not the limit of it. The Trump circus is so all-consuming that it even distracts attention from the Trump administration – which, believe it or not, does occasionally find time for some serious national and international politics.

In a post for his Marginal Revolution blog, the economist Tyler Cowen takes stock of the difference that Trump has made to America and the world so far. The most important developments concern America’s foreign policy. Let’s start with the obvious, i.e. North Korea:

“The situation with North Korea has moved to one of open confrontation. That said, there are stronger commercial sanctions on North Korea than before, and the attitude of the Chinese does seem to have shifted toward recognizing North Korea as a problem needing to be solved. For the time being, both the missile tests and the jawboning have stopped, for unknown reasons. Note that the South Korean and Japanese markets remain high, of course the U.S. market is strong too.”

That missile test pause has, let us note, ended overnight.

Then there are two items about Japan and India:

“Trump has spent a great deal of time with Prime Minister Abe [of Japan], the real ‘pivot toward Asia.’ Abe is being treated like the most important leader of the free world — is that crazy? Merkel is now teetering.

“The Trump administration has recognized and encouraged a much more explicit semi-military alliance between America and India, also part of the pivot. China-India relations could be the world’s number one issue moving forward.”

For those unfamiliar with the phrase  ‘pivot to Asia’, it is the idea that America should spend less time looking over the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, Russia and the Middle East and more time looking over the Pacific Ocean to the rising Asian powers.

As a strategy it received strong endorsement from Hillary Clinton (in her time as Secretary of State) and from President Obama himself. Arguably it also represents Obama’s most fundamental error – the underlying reason why he spent his Presidency being wrong-footed by Vladimir Putin and by events in the Middle East and North Africa.

It’s therefore very interesting that we see Trump persisting with the same strategic outlook – albeit stamped with his own unique, and terrifying, approach to international diplomacy.

In the Middle East, his focus is not on Syria or Iraq, but Saudi Arabia:

“The apparent ‘green light’ from the Trump administration probably raised the likelihood and extremity of the Saudi purge/coup. I give this a 20% chance of working out well, though with a big upside if it does. Whether you like it or not, so far it appears to me this is Trump’s most important initiative.”

It certainly will be if war breaks out between Saudi Arabia and Iran (and their respective allies).

Something else to pay attention to in Cowen’s analysis of Trumpian geopolitics is just how peripheral Europe is to it. There are just two passing references to the continent in the entire piece.

Europeans like to laugh at Donald Trump – and not without reason: he is absurd, he is grotesque, he is undignified.

On the other hand, he is relevant.