One phrase is particularly associated with Mao’s diminutive successor. “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white,” the memorable dictum goes. “If it catches mice, it’s a good cat”. In other words: it is possible for a socialist society to have a market economy — or a capitalist society to have a planned one. What matters is which social interests are privileged. Understand Deng’s feline-themed refrain, and the thinking behind it, and you grasp how contemporary China permits private firms, and the profit motive, while warding off the worst evils of capitalism. The economic objectives of the Chinese state are determined politically by the Communist Party, rather than reflecting the sectional interests of capital. The planner state isn’t always kind — it’s generally best not to have your fertility policy designed by a missile engineer — but it has dragged China to the top table of geopolitics.

In his own inimitable fashion, Donald Trump recently offered a mirror to Deng’s famous saying. “I respect China, because it’s… a system that, in theory, shouldn’t work,” he told an audience in Miami last week. “But if you look at China, how well they do, how much they produce. I mean, they produce so many cars that they actually have competitions over who can produce the fewest cars.” If Deng’s words were immortalized as the “white cat” formula, perhaps Trump had articulated the less poetic “too many cars” theory. It certainly distills how Chinese firms, often backed by the state, capture huge market share through oversupply. A decade ago, that meant a sudden profusion of solar panels. Today, it’s electric vehicles.

Such an overt admission of the success of the Chinese system, not least by a Republican president, might be unexpected — but it shouldn’t surprise us. Deng re-calibrated the political and economic system of his own country; now, almost half a century later, it increasingly feels as if the United States will have to follow suit. The question is whether, after Trump, it can. While the People’s Republic has a system where the parties can’t change but the policies can, America seems to operate in reverse. The faces, factions and rhetoric constantly evolve — polarization is everywhere, and ever more ferocious — but the underlying economic reality remains the same.

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Even before the Iran War, it was clear that the US, and the “political West” more generally, were in relative decline. Their collective high point came at the turn of the millennium, when the OECD countries comprised 80% of nominal global GDP. Today, by contrast, that figure stands at 60%, with economic clout — and, by extension, political power — flowing east. By another measure, indeed, China is already the world’s largest economy, with India and Russia behind the US in second.

Though it might be tempting to point to recent growth across the Pacific, economic expansion in America rests entirely on debt. While it’s true American GDP grew by an extraordinary $9 trillion between 2020 and 2025, the country’s national debt ballooned even more, rising by $11 trillion over the same period. Even at the start of the year, before the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the country’s jobs data, and stubborn deficit, were at odds with Trump’s rhetoric of an economic miracle. As with every Republican president since Reagan, his growth model is familiar: deficit-funded tax cuts while barking about smaller government. The Brookings Institution recently concluded that keeping tax breaks introduced by Trump would mean the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to more than 200% by the 2050s. Think Japan, just without the fast trains or social cohesion.

But it’s not just that the West is sluggish. China is increasingly competitive as both an industrial juggernaut and a global center for innovation. In the 2000s, when China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization, the assumption had been that, as America de-industrialized, it would move up the commodity chain, leaving the dirty work for poorer, less creative rivals. The avatar for such thinking was the Apple iPhone. While the handset was assembled in Asia, it was designed in California — home to the world’s largest company, and the first to reach a valuation of $1 trillion.

Today, however, China is building its own versions of the iPhone, from Xiaomi to Huawei, while remaining home to almost a third of global manufacturing. Then there is its burgeoning car industry. BYD is now the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, overtaking Tesla some years ago. Elsewhere, despite being banned from a number of Western markets, Huawei remains the global leader in 5G networks.

China also has a growing advantage in sectors like lithium-ion storage, solar cells and drones. Six of the world’s 10 leading battery producers are Chinese, while the country produces around 90% of all consumer UAVs. And the innovation gap in both fields is only set to grow. Emblematic of that is how BYD presently has more than 100,000 people working on research and development alone.

Finally, there is the country’s remarkable success with renewables. Nine out of every 10 solar panels are made in China. Given almost half of all electricity worldwide is now generated by renewables — with solar being the leading source by far — that means an exporting bonanza. Global solar capacity grew by 511 GW in 2025, and virtually all of that comes via panels made in the Middle Kingdom.

The war in Iran looks set to accelerate all this — not only emphasizing the industrial prowess of the People’s Republic, but underscoring its advantages as a so-called “planner state”, where private enterprise cooperates tightly with the state. Iran’s strategy of leveraging geography to close an economic chokepoint, and catalyzing a global energy crisis, means Beijing is set to be the conflict’s biggest winner.

In the first days of the war, one often encountered claims that attacks on both Iran and Venezuela were part of a new “Great Game”, with Washington hoping to undermine Beijing’s access to cheap fossil fuels. But besides Tehran only ever accounting for 12% of China’s supply, it was always the historic allies of America, not least in Europe and East Asia, that were most vulnerable to a blockade of the Persian Gulf. Pax Americana not only rested upon security guarantees for both regions, but in also ensuring a steady, cheap supply of energy. These assumptions are now imperiled and, with them, the credibility of the US global order.

Beijing prepared for this moment. Not only is China a net exporter of refined oil, but it also possesses a strategic reserve of 1.3 billion barrels of petroleum — enough to meet domestic demand for three months. So, as energy costs rise for competitors overseas, the Chinese state can offer price stability to domestic manufacturers. No less important, Chinese exporters stand to uniquely benefit — not only from domestic energy stability but also, for many sectors, increased demand. For the likes of BYD, CATL, which is a battery manufacturer, and LONGI, which makes solar panels, we are approaching a dream scenario. They’ve committed decades to creating the world’s most efficient renewable products, with highly optimized global supply chains. Until recently that seemed an uncertain bet. Yet in the weeks and months ahead, global demand will be unleashed.

Already, even before the deluge of orders materialized, China’s lithium-ion battery makers had seen their collective market values rise by $70 billion in the opening phase of the war. Last week, meanwhile, Indonesia’s president announced plans to increase solar capacity 10-fold over the next two years, from 11GW to 100GW. “We’ll convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles,” he added. “All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric”. Lee Jae Myung, the president of South Korea, has made similar noises, adding that the need to switch to renewables was so serious he couldn’t sleep.

If such rhetoric is to become reality, it means spending hundreds of billions on Chinese goods. And besides enabling an export bonanza for the country’s cleantech sector, which has benefited from decades of state support, something else highlights the acumen of China’s planner state: almost half of Congolese-mined cobalt will be in the hands of Chinese firms by the end of the decade, with around 70% of refining happening in the People’s Republic. That is important because the mineral is critical for lithium-ion batteries. While Washington waged a host of unnecessary wars in the Middle East, Beijing secured critical minerals for the backbone technology of the mid-21st century. The same is true for graphite and tantalum — the latter being a key metal for capacitors, central to stable wind and solar energy.

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When it comes to rare earth metals, meanwhile, China boasts a potential chokepoint of its own. The country has larger total deposits of rare earths than any other, a glaring concern for the United States given that its military is reputed to have reserves equivalent to no more than two months’ use. While it is true such minerals can be found outside of China, for instance in Australia, Beijing currently has a near-monopoly on refining and processing them. If it wishes for meaningful technological sovereignty, here is another industry Washington may soon need to start developing. From a military standpoint the importance of these minerals can’t be overstated. Each F-35 fighter jet, for instance, reputedly requires hundreds of kilograms of rare earth metals.

Yet as we’ve already seen, when your political consensus has long rested on the idea that industry is of secondary importance to financial services, technology firms and various forms of rentierism, that is virtually impossible to accomplish. The margin for such businesses can be large, certainly, but as enterprises they lack the scalability favored by US tech capital. If you view effective business through the prism of monopolies, as someone like Peter Thiel does, mining and processing, with its absence of network effects and high labor component, is deeply unattractive.

As NS Lyons wrote last year for UnHerd, the West’s lack of manufacturing capacity is its most glaring defensive weakness. Even now, despite years of fighting in Ukraine, Europe and the US can’t match Moscow’s ability to manufacture artillery shells. If the West is struggling to maintain parity with Russia — whose manufacturing base is nothing like as productive or wide-ranging as China’s — what hope would they have in a protracted conflict with Beijing? In 2025 China produced half a million consumer drones. The prospect of what that could mean in a war economy is staggering. The country’s shipbuilding capacity, meanwhile, is over 200 times greater than that of the United States.

China’s preparedness — a function of its aversion to market fundamentalism — together with the Iran war, now offers a historic opportunity for those advantages to be extended. Its power isn’t the result of a growing military-industrial complex, but the reflection of world-class civilian industries set to seize even more business. As these industries grow further in the months and years ahead, bolstered by Trump and Netanyahu’s war, that provides an even larger industrial base able to pivot in a time of war. The idea, therefore, that rearmament is the route to industrial renewal for Britain, as John Healey and much of the Labour party insist, is refusing to learn not only the major lessons of the last 25 years, but the last month. If a war with China ever came, the People’s Republic would defeat us for the very same reason it currently exploits demand for green technology: it makes stuff. Its defense capacity is built on its industrial base rather than the other way round.

While some have compared the unfolding events in the Persian Gulf to the Suez Crisis, the American-Israeli failure to inflict a decisive defeat on Tehran would more closely resemble the Fall of Singapore for the British Empire. It wouldn’t, in short, be the end of Pax Americana, but the beginning of the end. The erosion of its alliances; the declining confidence in its competence as a hegemon; the diminishing security returns on hosting American bases — all of these matter. But it is in starting a war which will see China’s leadership in industry and technology grow further still that reveals Washington has played its most foolish hand yet.

Quite suddenly, then, the future seems clearer. Energy stability, whether or not Europe uses more of its own limited fossil fuels, means more electrification, more batteries and more storage. In short, it means deploying more of the technologies where China is the unrivaled market leader. And with technology comes influence, with political realities then bound to shift too.

Deng’s second most famous quote concerned China on the global stage: “Hide your strength, bide your time.” With this kind of leadership — in technology, supply chains and, increasingly, moral authority — the time for hiding may now be at an end.

President Xi Jinping’s removal last month of General Zhang Youxia, until recently the most senior uniformed officer in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), has been interpreted in precisely this way. Western commentators have described the move as destabilizing, even self-defeating — and in the short term, that judgment may be valid. Yet by focusing only on the immediate disruption, they risk missing the bigger story: Zhang’s fall marks not the unraveling of Xi’s control over the military, but his success in remaking it in his image. 

The PLA has never been an apolitical military. From its foundation as the Red Army, it has always combined military tactics with extensive political indoctrination, deepened during formative events such as the Long March (1934-5). It remains, at its core, a Party army, embedded in the institutional structures, political norms, and — perhaps most importantly — ideological doctrine of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Power runs formally through Party mechanisms.

Yet the PLA has always had its own mythology. And for decades senior officers have enjoyed a level of discretion. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), generals, like other elites, had little room for maneuver, but that all changed when Deng Xiaoping set about modernizing the military in the Seventies. Military leaders were given more space to make their own choices about tactics and spending (which in turn led to increased corruption). Careers and promotions came to follow relatively conventional and foreseeable routes. Patronage mattered, but so did experience.

The new system left senior officers with a degree of institutional confidence and professional standing, which allowed them to inform and advise decisions made by the Party. The PLA’s leaders have as a result played a crucial role in developing China’s military strategy since the Nineties, a period that has seen its focus shift from land warfare to naval and air power.

After his rise to power in 2012, Xi Jinping moved fast to rein in military autonomy, becoming both the general secretary of the Party and the chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). (The two roles are often but not always held together: a reminder that the CMC is a separate power base.) One of his first targets was General Xu Caihou, the former vice chairman of the CMC, who was arrested in 2014 on charges of massive corruption. Only his death from cancer in 2015 prevented him from being court-martialed. In the years since, Xi has sought to tighten his control over the armed forces. But, until now, there still seemed to be some officers who were untouchable.

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Zhang was one of them. As first vice chairman of the CMC, he sat at the apex of China’s armed forces, second only to Xi himself. He had been unscathed by earlier purges that toppled officers of similar rank, protected by longstanding family and personal ties; Zhang’s father served with Xi’s during the Chinese Civil War of the Forties, making both men “red aristocrats”. His reputation for competence and rare combat experience — he fought in China’s 1979 war with Vietnam — gave him unique authority. He was too big a figure to be felled in the name of party discipline, anti-corruption, or factional housekeeping. 

Zhang stood strong while Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns uprooted the military system, demolishing entrenched networks and hollowing out senior ranks. Commanders have been investigated, removed or disappeared since 2012 at a rate unseen since the Cultural Revolution. Yet Zhang appeared to sit slightly outside this logic. Foreign observers often described him as one of the few officers who could speak frankly about readiness, logistics and the real costs of conflict. Former Pentagon official Drew Thompson, who met Zhang, remarked on his seriousness, his detailed questioning, and his respect for professional expertise. “I assessed that Zhang Youxia’s combat experience, his self-confidence, intellect and lifelong commitment to the defense of China and the Communist Party would protect him,” he wrote on his Substack after the arrest. In an increasingly disciplined system, that combination of wartime credibility and personal influence gave Zhang the rare ability to say “no” — or at least “not yet”.

In another world, that arrangement might have faded away gently. Zhang might have retired quietly at the next Party Congress, or else seen his influence diluted as other figures around him were promoted. Instead, Xi ordered his public downfall. His message was unmistakable: no rank, relationship, or history protects an officer from scrutiny. Corruption, disloyalty and failure to uphold the Party’s authority over the military are existential threats — even if, in Zhang’s case, the basis for those charges is murky at best.  

Chinese state media has framed the purge in unusually vitriolic moral and political terms, accusing General Zhang — as well as Chief of the Joint Staff General Liu Zhenli, who worked closely with him — of “undermining the Chairman’s authority”, “endangering the Party’s ruling foundation”, and “exerting vile influence on the Party”. Meanwhile it has exhorted the Party to “cleanse the institution of rot”, “eliminate ideological toxins”, and “promote organizational healing”. Translation: Zhang was not only corrupt but threatened the Party’s, and Xi’s, rule. As such, the Party needed to restore ideological discipline and reassert firm control over the armed forces. The implication is that Xi saw a generational reset of the military as unavoidable.

In the short term, this could all prove highly disruptive. A military leadership unsettled by investigations is unlikely to launch the most complex military operation in its history, which an assault on Taiwan would certainly be. Major campaigns require trust up and down the chain of command, confidence in delegation, and officers willing to exercise rapid judgments under pressure and amid uncertainty. These conditions are difficult to sustain when senior officers are acutely aware that missteps — especially political ones — carry heavy consequences.

But if Zhang’s downfall is the coup de grâce to the old order in the PLA, then the question is: what replaces it? It won’t be a vacuum. A new generation of generals is already rising. They have come up through an era of reform and modernization, with joint theater commands, new war‑fighting doctrines and a far more capable arsenal than their predecessors ever had. They have also spent their careers under Xi’s political campaign of “self‑rectification”, in which internal discipline is constant and the safest way to get promoted is to avoid standing out. For them, the lesson of Zhang’s downfall will be clear: personal advancement depends not just on competence, but on never looking like an independent pole of authority.

This is less about ideology than incentives. Officers who are conditioned in this environment are likely to be intensely attentive to the preferences of the Party center and acutely aware of the personal risks of deviation. So when the Party’s small civilian circle reaches a decision, there will be fewer internal brakes, a smaller chorus of voices with the confidence or legitimacy to push back. A system that constantly tests loyalty tends, over time, to narrow the range of views that ever reach the top. 

Systems built around discipline often hesitate in ambiguous situations, which can itself be dangerous when ships and aircraft are operating at close quarters. Yet once a clear order is given, those same systems can move with disturbing speed, because dissent has been driven out in advance. The danger, in other words, may lie less in deliberate aggression tomorrow than in miscalculation later, when decisions are made by a tighter circle who succumb to groupthink.

Seen in that light, Taiwan is part of the story but not its whole. Many Western military analysts have posited that China wants to be ready for a military capture of Taiwan by 2027, although that doesn’t mean this will happen. Over the next year or two, turmoil at the top of the PLA will probably lower the appetite for a high‑risk assault across the Strait. By the early 2030s, however, a reconstituted high command — greener in combat experience but fully socialized into Xi’s remade system — could make the region more volatile. A leadership that believes it finally has “its own” military, and faces fewer internal doubts, may calculate risk differently.

Meanwhile, the global zeitgeist is changing. Gone is the old language of the “rules‑based order”; today, large powers talk more about spheres of influence and less about restraint. In Washington, President Donald Trump has embraced a more transactional view of raw power, codified in a National Security Strategy that treats dominance by the “larger, richer, stronger” as a “timeless truth” of geopolitics, and as a simple fact of life. The United States should not be surprised, then, if China comes to a similar conclusion. Social Darwinism was central to the thinking of China’s 20th-century elites, and their successors have not forgotten it. 

A fully Xi‑controlled PLA, operating in this cutthroat new world, may reduce the risk of an overeager wayward general — perhaps raised in the spirit of the Wolf Warrior diplomats — dragging China into a conflict Xi doesn’t want. But it also increases the risk that, in the event that the civilian leadership is inching toward using force — over Taiwan, in the South China Sea, or in a crisis we have not yet foreseen — there will be fewer people in the room with the standing to say that the costs are too high. 

Mao Zedong said that the Party must always control the gun. For over a decade, President Xi has sought to do just that. He may finally have succeeded. 

It is these assurances that come to my mind — and that of my father, the Catholic publisher and businessman Jimmy Lai — as the Chinese state ramps up its persecution of him for the “crime” of insisting on democracy and rule of law in Hong Kong.

When my father came to Hong Kong, then a British colony, as a boy, he discovered his life’s great loves: God, family, and freedom. The freedoms he found were curtailed after the handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997. At first, it was gradual; he saw decreasing ad sales for his media properties, and subtle changes in the expressions on people’s faces. He was arrested one month after Beijing enacted the National Security Law on July 1, 2020, and in December 2020 was charged with violations of that law. 

On the morning of Feb. 9, my father was sentenced to 20 years in prison. At the age of 78 and in failing health, my father does not have 20 years; he doesn’t even have 10. Yet news outlets reported that he smiled and made a sign of gratitude to the crowd before leaving. 

Many people wondered why or even how he could smile. But even in my heartbreak, I didn’t.

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On Dad’s first day in prison, he told me he was in God’s good hands. He has repeated this multiple times throughout his imprisonment to his daughter, who is not good at very much other than worrying. Recently, when I left Hong Kong, five years into his imprisonment, I wrote to him expressing doubts about myself and about him. He chided me asking me why I doubted when God is so good. 

He wrote: “So, my dear daughter, though I understand your frustration, why did you doubt? Trust that God leads you in his ineffable way. The way is darkness for us, but [also] the best possible way for us, because He loves us more than we love ourselves.” 

The conditions in which my father is being kept have gone from bad to worse, and his health has deteriorated dramatically. He has developed worrying heart issues, visible signs of a compromised immune system (tooth rot and nail rot), and a litany of new conditions have appeared while previous ones have worsened. Yet his trust in divine providence grows only stronger. Echoing Saint Thomas More’s letter to his daughter, he has told me, “If we seek heaven on earth, we cut ourselves off forever from true happiness.” In one letter I received from him, he called the dire prison conditions in which he is kept a “holy sanctuary”, a retreat where solitude allows him to better feel God’s abundant grace and its ongoing impact on his life from even before he knew Christ. 

And while seeing his body breaking down cuts at me, he has used much of his time comforting me, telling me that suffering has cured him of his previous ignorance, acting as a “renewed baptism”. It has had the effect of bringing him closer to Jesus this life and next. And, in imagery I now often evoke, I’m reminded that although Christ suffers most, he teaches his disciples to pretend they are hiding at the foot of the crucifixion, which represents profound voluntary suffering. My father said he was grateful for the suffering that got him closer to God’s presence, saying “God’s action confounds but always turns out to be marvelous for us.”

In prison, my father wakes up in the middle of the night every night to pray. Before the crack of dawn, he wakes up to read the Gospel by leaning against his cell door to catch light from the corridor. I worry for his back and his waist but am comforted by the joy it gives him. He has said that doing so is like “touching the cloak of Christ” and that it ensures that “life is full, peaceful, and meaningful”. 

While he has always been a voracious reader, his book diet now consists almost exclusively of theology — ranging from Pope Benedict XVI to Saint John Henry Newman, and from Bishop Robert Barron to Hans urs Von Balthasar. He also studies drawing books to aid him in improving in his drawings; his two topics are the crucifixion and the Virgin Mary. I remember when he, ever the perfectionist, once spent eight hours on a drawing of the Virgin, only to be unsatisfied. 

He also spent a few days drawing the crucifixion for his friends who did not yet know Christ, because he wanted to ensure the God-Man’s act of love was sufficiently reflected in the drawing. I remember when he asked me to bring him photos of the Pieta to prison, and he started drawing it only to realize it would take some time to practice. Shortly afterward, the prison authorities banned him from sending those drawings out. 

The aspect of my father I most want to try to emulate is his almost unlimited capacity for love of God, for his family and friends, and not least, for those who wrong him. When he was mistreated in prison, I grew angry. Instead, my father told me to pray for the guard. He told me to pray that he, too, might feel the grace of God. 

One time, I said that I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to pray for people who contributed to my father’s suffering. He gently scolded me then. He reminded me that love comes from God and his grace is what gives us the capacity to love. He taught me the same growing up, but seeing him live it in these circumstances has been quite different. 

Nearly two millennia after the Christ event, the Italian mystic Padre Pio declared: “Blessed is the crisis that made you grow, the fall that made you gaze up to Heaven, the problem that made you look for God!” For my father, Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s descent into a dark night of oppression has been a source of light.

Britain’s intelligence agencies have belatedly admitted the gravity of the challenge. After a decade of neglecting the threats posed by an increasingly assertive China, MI5 warned of the “epic scale” of CCP espionage: the world’s largest intelligence apparatus, which commands tens of thousands of officers and agents, targets the UK “prolifically and aggressively”. According to MI5’s director, the CCP represents Britain’s most “game-changing” security challenge.

Yet while MI5 sounds the alarm, Britain’s response remains entirely incoherent. This month, the most serious breach of parliamentary security in living memory — an alleged spy operation run on behalf of the Chinese state — collapsed in court. Despite “slam-dunk” evidence of intelligence reaching Beijing’s top leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service could not persuade a single minister to state, on record, that China posed a national-security threat during the charge period.

On 21 October, the Labour government will decide whether to approve the construction of a vast Chinese embassy, opposite the Tower of London. This represents more than a planning dispute: it is a choice of whether to anchor, in the heart of the capital, the surveillance machinery of a one-party state which systematically crushes free expression, jails lawyers, and tortures its critics. The five-acre compound, heavily fortified and opaque by design, would be Britain’s largest foreign mission, housing more than 200 CCP employees and their families — any number of whom could be intelligence operatives.

The site offers Chinese intelligence an ideal perch within the arteries of the British economy. It is slated to sit directly atop sensitive fiber-optic cabling which transmits the City of London’s financial data — and a large share of global transactions. And this is a regime at the bleeding edge of digital surveillance technologies, actively working to reengineer the global financial system away from the dollar, and towards the Chinese yuan. Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove has warned that such proximity could allow China, “with impunity”, to tap those lines and “collect anything and everything going down those communication chains”. The White House has already expressed “deep concern”. For Britain’s allies, this is a critical test of reliability: as a member of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, the UK cannot afford to be regarded as the “weak link” through which sensitive intelligence might bleed to Beijing.

While intelligence officials now reassure Parliament that the risks are “manageable”, it is not clear why Britain’s allies should be convinced. The CCP has already successfully infiltrated Parliament; cultivated influence within the monarchy, and mounted large-scale cyber-attacks which compromised the data of 40 million UK citizens. Now, the collapse of the spy-case prosecution has dispelled any pretense of control. Britain’s China problem is an open wound — exposed, untreated, and festering in full view of its allies.

Beijing has made little effort to assuage concerns. On the contrary, it has refused the British government’s request to explain why its blueprints include mysteriously blacked-out rooms and an underground tunnel, insisting that further detail is “neither necessary nor appropriate”. It is a curiously contemptuous attitude. And when the roles are reversed, it becomes absurd. It is inconceivable that China would permit Britain to erect a vast fortified compound on Chang’an Avenue — within walking distance of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound and atop critical data infrastructure — let alone tolerate omissions labeled “none of your business” in the plans.

Chinese intelligence services represent a different kind of threat from most other states. Edward Snowden’s disclosures stripped away a polite fiction, revealing that embassies are not neutral houses of diplomacy, but platforms for espionage. Yet where embassies are typically used to gather information or advance strategic interests, Beijing integrates traditional espionage with the policing of ideology abroad. Its mission goes beyond the defense of China’s security to the preservation of the CCP’s monopoly on power through silencing critics wherever they live. This entails monitoring, intimidating, and neutralizing civilians — including students, dissidents, exiles, and academics — as much as it targets foreign governments.

At the heart of this effort is the Party’s United Front system, a global political influence network operating through Chinese embassies to co-opt institutions, silence dissent, and enforce ideological conformity beyond China’s borders. In practice, this means surveillance of diaspora communities, pressure campaigns against exiles, and harassment of activists associated with the CCP’s so-called “five poisons”: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese independence advocates, Falun Gong practitioners, and Chinese democracy activists. Uyghur activists in Britain have been threatened, while Hong Kong activists, including then-teenager Chloe Cheung, have had bounties placed on their heads. At times this repression has been brazen — as in 2022, when a Hong Kong pro-democracy protester was dragged by his hair into China’s Manchester consulate and beaten — but more often it works through fear and impunity, creating conditions where critics censor themselves rather than risk retaliation.

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This machinery has already extended into British academia. The Party’s ears and eyes are embedded within UK campuses through the United Front system. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, nominally cultural clubs, double as surveillance and pressure groups against dissenting voices on campus — reporting on peers and pressuring universities to cancel events critical of Beijing. At Cambridge, one friend, whose father was imprisoned and likely tortured in Xi Jinping’s political purge, confided that she only ever dared to speak about politics behind closed doors in her room, never on campus. “You never know who is listening,” she told me. Politically vetted teachers at Confucius Institutes, another arm of the Chinese state, mold China syllabi in the CCP’s image in over 30 British universities.

A CCP mega-embassy in London would reinforce this apparatus of intimidation. Britain cannot credibly condemn Beijing’s abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong while granting the Party greater capacity to harass its critics and chill debate on its own soil. To do so would not just endanger dissidents; it would accelerate the alarming drift towards illiberalism already visible in the UK, at a moment when comedians are arrested over provocative tweets and elderly ladies are branded as terrorists for holding pro-Palestine placards. It would also embed in British territory the very form of arbitrary power the country has spent centuries struggling to restrain.

For much of British history, the royal prerogative was enforced through terror — treason suspects could vanish into the Tower without trial or be disemboweled before jeering crowds. Slowly, a constitutional tradition was formed in opposition to such tyranny: Magna Carta bound the monarch to law; the Habeas Corpus Act barred imprisonment without charge, the Bill of Rights curtailed the Crown and secured freedoms of speech and petition, and, in modern times, the Human Rights Act armed the individual with legal protections. The settlement which emerged is simple and profound: no one is above the law, no one is beneath its protection.

China under the CCP represents the inversion of this tradition. Its leaked “Document No. 9”, circulated under Xi Jinping in 2013, castigated constitutional democracy, universal human rights and press freedom as “extremely malicious” Western imports. The Party does not recognize law as a constraint on power but wields it as a tool of domination. Arbitrary detention is routine, from the mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang to the prosecution of peaceful activists in Hong Kong. And freedom of expression is curtailed by the most comprehensive censorship and surveillance system on the planet. Petitioners who persist in challenging authority may be imprisoned or forcibly confined in psychiatric hospitals, fed anti-psychotics in the name of “stability”.

The implications of inviting such a system to plant its largest embassy in Europe beside the Tower of London would be long-lasting and corrosive. To the Chinese diaspora in Britain, it would signal that their security cannot be guaranteed. To allies, it would suggest Britain is a weak link in the defense of the international order, shared intelligence, and common values. And to the world, it would mark the end of Britain’s reputation as a defender of liberty.

But now, how distant that era seems: the US and China are locked in an apparently existential race for technological supremacy, and instead of becoming liberals, the Communist Party has become even stronger under President Xi. Yet ironically, that may be what it needs to engineer a capitalist transformation to rival the West.

A recondite Marxist debate makes today’s events make curiously relevant. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that the state, in a capitalist society, was merely the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Many years later, in the Seventies, Left-wing intellectuals argued over whether capitalist states amounted to government by or for the capitalist class. On one side were the instrumentalists, among whom the most famous was Ralph Miliband (father of the Labour politicians David and Ed). On the other were the structuralists. The instrumentalists said that the capitalist state was controlled by a business elite who used it to advance their interests, whereas the structuralists said that if the state was to manage the capitalist economy, it needed “relative autonomy” from the owning class to discipline it and manage its evolution.

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America will pay for its spending binge

By John Rapley

Today, you could hardly ask for a better representation of the instrumental state than the second Trump presidency: run by a real estate magnate, surrounded by oligarchs, staffed by businesspeople — a banker as Treasury Secretary, a fund manager as commerce secretary, an oilman as energy secretary. This has given rise to a curious type of state interventionism. If industrial policy is about picking winners, then the leitmotif of the second Trump administration is that a cabinet of proven winners meddles directly to reward those they see as best placed to win the future.

Yet the paradox of capitalists is that they don’t necessarily like capitalism. Rather than a free market, what is resulting is a form of oligarchic capitalism in which wealth is becoming highly concentrated. America’s richest and most powerful players are able to use the penetrability of the democratic state to capture and shape power, using it to limit competition and secure their position. So, while the US has many more AI startups than China, capital is flowing heavily towards a handful of tech titans.

In contrast to this strategy of maximization, in which the ultimate goal is to secure an uncontested position at the vanguard of a new technology, China seems to prefer an optimization strategy. In its approach, the government first nurtures the development of a large set of players, something facilitated by the structure of the Chinese state. Using open-source technology, China’s provincial governments, competing with each other to meet national growth targets, steer resources to local firms. Then they are cut loose on a fiercely competitive playing field, in which a Darwinian struggle is allowed to rip.

This relentless competition drives a breakneck speed of development. So, for instance, while the US auto industry is dominated by the “three big” firms, along with a number of national champions operating US branches like Toyota and Hyundai, China’s auto sector has over 100 auto firms struggling against one another. It is this fierce competition to survive that has driven the industry’s development to the point that China is now the world’s largest carmaker.

But while the winners of these competitions become national champions of sorts, there is little patience for them trying to manipulate state power to their advantage. On the contrary, whenever oligarchs show signs of becoming too powerful, the Communist regime doesn’t hesitate to cut them down to size. In effect, China enjoys the relative autonomy needed to discipline the market and keep it competitive. China’s ruling class can’t be called capitalist, but it may just be doing a better job than America’s in creating an environment in which competitive capitalism can thrive.

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China’s aim is not primarily the creation of a tech titan at the very frontier of technology, but rather to move quickly to embody existing technology in products and services, achieving a sort of fungibility. Put differently, China is developing AI with an eye to producing usable products at a reasonable cost, dispersing them widely throughout the economy. In contrast, the US is placing a huge bet that it will develop a radical technology that will so transform the economy that the country will own the future.

But how is that future shaping up? If we consider the release of ChatGPT three years ago as the launch of the AI era in America, that revolution seems a little underwhelming. While there are signs that AI has marginally raised productivity in sectors that have adopted it, the increase has so far been well short of the dramatic rise the tech firms say would justify the massive increase in investment going into their companies. Meanwhile, AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the market. While the headlines speak of trillion-dollar investment plans in this emergent industry, in the rest of the economy, capital expenditure remains flat as other sectors are comparatively starved of capital. After peaking early this year, capital expenditure in the US has fallen in the course of 2025, which means that in non-tech sectors, things are going backwards.

Compounding this is the Trump administration’s energy policy which appears to be building a wall beyond which it will be difficult for AI to continue scaling at its current rate. Reflecting both Trump’s biases and the role of oligarchs in shaping policy in the US, the administration is blocking the rise of renewable energy to strengthen the powerful oil and gas industry, going all-in on a strategy of “energy dominance” based on fossil fuels. But one effect of this has been to slow the installation of new electrical capacity to a rate much lower than China’s. Thus, as demand to power energy-hungry data centers surges, electricity prices are rising — up 40% in the past five years and nearly 7% since just the start of this year. Good for the bottom lines of energy companies, perhaps, but not for the economy.

Nor, apparently, for society. One of the impacts of the AI boom in America is that it is stirring a groundswell of opposition, not only because it is helping drive up prices, but also because its benefits seem to flow into the hands of oligarchs alone. In previous technological revolutions, new technology not only seemed to confer broad-based benefits but also lifted wages. Amid the dot-com bubble of the late Nineties, American incomes rose strongly for a few years and everyone was able to do exciting new things on the internet. In contrast, tech oligarchs keep on insisting that AI will destroy millions of jobs — how else to justify the sky-high valuations of their companies’ shares except with a pledge to save loads of money in labor costs? The public is turning against the technology, with very large margins of both Republicans and Democrats more anxious than excited about AI.

China seems like it will avoid this fate, in part because its system enables the government to produce joined-up policy. For instance, the country’s education ministry is encouraging AI use in universities so as to create a ready market for AI products whilst encouraging their more effective use. Moreover, ordinary Chinese people already see the applications of AI in their everyday lives in ways that make things simpler, like biometric turnstiles at train stations, creating a more receptive environment for the technology.

America’s AI revolution may now be running out of time. Investors are growing antsy: they note that the much-promised breakthrough that will turbocharge productivity still remains notional, and there are signs that they are running out of cash. (This shortfall of cash explains why the big tech companies are starting to issue a lot of debt to fund their further expansions). Meanwhile, the public is warming to populist politicians who will campaign against the tech oligarchs. 2026 is likely to deliver a Congress more willing to question Trump’s economic strategy.

If the result is that the AI bubble gets punctured in the US, that wouldn’t be all bad. All the startups doing inventive things by optimizing existing AI innovations, rather like what the Chinese are doing, would have more space to thrive. Nevertheless, a market crash could tip the US economy into recession, just as China’s economy is slowing as it reorients away from investment to consumption.

In short, the euphoria of 2025 may well give way to a global slowdown in 2026. China may emerge in a comparatively favorable position, but any “victory” may prove Pyrrhic. Meanwhile, the rest of us will feel the fallout.

Not so with many other targets. Sir Ken McCallum warned in 2023 that as many as 20,000 Britons have been approached on LinkedIn by profiles linked to Chinese state actors. The phenomenon hit the news last month when MI5 issued a formal parliamentary alert about two individuals accused of using LinkedIn to approach people in the parliamentary ecosystem on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).

The genius is in the banality of it all. The choreography of modern recruitment is designed to look normal: a polished message, a flattering invitation to write a short “policy” paper, an honorarium, a paid trip, a promise of future “opportunities”. These approaches are not crude entrapments, but the hooks for what become long-term grooming campaigns that escalate slowly and exploit everyday vulnerabilities. It’s a low-cost, high-impact option for Beijing’s operatives. LinkedIn does the reconnaissance. Tens of thousands of invitations can be sent. And a single lead can justify hundreds of dead ends.

On its own, a single approach may not pose much of a risk to national security. At scale, the threat is very real. This work is a part of a broader effort to shape UK institutions to be less resistant to the aims of the Communist Party, and to help Beijing assert its dominance by all and any means necessary, lawful or illicit.

And, yes, people fall for it. The CIA famously groups espionage motives under the acronym MICE: money, ideology, coercion, ego. It remains unerringly accurate, especially the ego factor. Flattery, exclusive invitations and the promise of being “the expert” are consistently reported as powerful accelerants. The MSS’s recruiters cultivate status and belonging. It works especially well with mid-career specialists who feel overlooked by their institutions. Of course, these motives rarely appear in isolation. The MSS’s success lies in shaping multiple pressures over time, turning a benign connection into routine cooperation. Even journalists have been shown to be susceptible.

But the threat ranges far beyond LinkedIn. Let’s widen the lens a little. The MSS is not just a spy agency in the narrow sense, but a key instrument in upholding the unchallengeable authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is itself foundational to the “new China”. The old China, by contrast, is the China of the “century of humiliation” which, in both Nationalist and Communist folklore, was bullied and suppressed by Japan and by European powers including Britain. The Party is the means of liberation — the architects of a People’s Republic that will achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, and restore China to its natural position at the center of the world order. This presupposes, of course, the end of what the CCP sees as a Western-imposed order. Any criticism, anywhere in the world, which challenges the legitimacy of the Party is therefore a threat to national security and to China’s destiny that must be managed, if not eliminated. To that end, the MSS is among the Party’s chief tools.

But the MSS is only one part of China’s intelligence apparatus. You may remember the Prince Andrew “spy” scandal, where the courts refused a visa to Chinese national Yang Tenbo on national security grounds. Yang had grown close to some of Prince Andrew’s charitable efforts, and dozens of photos of him looking chummy with the former prince surfaced. Those following closely may also remember that Xuelin Bates (neé Black), now married to a Tory peer, was found to have set up “talent acquisition centers” for Beijing. The FBI says that China’s talent schemes “incentivize members to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals”. Both Yang and (now) Lady Bates were accused of being affiliated with the “United Front”, a loose and sprawling association of organisations and individuals using their positions to soften opposition to the CCP.

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Successive leaders have termed the United Front an “important magic weapon” to “defeat the enemy, govern, and rejuvenate the country”, and Xi currently sees it as a key component of advancing the Party policy. The United Front mobilizes non-Party forces, such as overseas Chinese, intellectuals, religious groups, minorities, businesspeople, to align them with CCP goals, strengthening national unity, broadening the Party’s social and influence base.

Its methods are almost impossible to detect, and rarely illegal: coded threats to dissidents; services offered to overseas Chinese which enable the party to exact control at a distance; preferential business offers with invisible strings attached; infiltration of institutions across the UK economy and civic institutions; calling in favors earned over long periods of careful grooming. This list barely scratches the surface. It’s not a homogeneous body. Jelly is more easily nailed to a wall than is the amorphous blob of the United Front, and that’s by design, of course.

The MSS and United Front projects are distinct, but two branches of the same tree. They can and do interact and reinforce one another as part of China’s broader strategy for political influence and security. Together, they form complementary pillars of the Party’s mechanism to maintain internal cohesion, project influence abroad, and secure its long-term political dominance.

Not only that, as Alex Joske’s painstaking research has pointed out, they are the apparatus at the center of a deliberate strategy to blur influence and intelligence collection, showing how united front networks of diaspora groups, academic ties, and business associations provide institutional cover and plausible deniability, enabling the co-option of civic and academic structures into state purposes. The line between “normal” outreach and state targeting is intentionally fuzzy.

Those downplaying the risk often argue: “It’s normal for nations to spy on each other”. Or: “We are just as bad”. But they spectacularly miss the point, revealing shocking ignorance of the scale and intent of China’s intelligence operations in the process.

For context, both organizations have gargantuan budgets. In the financial year 2022-23, we spent £3.6 billion on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 combined. While there are no reliable figures for the MSS cashflow (predictably), one publication put the figure at $20 billion. Turning to the United Front, the Jamestown Foundation found in 2020 that the spending on institutions core to the United Front well exceeded that of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ entire budget, with nearly $600 million set aside for offices designed to influence foreigners and overseas Chinese communities alone. These are regarded by analysts as “floor” figures — highly conservative, with the likely spending much higher.

In sum: China has the means, manpower, and intent to reshape our way of life. The UK neither has the desire nor ability to do this. In the Chinese model, human intelligence, technical collection, and influence operations fused into a single national effort. It’s a behemoth.

Now, China would not put it in such stark terms, but the logic is plain enough. Their mandate is to protect the unchallengeable authority of the CCP and its aims. This requires and demands narrative control abroad. This, in turn, necessitates the adaptation of life in the UK to the extent that it poses any risk to CCP authority and its stated aims. That means that our values and freedoms, and our open, pluralistic society and institutions, are under threat.

So there’s a whistle-stop tour on what we are dealing with: an adversary with an intelligence apparatus that is “almost certainly the largest in the world,” composed of “hundreds of thousands” of officers and paired with a highly capable cyber-espionage arm. Don’t take my word for it. These are quotes from Parliament’s most senior committee.

Where does all of this leave the UK? My assessment would be that we are fighting a house fire with a syringe filled with lighter fluid. The syringe being the resources available to contain the threat, and the lighter fluid being the UK government’s seemingly irrepressible desire to make things worse.

Consider the National Security Act. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat designed a scheme to help police and intelligence deal with the problem of Chinese interference, called the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). The idea was that certain countries would be put in the “Enhanced Tier” and be subject to more stringent registration requirements. Then, the theory goes, those working on behalf of the CCP who fail to register properly would have committed an offense, and the police would have legislation to charge them (not currently the case). The scheme was launched this year, with Iran and Russia placed in the top tier. No prizes for guessing who’s still not in it: the country it was actually built for: China.

This isn’t a party-political point. The last government’s approach to China could be charitably characterized as schizophrenic, with different departments pursuing mutually contradictory approaches. We’ve had an intelligence community screaming from the rooftops about the threat, while ministers made concessions to Beijing in order to pave the way for begging bowl trips to China and Hong Kong.

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Indeed, across both Conservative and Labour administrations we have only ever seen movement in the direction of China realism when the backbenches have demanded it. Even then, it’s been tough going, with heavy campaigning to extract the smallest concessions. Huawei, Hikvision, the Genocide Amendment campaign. Every time it has been a slog, which became harder when latent divisions among China hawk MPs were worsened by someone who would be later accused of Chinese espionage.

I write as a long-standing member of the Conservative Party who had to spend the past five years criticizing the government’s obstinate unwillingness to address the problem. It is a dereliction of duty to leave the defense of the realm against our more acute security threat to a merry band of backbench MPs and activists. At the very least, it cannot be described as a meaningful China “policy”. More “path of least resistance” capitulation, whether to the backbenches or to Beijing.

That said, it is also true that the UK has begun adjusting its legal architecture, even if in a piecemeal way. I’ve mentioned that the National Security Act 2023 introduced offenses criminalizing the obtaining or disclosure of trade secrets for a foreign power and other espionage-related acts, addressing a prosecutorial gap that previously made economic espionage difficult to pursue. But legislation is only one pillar: MI5’s warnings, parliamentary briefings to MPs and peers, and the creation of protective institution signal that there is some desire for the state to shift from ad-hoc alerts to system-wide resilience.

Yet we remain miles away. According to MI5, one of the most targeted aspects of the UK economy is business, yet I am not aware of a single MI5 alert having been issued to the business community. We should not be surprised, therefore, when City of London institutions pop up to lobby the government in favor of, say, keeping China out of the top tier of FIRS.

Our response must be precise, grounded in clarity, not ignorance or xenophobia. Britain’s strength is in our openness: universities, collaborative research and cross-border professional networks are national assets. Overreach risks pushing communities away from cooperation and falsely equating ethnicity with threat. The landmark Intelligence and Security Committee report on China explicitly cautions against conflating the Chinese state’s activities with people of Chinese heritage. Effective policy therefore balances targeted intelligence and security measures with safeguards for civil liberties and community cohesion.

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But there can be no meaningful response which fails to recognize the strength of the adversary, or to signal willingness to address it. The power of China’s interference apparatus lies in its cinematic scale; the genius lies in the subtlety of its tools, and the danger lies in its intent. That subtlety is what makes the operation both potent and hard to see. We should be alert and robust in our countermeasures, honest about the scale and sophistication of the challenge, and disciplined.

The lines between sunlight and shadow, and between Party and people, have been blurred by design. Recognizing that fact is the prerequisite to defending an open society against a whole-of-state adversary that prefers the appearance of normality to the drama of the cloak-and-dagger.

But, right now, we are barely on the playing field, invincibly ignorant for fear of diplomatic detriment. We lack the China expertise and political courage to face reality. This is clearly unsustainable. We are already feeling the pain of naivety. Just recall the British Steel fiasco, bought by Chinese company Jingye and mismanaged so drastically that nationalization was the only option. As so often, the short-term allure of Chinese investment made us forget the risk, anyway costing us more in the long-run. And yet the Treasury remains convinced that a country which targets the majority of its foreign direct investment towards UK critical infrastructure, and with which the UK has a gaping trading deficit, is somehow going to help save our economy.

Just as the obstinacy of the Westminster bubble over migration policy led to the splintering of the political spectrum and yielding of the microphone to the political fringe, so refusal to address the intensifying threat from China will strengthen the CCP’s narratives, and hobble the UK. If we don’t get this right, it will be British-Chinese people who will pay the price as the UK lurches for a nationalist answer to the Beijing question.

The UK should exchange its lighter fluid-filled syringe for the biggest hosepipe we can find. Our security services are superb, but until we kill the governmental culture of anticipatory obedience, and stop denying the police and intelligence services the tools they need to address the problem, we will not succeed in constraining China’s interference behemoth. This really is urgent. Our universities and private sector have already been compromised, and  civic institutions, including even Parliament, are now also being targeted. Act now, or future generations will inherit a different Britain.

You’d hope that the Mandarin programs would be good — given that the ultimate owner of these schools is an ardent Chinese nationalist who goes by the nickname “Red Fred”. Of course, that’s not how he’s known in the international finance circles in which he moves. On his LinkedIn page, he’s Fred Hu, the chairman and founder of Primavera Capital, a $20 billion private equity fund that owns the Spring Educational Group and its 29 school brands. His CV is blandly bluechip: spells at Goldman Sachs, the IMF and the World Economic Forum; seats on the Harvard University Global Advisory Council and the board of the Swiss bank UBS. Nothing unduly alarming to the parents of the 41,000 children who attend his institutions.

But those who have worked closely with Hu — or Hu Zuliu, as he’s known in China — have been left in little doubt about his sympathies. “Some people suspected that I was too biased towards China,” he told the Changsa Evening News in 2016, “and so they called me ‘Red Fred’.” And I can reveal that Hu and Primavera have close political and financial ties to the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party. So, too, do two other Chinese financial institutions that have been busy buying their way into American education: NewOpen USA and the Guanghua Education Group. The purchases conform to a deliberate strategy to spread Chinese ideology and influence into Western classrooms, which I first outlined in my recent investigation into China’s purchase of 30 independent schools in the UK. But the campaign is already much further advanced in the USA — with even Donald Trump’s former school, the New York Military Academy, now under Chinese ownership.

* * *

It’s no secret that China’s impact on educational institutions in the West is not always benign. Earlier this month, it emerged that Beijing had bullied Sheffield Hallam University into halting research into the enslavement of the persecuted Uyghur minority by threatening to withdraw its Chinese students. Laura Murphy, Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery, protested that her employers had “explicitly traded my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market”. Chinese students, let’s not forget, annually provide more than £2.3 billion to Britain’s cash-strapped universities.

Indeed, for America too, tapping into the lucrative Chinese market makes sound financial sense. This summer, President Trump said he would be prepared to let 600,000 Chinese students study in America, which the Cato Institute estimated would bring in a windfall of around $32.1 billion. But it also happens to coincide rather nicely with a core CCP strategy of creating an education with Chinese characteristics for a generation of American schoolchildren.

Working with a Mandarin translator, I have unearthed a new document outlining this strategy — a letter issued in 2019 by China’s Ministry of Education in response to proposals aired at an official conference in Beijing. It details how after being issued “important instructions” from President Xi Jinping, 45 Chinese embassies had conducted “systematic research” on how to set up and run schools abroad to disseminate “excellent Chinese culture”. Teams working in the US, Britain, Japan, Brazil and other countries had concluded that “Chinese international schools overseas should reflect Chinese characteristics and a global perspective”. They should, the paper added, make particular efforts to attract and indoctrinate the children of Chinese expatriates.

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It is significant that this document states that the Ministry was developing its strategy in collaboration with the United Front Work Department (UFWD) — a powerful, well-funded arm of the Chinese Communist Party, described by both Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping as a “magic weapon” to enhance the party’s power. The UFWD uses its $2.6 billion annual budget to conduct espionage operations, spread Chinese influence and enforce Party discipline through a web of innocuous-sounding front organizations.

Among these fronts is the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which convenes assemblies at national and provincial levels through which the party supposedly “consults” Chinese citizens. In reality, this is a sham. According to its own charter, CPPCC delegates are bound to do whatever the party leadership tells them to do — including “facilitate implementation of state foreign policy” and “keep state secrets”. In other words, if you’re a CPPCC delegate, you’re supposed to advance the interests of the Chinese Communist Party.

One such interlocutor is Zhou Yongyong, who heads the NewOpen China group. It was NewOpen’s US subsidiary that purchased the Florida Preparatory Academy in 2017 — the first US school to be bought by a Chinese company. Yongyong has been involved in United Front Work Department organizations, including the CPPCC, since at least 2008. Another is Allen Lu, a delegate to the Jiangsu Province CPPC. He founded the Guanghua Education Group that bought the New York Military Academy in June of this year.

And then there is “Red Fred” Hu. In 2008, two years before he founded Primavera Capital, Hu became a delegate to the Hunan Province CPPCC. He has been pictured on its website and been a delegate many times subsequently, most recently in 2023. He has also been listed as director in the Western Returned Scholars Association, a second United Front Work Department front organization, ostensibly for Chinese students who have studied in the west. According to the The US-China Economic and Security Commission (USCC), which monitors threats from China on behalf of the US Congress, this association conducts “influence operations” and “disseminates propaganda”. Its operatives have engaged in industrial espionage, facilitating the transfer of sensitive technologies from America to China.

Last year, when the Daily Caller published details of Hu’s involvement with the CPPCC, Primavera Capital issued a statement claiming he was not a member of the Chinese Communist Party, nor an adviser to the Chinese government. Yet Hu’s own professional biographies state that he does advise the government. Moreover, even if he is not a party member, his connections to it and the Chinese state are both political and financial.

When Hu founded Primavera Capital in 2009, he accepted millions of dollars of investment from corporations closely connected to the Chinese state, including Tianjin Huida Enterprise Management, a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China, and Ping An Life, China’s biggest insurance company. Primavera’s founding partner Zhao Haotai and its managing director, David Lin, also have close links to the Chinese state. Lin previously worked for a subsidiary of CITIC, the Chinese International Trust Investment Corporation, a state-owned investment firm that has invested in new technologies used to repress dissidents and minorities.

And Hu has in turn lent his expertise to various institutions closely connected to the Chinese state. Until he stepped down in April 2025, he was a non-executive director of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which is 70% owned by the Chinese government. And in 2007, he helped set up the China Investment Corporation, China’s state-owned foreign reserves fund, which now has assets of over $1 trillion. He has meanwhile invested heavily in the AI start up, SenseTime, whose other major backer is the Chinese state. SenseTime was sanctioned by Joe Biden’s administration in 2022 on the grounds that its AI-powered facial recognition technology was being deployed to monitor and oppress the Uyghurs. Primavera’s stake in it is worth around $500 million.

Naturally, when he addresses Western audiences, Hu is keen to dismiss any concerns. America, he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed during the first Trump administration, was “overly paranoid” about China’s rise, and its fears were “unfounded”. America should see China as an opportunity, not a threat, and encourage “virtuous, two-way capital flows”.

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He presents a rather different face when he’s talking to a Chinese audience. In an interview for a newsletter for graduates of Tsinghua University, where he gained his master’s (and where Xi Jinping studied before him), Hu said that his personal “hero” was the 19th-century general Zuo Zongtang, who crushed the Taiping rebellion at a cost of 30 million lives, going on to fight the Hui war against western Chinese Muslims — the forerunners of the Uyghurs. “If I hadn’t studied economics, I would have wanted to be a great general like Zuo Zongtang, expanding the country’s territory,” Hu said. (Hu, the Primavera Group and NewOpen have not responded to my requests for comment).

There is, naturally, no mention of any of this on the website of the Spring Education Group (SEG). There is instead lots of talk of the “web of trust between our students, our families and our communities” and how its mission is “to develop the best schools and educators in America” with a “perfect balance of work and play”. Since 2017, SEG has been acquiring an ever-expanding schools portfolio, covering every age group from kindergarten upwards. Indeed, it is still on the lookout for more: the website even has a page that tells other school owners how to get in touch if they’d like to sell.

Are American parents concerned about this? From time to time, their disquiet surfaces. In 2019, for example, almost 200 parents whose children attended a BASIS school in Brooklyn, signed a joint letter about its sale to Primavera, expressing fears that its curriculum might change. They were assured it would not.

Then again, money plays a decisive factor in the decisions parents take regarding their children’s K12 education. While it’s no secret that Chinese companies have been buying up American independent schools since 2017, parents often seem relatively untroubled by this, for the simple reason the fees are often significantly lower than competitors. BASIS Brooklyn, for example, is around $20,000 less per year than comparable nearby schools. Some parents are also persuaded that a more Asian-influenced education — with a strong focus on STEM and perhaps some Mandarin lessons too — will prove a more rigorous training ground for the 21st-century economy.

One mother in Washington told me that she had been planning to send her son to a BASIS school because it seems like good value. “When you first look at the schools’ rankings versus cost, you’re like: ‘Wow, sweet deal!’ But then you realize why it’s such a sweet deal. I’ve joked with friends that I guess the upside is, if my kid went there, he’d be 100% prepared to keep the rest of the family out of CCP re-education camps when China takes over!”

America’s political class does occasionally raise objections — if not as often as you’d think, given the Trump administration’s rhetorical war with China. In 2023, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s education department to suspend public scholarships for students at four schools owned by Primavera, citing its “direct ties” to the CCP. Last year, the Republican Arkansas Senator, Tom Cotton, wrote to the then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, saying that Primavera Capital’s ownership of Tutor.com was a national security risk as it gave a Chinese company the personal data of armed service members and their children. His call was echoed by the Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who demanded a “complete accounting” of the firm’s relationship with its Chinese owners — it may well have been this that prompted Primavera to quietly sell Tutor.com in September.

Nevertheless, to date, there has been little sign of official action to restrict the influence of school owners connected to the Chinese Communist Party. Primavera’s fees may be relatively cheap, but there’s a more serious price to be paid as America sells off control of its institutions.

Indeed, over the past decade, the green movement has successfully trolled for big money from groups with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as some dollops from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has cynically backed efforts to curb the West’s production of natural gas, the easier to deepen its own energy dominance; and Qatar, known for financing Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Nowhere is the penetration more complete than in the universities, where Chinese and Qatari money are behind the largest proportion of the $29 billion of foreign money sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. This, and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian, and British Universities, buy good will and political influence. Chinese students at institutions like Stanford are also closely monitored by the Beijing regime’s agents in order to stamp out or at least identify dissidents — and when possible, to purloin research for the motherland.

Climate change has emerged as one critical element of this collaboration. The Washington Free Beacon has reported on millions of dollars from a climate nonprofit called Energy Foundation China, run primarily out of Beijing by former Communist Party cadres, flooding campuses. The beneficiaries include the University of Maryland and Harvard (where a professor was arrested for lying to the FBI about his China ties, and then appointed at a Chinese university). The consulting firm Strategy Risks argued Harvard also hosted training sessions for XPCC, a Chinese paramilitary organization, subject to sanctions for being involved in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

The belle of the China ball, not surprisingly, is California. Engagement with the People’s Republic has been long required for elites in the Golden State, whose imports from China are roughly nine times its exports. For China, it is a wonderful place to do business. The country runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion. As climate policy hurts average Californians through deindustrialization, high energy prices, and climate regulation, it enriches China.

The outreach began under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, who now chairs the legislatively created California-China Climate Institute at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been particularly egregious in its embrace of China. So much so that the Government Select Committee on the CCP wrote an open letter to the school, venting “grave concern” about its “joint institute with state-controlled Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government” and warning that Berkeley is facilitating Chinese espionage of American research.

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Newsom is clearly a vassal in training, traveling to China and greeting Xi like a visiting sovereign when the dictator came here. Ahead of the visit, China and California issued a “first-of-its-kind” joint declaration pledging cooperation on subnational climate action, such as “aggressively cutting greenhouse gas emissions, transitioning away from fossil fuels, and developing clean energy.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing dreams of the pliable Newsom as President Trump’s successor. In July 2024, not long after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, several media outlets — including the Asia Times, South China Morning Post, and Business Insider — reported that Newsom was seen by the regime as “a fresh but also positive and more sober-minded politician in the US” who “could be a cool head among this anti-China US consensus”.

The greens are also “all in” for this kowtowing behavior. The Hill, quoting Alex Wang — a UCLA professor and former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who helped establish the NRDC’s China office — praised the governor for being “engagement-oriented, at a time when engagement is seen as a dirty word by some people” and sending “a green light for more collaboration” with China “to move as quickly as possible on climate action and climate research.”

But it’s not just California politicians and NGOs on the Chinese green gravy train. The Energy Foundation has also lavished large grants on groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute, whose policy agenda includes the electrification of homes and EV mandates that benefit the Middle Kingdom. This reflects China’s industrial strategy that is in part built around capturing new markets, of which “green” products like EVs and solar panels are critical components.

The CEO and president of Energy Foundation China is Ji Zou, who previously served as a deputy director-general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, under the government’s National Development and Reform Commission. In 2013 and 2014, he served as a Chinese representative to the UN Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing.

Of course, Chinese influence extends well beyond California. Right-wing groups have also been known to align with China, and its wealth has turned Republicans, like former House Speaker John Boehner and former Sen. David Vinter, into Beijing lobbyists and acolytes.

But for the most part, China’s best allies are found, perhaps unwittingly, on the progressive Left, particularly in billionaires like Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, as well as powerful foundations like Rockefeller, MacArthur, Hewlett, and a large coterie of donor-funded NGOs.
All are devoted to “fighting” climate change, whatever the cost to the unwashed.

As China gears up its increasingly anti-American response to President Trump’s trade antics, including racist AI-generated videos, it also can count on the behind-the-scenes backing of obliging Wall Streeters like Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, and Larry Fink. Business is business, I suppose.

Similarly, Silicon Valley firms seem less committed to fulfilling American aspirations than enabling Xi Jinping’s “China dream” of greater state control, more wealth, and worldwide technological supremacy. Alexander Karp, co-founder of the defense-tech firm Palantir Technologies, has argued in his recent book that most social-media and internet CEOs view the US as a “a dying empire, whose slow descent cannot be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise.” Instead, they have become accomplices helping achieve Beijing’s stated aim of becoming the leading global superpower by 2025.

The rise of pro-China politics can be seen in other countries, too. The recently elected, pro-China Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney advocates for policies that would block oil drilling and place burdens on Canadian mining, agriculture, and industry for environmental reasons, even while stating no objections to China’s coal-plant building spree to power its own solar-panel industry. A greener Canada, as currently defined, will have to genuflect to China to procure the requisite rare earth minerals and the technology for processing the “renewable” energy that Canadian Liberals crave.

This alliance between China and the greens can likewise be seen in Britain and Australia, where China has won over allies among center-Left parties. In Labour-run Britain, China is building a mega-embassy in London that will likely help the surveil and harass those who fled Communist Party rule for the assumed safety of Britain. In Germany, China has been very active in trying to evade climate-related duties on their exports. In December 2024, two of the largest German media companies conducted an investigation of “dozens of climate projects in China” that Germany approved for domestic “carbon credits” and found that the Chinese credits were “likely fake and part of a large carbon credit scam.”

Besides appealing to the profit motive of the plutocratic elites, China takes advantage of our liberal institutions — and our comparatively open economies — only to undermine them. The Chinese have become skilled at siphoning off the technological edge of the West. Chinese money also goes to diaspora groups that attack as “racist” anyone who protests CCP policies. For example, the Committee of 100, a China-aligned US group, singled out former Rep. Michelle Steel, a Korean native based in California, for being “racist.” Her real crime? Criticizing her Democratic opponent’s support for a China-backed program promoting Chinese language and culture in elementary schools.

China’s apologists justify their sympathy in large part on concern about our common earthly future. After all, the UN aid chief recently praised Beijing’s green “leadership.” Like almost anything that comes from Turtle Bay, this seems patently absurd. The country won’t stop building coal plants, at least not in the foreseeable future. Its 1,161 coal-power plants account for 55 percent of global carbon emissions from coal.

China overall emits far more GHG pollutant than any country and is responsible for more than 30 percent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share. Not content to spew at home, it is also building coal plants around the world as coal consumption hits a historic high.

The greens make little effort to demand that China stop its pollution, which no doubt the People’s Republic would refuse. Instead, the greens prefer to turn their ardor against Western industries and consumers. Greens, for example, barely raised a peep after China recently decided to slash its GHG-reduction pledge.

For China, this represents clever realpolitik. Demands for massive purchases of Chinese solar technology, rare earths, and EVs creates a huge boon to the Middle Kingdom. Current green policies necessitate a flood of Chinese EVs, as well as panels from its solar-panel industry, while green obsessions undermine Western industries.

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China is already working to make sure that key solar manufacturing technology is not exported to potential competitors. The country boasts a huge lead in solar battery production, and increasingly dominates the production of the rare earth elements, which also figure prominently in wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs. As American electric-car firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, China’s Warren Buffett backed BYD has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions, while Tesla focuses much of its future growth at its Chinese factories.

We already know who pays the price for kowtowing to China. It has meant a massive erosion of jobs and productive capacity. The United States has lost an estimated 3.4 million jobs since China was invited to the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century. The US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned to $419 billion last year, up from under $10 billion in 1990. China’s ratio of imports to exports was 4 to 1 in 2018. Academics from the climate-industrial complex continue to claim renewable energy is cheaper and the move towards them is “unstoppable,” but virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are generally those with the strictest renewable policies — Germany, Britain, California.

This pro-China regime may have enriched some in the City of London, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, but is clearly no boon to the rest of the Western population. Living standards in the post-industrial West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ peacetime life expectancy has gone down for the first time. China’s successful wooing of some on the Left seems odd not only because the country is spewing greenhouse gas and repressing its people, including Muslims, but also producing a society where income inequality exceeds that of the United States.

Ultimately, the only way for the West to get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China just put off for at least another decade — can be accomplished is by squelching all future growth.

As Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes, it would entail catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West, This program, he suggests, can only succeed only by imposing “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship.” China’s leaders, for their part, are quite clear: they will not sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost. They understand clearly that declining living standards threaten their hold on absolute power.

The West needs to escape this trap. Fortunately, even some on the Left recognize the danger of dependency on China, with The New Republic recently suggesting that Washington needs to relearn “the language of mining and metallurgy.” The ultra-green Guardian has recently embraced the argument that US manufacturing needs to come back, allowing for “an exit path from neoliberal globalization” and the creation of higher-paid blue-collar jobs.

The West must choose not to surrender its productive economy to the polluting superpower in Asia. The notion of giving up progress and living standards for the middle and working classes — largely to sustain the same classes in China, Russia, and Iran — sounds like a bad bet. Voters will see it that way — and punish ruling classes that acquiesce, sooner or later.

Today, the capital of Shaanxi Province has another source of renown: its armaments research and manufacturing hub, which serves the burgeoning strategic requirements of Qin’s distant successor, President Xi Jinping. The Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation builds many of China’s bombers and assault planes, and the city houses four separate universities where staff conduct defence and weapons research.

Appropriately enough, then, starting on 23 September, Xi’an’s cavernous Quijang Convention Centre will play host to a high-profile four-day meeting, the fourth International Conference on Defence Technology (ICDT), at which some 2,000 scientists will discuss the latest research into ways of making weapons more deadly. The conference will examine work in highly sensitive fields that are already transforming the way nations wage war, and its considerable cost will be met by China’s weapons industry. Unsurprisingly, most of the delegates will be Chinese, although two of the listed keynote speakers happen to be citizens of China’s ally, Russia. However, somewhat less predictably, the conference’s co-chair will be a Briton who lives in Kent.

A tall, bald and bespectacled figure in his late sixties, Clive Woodley is one of Britain’s leading weapons technology experts, with much of his own ground-breaking research funded by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Having worked closely with Chinese colleagues for at least a decade, he is set to play a central role in Xi’an; indeed, he is the author of the ICDT’s welcome message encouraging other scientists to attend the conference. The conference, he writes, will “allow exposure to the most current state-of-the-art technology in defence science”, and “provide opportunities for interactions with some of the world’s leading experts in the field”.

He goes on to explain how “new topics have been added which are at the frontiers of defence science and technologies, including hypersonic technology, artificial intelligence, directed energy, optoelectronics, stealth technologies, and electronic countermeasures”. Also promised are sessions on “explosions and impacts”, “armour and protection”, “advanced launch technology”, and quantum computing.

The full conference programme has not yet been issued, but the list of keynote speakers reveals an interesting array of expertise. Joining Woodley as co-chair will be Professor Baoming Li of the Nanjing University of Science and Technology — one of the “seven sons of national defence”, a group of Chinese universities which are especially close to the military. Baoming Li is also a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, and the Principal Scientist of the China Academy of Ordnance Science.

Elsewhere, accompanying Woodley will be at least one British colleague — Anthony Vickers, emeritus professor of computer science and electronic engineering at the University of Essex, who has published research on both lasers and quantum computing. (Like Woodley, Vickers did not respond to requests for comment.) Other keynote speakers listed to appear include scientists from Germany, Singapore and South Africa.

It’s not hard to see why Woodley tops the bill. His international stature as a scientist, and his long, close relationship with Britain’s Ministry of Defence, grant heft to his presence and add to the prestige of the ICDT. Having worked directly for the MoD after graduating from the University of Southampton in 1978, he went on to spend 17 years as Principal Scientist at Qinetiq, the MoD-controlled defence and security firm created when the Ministry privatised its laboratories in 2001. After leaving Qinetiq in 2018, he joined the Department of Shock Physics at Imperial College, London, where he stayed until 2022. He also served for several years as president of the International Ballistics Society, which has thousands of members across the globe. He remains the chair of its membership committee.

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But what does this mean in practice? Well, according to his online biography, issued by the Chinese publisher of Defence Technology, a journal that Woodley co-edits and is closely linked to the ICDT, he is a “world expert on the mathematical modelling of the internal ballistics of guns”, who has “contributed to many of the gun systems used by the UK Armed Forces”. He has, it adds, also provided “critical insight” into the behaviour of explosives, and devised “innovative numerical modelling techniques” that have enabled the development of next-generation hypersonic artillery weapons such as railguns, whose shells are propelled not by conventional explosives but by electromagnetic pulses — weapons in which China appears to have developed a decisive lead.

Woodley insists that his involvement with the ICDT and his broader relationship with China is innocuous. While he declined to speak to me, he recently announced on LinkedIn that he is looking forward to an “impressive lineup of over 100 presentations and papers”, saying the conference will serve “as a conduit for the exchange of ideas, fostering collaboration”. (He also writes that he is “really looking forward” to staying at the five-star conference hotel, the Xi’an South Ramada Plaza by Wyndham, which “looks very comfortable”, and where he hopes “the breakfasts are good”.)

Yet not all are so blasé about his involvement. According to Charles Parton, formerly a Foreign Office China-watcher who spent several years stationed in Beijing, his presence in Xi’an is “extraordinary”. The only purpose of the ICDT, he told me, is to “attract people with his sort of experience to China in order to share that experience with China”. Moreover, “any usefulness which the Chinese can extract from his participation will be relayed into Chinese weapons programmes”, and if they believed his presence were not invaluable, “they would not have invited him” — and the weapons that China is trying to enhance “are intended for use against the UK’s allies, and even possibly in the unforeseeable future against UK forces”.

Parton’s assessment is supported by sources in China. In 2018, when Woodley co-chaired the first ICDT, the China Daily reported that it would “let China’s scientific researchers come into close contact with outstanding foreign scientists in the field of defence technology without leaving the country, conducting in-depth exchanges and gaining insight into the work being done on international academic frontiers in the field of defence”.

What this meant in practice became clearer in 2022. After that year’s ICDT in Beijing, Sun Zhuzhu, a young Chinese scientist based at Baoming Li’s university in Nanjing, posted a report on the event in Mandarin on his department’s website, saying that thanks to the “insights in the international academic frontiers in the field of defence” provided at the conference, it had “served the innovative development of [the Chinese] weapons industry”. He continued: “Not only is the gap between our product and technology level and the advanced level of foreign countries getting smaller and smaller, the influence of international defence technology is also increasing rapidly.” If any clarification was needed, he emphasised that the aim was for China to “truly grow into a scientific master”.

As UnHerd readers will know, Woodley’s involvement stretches back well beyond that conference. In May 2022, I drew attention to his appearance the previous October at a conference devoted to “New Material Technology for Ammunition” in Jinan, the capital of China’s Shandong province. According to the subsequent official Chinese report, the event “marked a new chapter in the development of artillery, shells and missiles”. Just a few weeks later, the MI6 chief Richard Moore gave a speech warning that the threats posed by China had become his agency’s “greatest single priority”, warning of “large-scale espionage operations against us, targeting those in research of particular interest to the Chinese state”.

I also revealed that, between 2014 and 2022, Woodley travelled to China to participate in seminars and lectures with senior defence figures and academics at least seven times. He had also published eight research papers either in Chinese journals or written jointly with Chinese scientists who worked for Chinese weapons firms.

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Of course, when Woodley’s relationship with China began in 2014, Anglo-Chinese relations were still basking in the “golden age” inaugurated by David Cameron and George Osborne when Xi visited Britain in 2012. It took years for its warm glow to cool: it was not until 2020 that Britain decided it had to eradicate equipment made by the Chinese firm Huawei from its 5G phone networks on grounds of national security. In 2014, there had been no Uighur genocide, and the basic rights of Hong Kongers had not been crushed.

But if it was clear that the geopolitical landscape had shifted in 2022, the evidence is now impossible to ignore. “Xi Jinping has become even more authoritarian, the threat to Taiwan is greater than ever, and China is backing Putin’s brutal campaign in Ukraine,” says Professor Anthony Glees, the founder of the University of Buckingham’s Institute for Intelligence and Security Studies.

Indeed, the ICDT’s main sponsor, the China North Industries Corporation (Norinco), a manufacturing giant whose products include military jet aircraft, drones, artillery guns, shells, mortars, missiles, bombs, small arms, radar and anti-aircraft guns, has reportedly shipped guns and other military equipment to Russia for use against Ukraine. Having first been sanctioned by the US in 2003 for selling missile technology to Iran, Norinco fell within the scope of President Biden’s 2021 Executive Order prohibiting Americans from doing business with what he termed China’s “military industrial complex”. Woodley himself appears to realise how much things have changed. The futuristic technologies that will be discussed in Xi’an, he said in a recent LinkedIn post, are now “very topical, given events worldwide”.

Yet for now, the new British government appears just as reluctant to criticise, let alone block, Woodley’s involvement with the Chinese weapons industry as its Conservative predecessor — despite a Labour manifesto pledge to conduct an immediate “review” of UK relations with China. Last week, when I asked the MoD to comment on Woodley’s trip to Xi’an, its spokesperson replied with an emailed statement: “We have robust procedures in place to make sure research contracts do not contribute to overseas military programmes and that individuals or organisations with foreign-state links cannot access our sensitive research.” Somewhat disappointingly, the statement was a verbatim replica of the statement the MoD issued when I asked about Woodley two years ago.

Others are more forthright. According to Glees, “on the face of it, Woodley’s behaviour is astonishing”. It is, he says, just possible that Woodley has been a British intelligence asset all along, tasked with penetrating China’s defence establishment. But if this is so, none of the several sources from Britain’s defence and intelligence communities with whom I have consulted has made any suggestion that this might be the case.

Meanwhile, a curious stipulation set out on the ICDT website appears to support the fear that the direction of traffic in sensitive knowledge taking place in Xi’an will be strictly one way. Chinese scientists who wish to submit papers must sign a declaration that none of their contents is classified, and that they have obtained approval from the “comrades” in their department’s “confidentiality unit”. Scientists from abroad, however, are not bound by this rule. Should they wish to divulge, the ICDT will not stand in their way.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former Whitehall security official with long experience of trying to stop the transfer of sensitive technology to potentially hostile powers says that while Woodley has done nothing unlawful, he appears to be disregarding “ethical and moral norms”. His apparent impunity, the former official says, will only make it more difficult to stop other military experts from sharing their knowledge with China, while Russia’s involvement with the ICDT makes it still more dangerous: “In my view, what he is doing does not align with Western interests.”

For Xi China’s building binge had a single purpose: to urbanise the nation. And now China has enough. Since 2004, 12.7 billion metres of housing have been built in China. In 1999, 65% of China’s population was rural; by the 2020 census, that proportion had dropped to 39%. Hundreds of millions of people moved into new houses, sometimes in entirely new cities.

In pursuit of this state-mandated goal, vast private building companies emerged and made their fortunes, including Evergrande and Country Garden. China’s GDP soared, not only due to the building boom, but also because new urbanites started to spend money. Rural subsistence farmers generate virtually no GDP: they plant crops, consume them and occasionally buy fertiliser. By contrast, urbanites buy washing machines and TV sets, they take trains, work at companies and eat dinner in restaurants. As of 2023, Shanghai’s per capita GDP is 190,000 RMB (around 26,000 USD); the average for rural China, according to government statistics, is around 20,000 RMB (around 2,750 USD). By embracing modernity and turning peasants into urbanites, China created infinite reserves of GDP.

Now this process is almost complete.

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China’s colossal property developers will suffer as a result. But in the eyes of China’s government, they are disposable. They’ve served their purpose. Before last month’s Third Plenum, some speculated that China would revive its housing market by inverting the three red lines and somehow giving investors cash from the magic money tree. No such luck. Although Chinese leaders do want to continue the process of urbanisation by, for example, reforming the Hukou system, they have no interest in pleasing property tycoons and investors. In an effort to prevent out-of-control urban growth along the lines of Tokyo or Seoul, the Chinese government retained the Hukou system — in which Chinese people are entitled to education or medical care only in their hometown — during the boom years. As urbanisation has slowed, the system is gradually being abolished, with the intention of encouraging a few more rural dwellers to move to the cities.

China officially plans to reach 75% urbanisation, so there are still more than 100 million people left to go. But Xi is keen to retain that rural population: they preserve the nation’s food security and traditions, and tend to China’s wild spaces. At the same time, the overriding goal of the CCP is to create the conditions for the optimum number of healthy, highly-educated, middle-class Chinese. When India’s population exceeded that of China last year, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the quality of the individuals, not just their quantity, was relevant. This comment alluded to the sense that in the globalised economy, one highly-educated STEM engineer is worth 10, if not 100, peasants; while China’s total population isn’t growing, the population of middle-class urbanites is, and that is the population relevant to latest goal: turning China into a sci-tech superpower. And now, these new urbanites must start inventing semiconductors.

Some of the property developments that were unfinished or unsold when Xi blew the whistle will become affordable housing in line with the Singapore model. Housing values have stopped rising, leaving urban middle-class families whose assets are tied up in houses — which make up 59% of household wealth, compared to around 25% in the US — feeling hard done by. But despite the hit to China’s economy, Xi Jinping continues to insist that houses are for living in, not for speculation. If China’s middle class don’t like it, they can book a flight to Ecuador.

It’s worth pointing out that these urbanites are still rich relative to their countrymen: imagine if the government magically made London house prices stop rising. They’d be pretty unpopular in London, but for the excluded and resentful, this policy would be a winner — especially if it meant their children could go to work in London.

This could also affect the so-called “lying flat” generation. Right now, given that 96% of Chinese urban residents own their homes, the young can afford to be picky about working. Many of them choose not to. After all, they don’t need to pay the rent. Right now, renting your home is marginal in China; but in the years to come, it is bound to become much more widespread. When homes were an asset class, you didn’t need to rent them out; their value doubled rapidly, and being a landlord is a lot of work. But if house prices aren’t guaranteed to increase, the assets need to work to generate returns. And so will the youngsters.

When the CCP first decided to wind down the property boom with regulation, fears spread that China would face its own Lehman Brothers Moment. But for now, it has not materialised. The 2008 financial crisis engendered a long-term loss of faith in the economic system among Chinese policymakers and ordinary Americans. Just as the populist politics of Donald Trump are arguably a consequence of the Global Financial Crash, so are those of Xi Jinping. In cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, middle-class families who expected the value of their homes to continue rising forever are unhappy. And we are yet to discover whether this managed deflation, so different from the explosive shock of 2008, will erode the government’s credibility in the medium term.

Meanwhile, urbanisation has changed China forever. For the longue durée of Chinese history, Chinese society was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural; it is only extremely recently that peasants have become a minority. The new Chinese city, generic in form, which satisfies most human needs in a functional, basic way, has introduced a massive number of humans as consumers, potential scientists or investors, and historical actors. As to the results? As former CCP leader Deng Xiaoping said of the French Revolution, it is too soon to tell.

Just after Xi Jinping came to power, the 2013 Third Plenum provided an ambitious programme of economic and policy reforms, but much was diluted or ignored. Xi largely paid lip-service to market-related reforms, but was more interested in Party discipline, greater centralisation of political power, and cracking down on dissent and the free spirits of entrepreneurs and private firms. 

But last month’s Plenum came at a time when China’s economic bliss had started to wane. In recent months and years, even allowing for Covid, the nation’s economic growth has slowed significantly, productivity growth has stalled, and the country has experienced the adverse effects of rising misallocation of capital, over-investment in infrastructure and housing, and a rising burden of debt. The property market boom, which lasted for a couple of decades, is over, and youth unemployment has dramatically soared. Despite calls from economists, including some in China, for measures to strengthen household income and consumption, the government has preferred to prioritise industrial policy and national security. In short, even as previously successful companies like Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and now electric vehicle and battery firms such as BYD and CATL, have risen to global prominence, a macroeconomic malaise has descended over the economy. 

Last month’s gathering was, therefore, awaited eagerly. What would the Party say about the trenchant and inter-related issues concerning its faltering economic development model at home, rising trade tensions with the US, the EU and other countries, and the ubiquitous significance of national security and geopolitics?

As usual, the Third Plenum documents, which have since been released, heap praise on the Party for its successes and guidance over the last several years. They proposed 300 or so measures, which the Party hopes to have completed by 2029, and which will help to steer China to become a “high-level socialist market economy” by 2035, en route to becoming the dominant global power by 2049 — to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic. 

One could imagine that great ambition would focus the minds of the leadership on addressing many of the most pressing economic problems, such as job creation for young people or a financial package to stabilise the real estate market and encourage home-buying optimism. In practice, though, the government doesn’t see things this way. At the Plenum, as before, its central message was that national security is as, if not more, important as economic policy, and that the two are inseparable. In one document, Xi expanded on the Plenum’s deliberations by saying that “higher priority to national security provides a pivotal foundation for ensuring steady and sustained progress in Chinese modernisation”, and that China’s industrial system, which is already such a large part of the Chinese economy and global manufacturing, suffers from “over-reliance on key and core technologies controlled by others”. 

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The re-emphasis of this linkage between national security and the economy means that the fundamental tenets of economic policy are not going to change. Reforms will be implemented not to change course, but to underscore existing commitments to the Party’s focus on industrial policy and underpin investment, rather than bolster the consumption share of national income. 

Does this mean it is oblivious to the needs of the Chinese people, or the very serious economic challenges it faces? The CCP certainly wants to improve people’s livelihoods, paying attention to the quality of growth, if not the quantity, and to lowering inequality, improving income distribution, and providing some relief to soaring healthcare costs. There may be other nods to what Xi has called “Common Prosperity”, such as a rise in pension benefits, reforms to the hukou residency permit system that would give social benefits to more of China’s 290 million or so migrant workers, and allowing migrant workers with urban permits to sell their rural land rights. 

However, such initiatives, some of which are already in place, are unlikely to be transformational, and it is noteworthy that there was almost nothing new as far as the beleaguered real estate sector is concerned. Instead, the government insists that collective economic and spiritual prosperity will flow from successful industrial policies, compliant domestic firms, and greater self-reliance. 

Chinese leaders also want to improve efficiency and governance as they continue to develop “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, in which market forces and mechanisms also strengthen the primacy of the public sector and state firms. To this end, one proposal is to pass a “private sector promotion” law. Yet, while this and other initiatives to assure private firms and entrepreneurs might be designed to win back their commitment and enthusiasm, the Party does not mince its words. It wants to bolster state enterprise efficiencies and organisational capacities, insisting on “unswervingly developing the public economy” and a total commitment to Marxism, the CCP and its political goals.

As it makes clear, the CCP is determined to modernise China by pursuing “high-quality development”. This is code for industrial policy, and specifically for allocating state capital towards new technologies and advanced science, especially those deemed key to national security, and defined as strategic emerging industries, such as information, industrial machinery and biotechnology. State-owned enterprises will be in the vanguard of these efforts, while there will be increased state investment, funding and “guidance” over private firms. 

Here, efficiency and profitability are subordinate objectives, if they figure at all. The primary goal is to build up domestic capacity and become less reliant on the United States and its allies, and to develop dominance in science and technology. By so doing, Xi thinks China can also fulfil essential geopolitical ambition, namely to lead what he calls the fourth industrial revolution, and terminate America’s leadership role in the global system. 

The confluence of economic and technological progress on the one hand, and geopolitical advantage on the other is not accidental. The CCP insists that China’s failure to keep up with the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution was due to what it calls the “century of humiliation” — in which foreign imperial powers, such as Britain, Japan, France, Germany and the US, carved up China and imposed damaging treaties and financial hardship. According to this (incomplete) narrative, history will not be repeated and the CCP intends for China to emerge well from what Xi reflects today as “great changes, unseen in over a century”.

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Yet, even though China is the world’s leading manufacturing nation, accounting for about a third of the global total, this high-quality development strategy is not certain, or likely, to deliver the type of economic surge China needs and expects. Aside from persistent questions about the efficiencies, commercial viability, and innovative depth in targeted industries, its rigid political structure, controlling governance, and closely state-run institutions certainly appear to present constraints. It is also running into push-back from other countries — not just the US and EU but also Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia — against the mercantilist trade consequences of its industrial policies. In other words, given China’s already strong export status, it can only bolster its manufacturing and exports by imposing significant trade and economic costs on those to whom it wants to export more. 

And perhaps most damningly, even on the scale on which it is likely to be implemented, China cannot guarantee that it will do two important things. First, its focus on national champions and top-down industrial initiatives are no substitute for a properly integrated technology ecosystem that reaches all parts of the economy, including all the “boring” bits such as wholesaling, retailing and distribution. Second, this type of industrial policy is no panacea for an economy that still needs much macroeconomic care and attention. 

After all, it is not exceptional, historically, for countries to excel in various forms of industrial and scientific endeavour but to be undone eventually by macroeconomic imbalances, debt capacity constraints and inflexible institutions. The USSR in the Sixties and Seventies, and Japan in and after the Eighties, both examples in their own ways. China is shaping up, over time, to probably follow suit. 

The saga isn’t over yet. David Johnston, a “special rapporteur” appointed by Trudeau to investigate the matter in March 2023, quit just three months later, blaming a “highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work”. Yet he was hardly the ideal candidate, coming across as a pal of both Trudeau and the CCP. Social media abounded with pictures of him beaming next to Chinese officials including Xi Jinping, who he’d met more than once while serving as the late Queen’s representative to Canada. Trudeau, meanwhile, described Johnston as a “family friend”.

China’s interference in Canadian politics has allegedly taken many forms. There are accusations of officials bussing in Chinese students to vote in Liberal Party nominations and whispers of covert donations, compromised staffers and the intimidation of political candidates and activists.

Before his resignation in June, Johnston issued a lengthy paper addressing the principal allegations. This included a quietly damning verdict on Han Dong: “Irregularities were observed with Mr Dong’s nomination in 2019, and there is well-grounded suspicion that the irregularities were tied to the PRC Consulate in Toronto, with whom Mr. Dong maintains relationships.” However, Johnston’s paper contained conceptual errors, downplayed certain claims and urged against a public inquiry.

For months afterwards, Trudeau appeared keen to avoid an inquiry, while his opponents pressured him to go ahead. Michael Chong, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, became a prominent voice in favour. For Chong, the issue was personal: in 2021, the CCP had launched a campaign targeting his family in Hong Kong after he had spoken out about ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. Chong claimed that the CSIS withheld information from him about the CCP campaign, and that Trudeau also knew about it but did nothing to help. Trudeau, however, insists that he didn’t find out about it until early 2023 when it was leaked to the press. Neither version of the story is very encouraging.

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In September 2023, Trudeau finally announced the “Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions”. Its public hearings began in January 2024, accompanied by classified in camera interviews and disclosures. The focus so far has been on what was known by whom and when, and why information was or was not passed on or otherwise acted upon. Looming over Trudeau is a damning insinuation: that concerns about CCP activity dissipated in a mist of procedure because that activity benefitted the Liberals.

The inquiry has not gone smoothly. In February, two diaspora groups withdrew from the process. One, Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, which claims to have been targeted by the CCP, pulled out to protest the role that three Canadian politicians were to play in the inquiry: Han Dong, former provincial cabinet minister Michael Chan, and a controversial senator, Yuen Pau Woo. The group stated that giving these figures a chance to cross-examine witnesses and access non-public evidence presented a security threat and gave them a platform for propaganda.

It is, indeed, remarkable that Han Dong has been given a privileged role in the inquiry. This is a man accused of benefitting from the CCP “coercing” busloads of private Chinese high-school students into voting for him in 2019. (Liberal nominations do not exclude those who are not Canadian citizens and allow people as young as 14 to vote.) Chan, too, is open about his “close relationships” with Chinese diplomats. Leaked CSIS intel accuses him of meeting with Chinese intelligence and orchestrating Dong’s problematic nomination. In neither case is any criminal behaviour alleged.

This surreal situation raises an important question: whose responsibility is it to prevent foreign interference? To answer it, Canadians need to consider what should count as criminal conduct in a democracy where nearly a quarter of the population was born abroad, and many retain ties with foreign governments.

The case of Kenny Chiu illustrates the delicacy of this question. From 2019 to 2021, Chiu served as MP for Steveston-Richmond East, a swing seat where more than half of the population claim East Asian ancestry. Many were born in China and Hong Kong. In the lead up to and during the 2021 election, Chiu put forward proposals for a foreign influence registry, which if implemented might have forced groups working with the CCP to publicly declare their ties. Chiu’s bill raised hairs in Beijing. On WeChat, a social media network controlled by the Chinese government, Chiu was painted as an “anti-Chinese” fanatic who wanted to force Chinese Canadians to register as foreign agents or else face deportation. His goal, according to CCP propaganda, was to destroy Canada’s relationship with China.

When Chiu first raised concerns about this online crusade against him — alongside the then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole — he was fobbed off by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) body, which withheld information supporting his case. SITE determined that the propaganda wasn’t significant enough to publicise, nor the evidence it was “state-directed” clear enough. Yet an intelligence document tabled at the inquiry this year came to a different conclusion. It claimed that the timing and language of the campaign, as well as the fact that the outlets involved had partnerships with Chinese state media, “all suggest that these efforts were orchestrated or directed by the PRC”.

If this was the case, why did SITE belittle the issue? Such revelations expose the inadequacy of Canada’s pre-leak anti-interference systems, which  operated on the basis that there is an acceptable level of interference that is determined privately in government. The existence of foreign interference campaigns below this level should not be communicated to victim candidates or the opposition, let alone to the public. The decision appears to have been that WeChat should be given the benefit of the doubt and only deemed to be involved in manipulation if very high evidentiary thresholds could be met. But who could realistically expect to receive this sort of evidence? This lies solely in the hands of the China-based CCP members running WeChat, who have vowed to “keep the Party’s secrets” and who face imprisonment should they break their oath. We are not going to get hold of it.

Meanwhile, there is strong experimental evidence that WeChat’s CCP-directed censorship and manipulation systems operate for users abroad. This was ignored or treated as insignificant in Canada, which is peculiar considering that WeChat is used by roughly one million Canadian voters.

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The fate of Han Dong is no less bewildering. Sam Cooper, an investigative journalist who covers foreign interference in Canada, points to a series of meetings in 2019 between Canadian spies and Trudeau’s national security advisor. Officials have since told the inquiry that these meetings resulted in reports on Han Dong being repeatedly altered and not shared as widely or as quickly within government as they should have been. CSIS’s head was recalled to the inquiry because of a lack of clarity about the matter. Having led on its reporting and as a direct recipient of CSIS leaks, Cooper is now deep in the weeds of the scandal. He believes there may be a Watergate-scale coverup at play here.

Yet the evolution of CSIS briefings might reflect incompetence more than conspiracy. It could be that Canadian spies simply aren’t up to the task and are either making mistakes or failing to grasp the precise contours of the situation. This would fit patterns seen in other Western countries, where spooks have been struggling to follow the CCP’s influence networks. Britain’s leading spies are not alone in admitting they are playing catch-up in the fight against CCP interference and espionage.

When asked last year whether he was told about the allegations surrounding Han Dong before the 2019 election, Trudeau’s answer smacked of emotional manipulation. “There are 1.7 million Canadians who proudly trace their origin back to China,” he said. “Those Canadians should always be welcomed as full Canadians and encouraged to stand for office and […] We are extraordinarily lucky to have a member of parliament like Han Dong in our midst.” Eventually, he got to his point: “It is not up to unelected security officials to dictate who can or cannot run.”

Trudeau was careful not to make the same mistake when he faced the inquiry this April. Instead, he admitted that he had been told about Dong before the 2019 election, and that he had decided to keep Dong in place, with an eye on revisiting the matter after the election. But he never did. The Initial Report released in May of this year states that, even after interviews with Trudeau and his officials, “the specifics of any follow-up are at this point unclear, and I am not certain what steps were taken”. It is another quietly damning comment.

Throughout this mess, senior Liberals have downplayed the gravity of the CCP’s interference. As well as distracting from serious issues — raised most vociferously by Chinese Canadians — with oblique references to racism, they have been obsessive in underlining that the elections were “free and fair” overall. This seems to be an attempt to conjure up fears about a wave of Trump-style election denialism. But this is to pretend that swathes of the population have decided that CCP puppetry actually swung the election. As all Canadians who have followed this story know, that is not the point.

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A second wave of hearings are set to take place in the autumn, but the inquiry will not spell the end of the matter. Earlier this month, a 90-page report by the Canadian parliament’s National Security and Intelligence Committee (NSICOP) accused unnamed Canadian parliamentarians of “witting or semi-witting” participation in foreign interference, including attempts to influence parliamentary business and “wilful blindness” in the acceptance of funds. The report names China and India as the main perpetrators, saying of the former: “the PRC believes that its relationship with some members of Parliament rests on a quid pro quo that any member’s engagement with the PRC will result in the PRC mobilising its network in the member’s favour.” The Conservatives are calling for the names of these MPs to be published, while Canada’s public broadcaster has covered this latest phase of the scandal with reference to potential “treason”. Meanwhile, both NSICOP and the public inquiry’s commissioner continue to complain that Trudeau’s cabinet is withholding information from them — lending some credence to the suspicions of Cooper and others that the Liberal party is engaged in a coverup.

For anyone remotely versed in the CCP’s strategic framework, the idea that it should seek to lay down a bridgehead abroad is nothing new. One CCP handbook that I have been reading was printed 10 years ago. It states quite plainly the CCP’s intent to turn Chinese diasporic groups into a “new force for unifying the ancestor-land and rejuvenating China”. This is a reference to the CCP’s hopes for territorial expansion in Taiwan, the South China Sea and elsewhere, which will require compliance from Western powers. The CCP hopes that ethnic Chinese people in countries such as Canada will help secure that compliance.

Most of the diaspora want nothing to do with Xi’s dictatorship, but the CCP’s financial clout and its use of intimidation, censorship and aggressive espionage mean that Chinese Canadians need proper support from governments and civil society. This is where Canada’s Liberals have clearly failed. Wherever this scandal leads, the CCP’s goals are clear, and it is in this fight for the long haul. Multicultural democracies must be too.

His vision was fated to become reality. More than 70 years later, in October 2021, Western media outlets reported that the Chinese military had conducted two top-secret tests on a new kind of hypersonic weapon. Its flight closely resembled Qian’s sketch: an object was fired into near-Earth orbit, which then descended further before releasing a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) travelling at more than five times the speed of sound.

China denies this event had anything to do with the military. But Western experts believe it was a successful test of a fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) weapon with an HGV element — in other words, a rapid and stealthy means of delivering nuclear or conventional ballistic payloads. Such a weapon could alter America’s nuclear “calculus”, creating the possibility of a nuclear attack hitting the US before it has time to react.

When the US tried to test a similar weapon in October 2021, it failed. And since then, at least one more successful Chinese test has taken place. The knowledge that the Chinese military is most probably ahead on hypersonic weapon delivery technology has ignited debate in Washington defence circles.

It didn’t have to be this way. Qian came to America as a “Boxer Scholar”, on a scholarship granted to Chinese students to make amends for America’s invasion and looting of China during the Boxer Rebellion. His career as a top defence scientist began in the service of the United States. He served as one of the leading aeronautics experts in the American military during the Second World War and went on to become a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was described by his friend and supervisor, the Hungarian-American aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán, as an “undisputed genius”.

But in 1950, Qian’s adopted home turned against him. A paranoid fog settled over America and Mao Zedong’s Communists, once supported in their fight against the fascist Japanese invader, came to be seen as ideological enemies. In the summer of 1950, Qian was visited by the FBI. Despite the fact he was married to the daughter of a prominent Chinese Nationalist, he was accused of socialising with American Communists. His classified security clearance was revoked, which forbade him from working on some of his most ambitious projects.

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Qian felt suffocated “under a cloud of suspicion”. He told his senior colleagues and the FBI that “the only gentlemanly thing left to do is to depart”. His friends in the military and at Caltech begged him to stay and fought to get his clearance reinstated. But after tentatively delaying his departure to China, he was arrested. His luggage was seized for containing boxes marked “secret”. Yet his allies continued to praise his talents and loyalty; J. Robert Oppenheimer even tried to tempt him to Princeton to work on computing alongside the celebrated “Man from the Future”, John von Neumann.

Later that year, the American immigration service announced its intention to deport Qian, though the plan was foiled by the State Department, which was wary of sending military experts to the Chinese Communists. In the end, Qian was condemned to a half-life in America: he and his wife lived under constant surveillance, and although he was able to continue working, his activities were strictly curtailed.

For a man of such talent, who had been devoted to America and felt torn about leaving, this intellectual ostracism proved unbearable. In 1955, Qian smuggled a note to the Chinese Communist Party, pleading for their help to get him out of America. Later that year, President Eisenhower authorised Qian’s release as part of a high-stakes prisoner swap with China in Geneva. In return, America brought home a dozen or so pilots captured during the Korean War. Zhou Enlai, a towering figure in 20th-century Chinese politics, remarked: “We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.”

America would come to regret hounding him out. On his return in September 1955, Qian instantly became one of China’s most influential military scientists. Within a year he had helped to establish the National Defence Ministry’s 5th Institute, of which he served as founding director. As the Chinese government now puts it, this “marked the beginning of China’s aerospace industry and missile development”. The 5th Institute has since morphed into China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation, the main contractor for China’s space programme.

When Qian set up the Institute, China barely had the technology to build a decent car, let alone satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The supply chain for basic materials, including rubber, aluminium and stainless steel, was poorly developed, and the techniques for conjuring advanced parts from them were unknown.

One of the first things Qian did was join a delegation to the USSR to ask for military assistance. Joseph Stalin coughed up around 10,000 volumes of technical guidance, 100 advisors and a dozen or so missiles for the Chinese to copy. But the circumstances of China’s research programmes remained primitive. In the first few years of the Institute’s life, thousands of scientists worked for Qian using the most basic tools and under challenging conditions. Many toiled shirtless in a vast hangar with no windows or air conditioning, operating mechanical calculators by hand. According to Iris Chang, author of the exquisite 1995 account of Qian’s work, The Thread of the Silkworm, the first rocket tested by the 5th Institute was filled with fuel using a bike pump.

In 1960, the Soviets withdrew their support. But under Qian’s leadership, China made extraordinary progress in developing its armoury. In 1966, China became the first country to test “a nuclear warhead mounted on a ballistic missile flying over populated areas”. It was incredibly risky, but it worked. An atomic bomb was delivered from Jiuquan in Gansu to its target in the Xinjiang desert atop a Dongfeng-2 missile developed by Qian’s 5th Institute.

As one protégé put it, Qian was always “10 years ahead of time”. But once America realised his value, it was too late. Within a year of the Dongfeng-2 missile test, two American authors published The China Cloud: America’s Tragic Blunder and China’s Rise to Nuclear Power, in which they blamed China’s advances on the hysteria of McCarthyism, arguing that “without the intentional aid of United States authorities, China’s nuclear weapons and the rockets to carry them would not have been built until the late Seventies”. They also suggested that, had Qian been treated well, he might have stayed and become a leading figure in the American space programme.

This lesson mustn’t be lost on today’s cold warriors. Qian’s story — that of a brilliant and loyal scientist hounded out of America — is not unique. For all the talk of “China stealing US tech”, there is increasingly a risk that brilliant Chinese American scientists will be driven into the CCP’s arms. With science and technology more important than ever in the contest between the great powers, the US risks repeating old mistakes.

Consider the China Initiative, launched by the Trump administration in November 2018. Its stated goal was to stop the Chinese from stealing American technology and intellectual property. But it was ill-defined from the start: referring to both Chinese hacking of leading companies and to the only tangentially related charge of “Chinese propaganda disseminated on our campuses”. When it was shut down in 2022, officials noted that it was nothing more than a “grouping” of cases “under the China Initiative rubric”. “[This] helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently.”

This wasn’t aided by the fact that the Initiative appeared to lack a competent, sensitive and indeed honest approach. In one case, the FBI admitted to falsifying evidence. In another, the prosecutors admitted to misunderstanding the funding disclosure rules a Chinese-origin scientists was alleged to have broken, and dropped the case. Most of the cases involved scientists, including white Americans, failing to disclose links to China in applications for American funding.

The Initiative left a deep impression on Chinese talent in America, and helped create an atmosphere of hostility that would have been familiar to Qian. One study suggests that significant portions of Chinese-descent American scientists feel unwelcome, unsafe and fearful of conducting research or applying for grants. The American scientific community is not happy about this: articles in science magazines and a growing body of evidence point to the damage it has done to America’s ability to attract and retain precious Chinese scientific talent.

It’s not just Republicans scaring off scholars. The liberal establishment’s insistence on affirmative action for black and Hispanic students has long resulted in discrimination against Asian Americans, who tend to outperform other ethnic groups academically. At Harvard, an internal study estimated that if admissions were based on academic performance alone, the proportion of Asian Americans would double to 43%. It’s a similar story at other Ivy League universities.  Some Chinese scientists considering raising a family in America look upon this discrimination and despair.

Is it any surprise then that America is losing Chinese talent? Now, more than ever, brilliant young Chinese scientists who have studied in the US seem to end up going back home. According to one report on Tsinghua University, by many accounts China’s finest, the number of graduates going to the US to continue their studies has plummeted — while the numbers going to Singapore and the UK have risen and remained stable respectively. One study focusing on leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence concludes that America still receives a net benefit from the Chinese brain drain — but much less so than a few years ago.

Meanwhile, China has gone to great lengths to grow its pool of top scientists. A focus on investment into education, on sponsoring study abroad, on promoting Chinese traditions that encourage intensive schooling, and on providing grants, materiel, sponsorship and prestige to mature scientists via the “Thousand Talents” programme and others like it have paid off. According to one report, analysing the top 10% most highly cited research publications from the past five years in 44 key technology areas, China’s institutions and their scientists are leading the world in 37 of 44 key technology areas such as batteries, synthetic biology, 6G, quantum sensing, and drone swarms. By 2050, according to one estimate, the highly-able STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) workforce in China could be 10 times larger than in the US and comparable with or larger than the rest of the world combined.

In this context, America’s efforts to limit Chinese companies’ access to high-tech chips have proved futile. Last October, the launch of a new Huawei phone shocked Washington because it contained a chip of a quality that US sanctions were supposed to have rendered unattainable. Starved of American chips, Huawei has had to innovate or perish. It has innovated.

What Washington failed to realise is that Chinese technology theft is no longer the only problem. IP heists have been crucial to China’s rise. But now, the greatest “threat” comes not from copycats but innovators. Washington, however, continues to respond in a way that might have been effective 20 years ago — but may have undesired consequences today. The paradigm of “China stealing our technology” is not a full reflection of the reality; Chinese scientists, working in China and elsewhere, are already among the world’s finest.

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All is not lost. Plenty of Chinese scientists still wish to escape Xi Jinping’s oppressive regime and its spiralling nationalism. As the tale of Qian Xuesen shows, there is much at stake in the battle for great minds. For one thing, we should all fear the prospect of great technological might in the hands of a tyrant. Even Nikita Khrushchev wrote of his horror at Chairman Mao making light of nuclear holocaust at a 1957 meeting of Communist leaders in Moscow: “We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.”

The madness of Mao touched Qian’s life too. These were the days of China’s blossoming missile programme, but also of an evangelical Communist-religious fervour and the Great Leap Forward. By some accounts, Qian took part in Mao’s campaign against flies, rats, sparrows and mosquitos, and was spotted kneeling in an alley near the Institute of Mechanics in Beijing, smashing fly larvae with a spade or screaming and waving a bamboo cane around in order to scare away sparrows. In 1958, he published a series of sermon-like articles in the People’s Daily extolling Maoist themes: “For our scientists — the leaders of the scientific ranks — their responsibility is great. They must be able to mobilise the masses and rely on the masses. But if they are to be able to do this, they must not only resolve to be red, they have to really be red, red all the way through.”

Qian’s writings would become even more disturbing: one article claimed that since the only hard limit on the agricultural productivity of a field is the availability of energy via sunlight, China could boost its food production twentyfold at least. In the eyes of some of his peers, this served as inspiration and justification for Mao’s plan to merge peasant collectives into huge bureaucratic farming units. This programme — combined with an insane initiative to force everyone, Qian and his colleagues included, into operating steel furnaces — led to a famine that killed tens of millions of people.

For a brilliant man to engage in such nonsense is baffling. For a man leading a WMD programme to engage in such nonsense is terrifying. As Qian’s would-be colleague John von Neumann put it: “The combination of physics and politics could render the surface of the earth uninhabitable.” In the era of Chairman Xi, Donald Trump and Taiwan, these are words worth remembering.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

Shipworth is not the first to run into trouble. And that’s because the problem is more profound than many realise. Many universities need these students. Were their fees to disappear entirely from Britain, with no other income found to replace them, many institutions would go under within a year or two. Some universities will even accept Chinese students without proper qualifications or basic English-language skills, so great is their desire for the fees.

Sometimes, issues arise because many Chinese students have been moulded by the jingoistic politics of authoritarian China. Xi Jinping’s promises to deliver the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and “Reunification of the Ancestor-land” make Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra seem gentle by comparison. The emotion this inspires can move people to respond aggressively to perceived slights upon China’s character. Such displays of nationalism may be sincere, or they may be a means of improving one’s own reputation, fishing for a reward or promotion, or going viral on CCP-controlled social media. Universities should back academics in the face of pressure from these nationalists.

The problem, however, is more complicated than a bunch of young chauvinists making noise on UK campuses. As the charity I run, UK-China Transparency, has shown, the CCP has institutionalised its presence at British universities. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) are present on roughly 100 British campuses. Most are formally registered as student societies under the authority of university student unions and typically describe themselves as “branches” of a central UK CSSA based at the Chinese embassy in London. This acts as an overseas office for an organisation controlled by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, which conducts influence operations abroad and was name-checked by MI5 in 2022. Most CSSAs publicly admit — though sometimes only in official documents published in Mandarin — that they are under the “guidance”, “control” or “leadership” of the embassy, which runs training programmes and networking events for CSSA leaders.

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We also have Confucius Institutes on 30 campuses. These centres are typically organised as partnerships between one Chinese university, one British university and the Chinese government. Although nominally for language teaching, they have in fact been involved in a whole range of activities, from events in Parliament to teaching undergraduate courses. One teaches Chinese traditional medicine and offers massages to the general public, for a fee. UK-China Transparency has shown how staff from China teaching in British Institutes have to follow CCP “discipline” rules that would oblige them to inform on university members if requested. Rishi Sunak promised to ban them but, as former foreign secretary James Cleverly admitted in an interview, the decision was reversed because of fears about CCP retaliation.

And if that’s not “surreal” enough, consider the China Scholarship Council’s footprint in Britain. This Chinese government body gives stipends to hundreds of PhD scholars in the UK, selecting them on the basis of their political leanings as well as their academic merit. British universities then pay these scholars’ fees. Like CSSAs, scholarship recipients are formally obliged to accept “guidance and management” from Chinese diplomats in the UK — with penalties imposed on them and their families if they fail to do so or otherwise negatively impact China’s national security. As with Confucius Institutes and CSSAs, all these expectations are spelled out in official documents — in Mandarin.

Meanwhile, the CCP has active eyes and ears on British campuses in the form of party members, which includes, for example, many visiting academics. All CCP members have taken an admission oath, by which they vow to obey the CCP, uphold its “discipline” and guard CCP secrets. They agree to act on the CCP’s behalf, and face special sanctions and punishments if they fail to do so, along with rewards for good behaviour.

Although the subject receives periodic attention from politicians, this scandal has essentially been ignored for a decade or more. Britain is only now beginning to come to terms with the CCP’s presence on our campuses. Likened by one scholar to a “python in the chandelier”, the Party is always looming — even if it strikes only occasionally. And it is those students and academics with family in China who feel most keenly the CCP’s presence. Most simply self-censor, knowing that their university is not a “safe space” for free discussion. Better to keep schtum than say something about Tibet or democracy in China which is reported back, because the consequences can be dire.

A minority ignore the warning signs, and courageously persist past the first clear indication that they are being watched. Most often, these brave individuals are called by family members in China, who explain that they have been visited by the police forces. Family members pass on a clear message from the authorities: stop now and come home. If you don’t, then you will never see your family again and they too will be affected, in their careers, in their access to government support, in their community. These are the consequences for Chinese students and academics in our country if they defy the CCP and stand by it.

It is worth underlining how much speech the CCP forbids and how ridiculously broad its definition of “national security” is. In China, forbidden speech is treated as terrorism — and includes any discussion of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, human rights, politics, corruption and religion that transgresses the party’s red lines. So restrictive is the speech environment in China that, during the anti-lockdown protests of 2023, people took to holding up blank pieces of paper as a sign of protest. Hundreds at least were arrested. Displaying “White Paper” remains a sign of protest. Given these sensitivities and the university sector’s dependence on Chinese money, one can see how difficult it might be to have a meaningful discussion about China’s history, politics, society or economy.

British academics beginning their careers know that if they put a foot wrong in this regard, they will find it difficult to go to China, let alone gain access to any interesting material or interesting sources. Last year, for instance, I and others working on a Channel 4 documentary about China exposed how Professor Steve Tsang, a leading British China expert, was censored by Nottingham University, which closed down his China studies centre because of CCP pressure. Elsewhere, Dr Jo Smith Finley of Newcastle University was sanctioned directly by the Chinese government for her work. One academic in New Zealand had her home and office broken into because of her research into CCP influence abroad. Even those who are not China specialists, such as Shipworth, may find that their teaching leads to “problems”. They need and deserve their universities’ support.

The strategic aim here isn’t hard to glean: over time, such interference has the potential to distort our knowledge of China itself, which is, of course, exactly what the CCP wants. This is also reflected in new restrictions on foreign access to corporate data, academic journals, and national statistics. Some sinologists tell me that this process started decades ago and that the well has already been poisoned. Only the courage of Shipworth, Tsang and whistleblowers like them can stop the creeping extension of CCP authority into our universities. Our academic freedom depends on it.

***

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, contact UK-China Transparency at info@ukctransparency.org

Shocked by such raw aggression, the man being accused, public pianist Dr K, withdraws. It’s hard to tell if he did touch anyone, since his hand is just out of shot in the film of the incident. He appears to be reaching for the miniature People’s Republic of China flag the young woman was holding.

The outburst was the climax of a row that started when a group of flag-wavers accosted the station’s public pianist and tried to prevent him from broadcasting any footage showing their faces or voices.

The whole group, who were waiting to play after Dr K, had voluntarily interacted with Dr K in a friendly way just 10 minutes earlier. But as he sat up from the piano, inviting them for a jam, one of the party, Ms Liu asked him not to show their faces in his livestream. “We are filming for Chinese TV […] You’re not allowed [to film us at the piano] because we are for Chinese TV. This is non-disclosable.” At one point, the pianist responded: “We’re in a free country, mate. We’re not in Communist China now, you know.” In response, Mr Leng, another of the group, cried racism, claims since echoed online by Ms Liu.

After the clip went viral, an interview with Piers Morgan followed, as did tabloid headlines, memes and remixes. But why such excitement? Weren’t these merely normal British-Chinese people driven by a concern for their personal privacy? Or was something more sinister going on?

To answer this question, we must to turn to Ms Adelina Zhang (张宁), Dr K’s third interlocutor and supposed hand-touching victim. A decade ago, Zhang surfaced at the coalface of the American branch of China Daily, a regime mouthpiece, writing a range of generally anodyne English-language articles, her only sensitive piece being an investigation of a religious cult banned in China. By 2016, Zhang was in the UK. That year, she triumphed at the “First British Chinese Supermodel Contest”, winning with it the opportunity to work with a company that produces shows for Chinese TV. (By the way, all Chinese TV is controlled by the CCP’s propaganda system, including whatever station the St Pancras crew were working for.)

Zhang has since built a career as a presenter of events associated one way or another with the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) and its friends. The UFWD has bestowed upon itself responsibility for what it terms “qiaowu” 侨务, or “Overseas Chinese affairs”, meaning for Zhang’s purposes engagement with the Chinese immigrant community in Britain, which includes the likes of Leng and Liu.

UFWD guidance that I’ve been studying states that “Overseas Chinese” are the “sons and daughters of China connected by blood” and that their goal is “national reunification and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. This is of course nonsense. It is the CCP that wants to “reunify China”. (For “reunify China”, read annex Taiwan, gain control of some Malaysian, Philippines, Vietnamese and Japanese waters, plus hopefully various bits of India and Bhutan too.) The claim that the “Overseas Chinese” share this goal is an attempt to conjure a “broad United Front” in support of the CCP. The CCP thus claims to be speaking on behalf of all “Overseas Chinese”, asserting the right to monitor and guide these people, enticing collaboration and intimidating sources of opposition — all in the service of “national reunification and the great rejuvenation”.

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Happy-clappy galas and functions of the kind overseen by reliable hosts such as Adelina Zhang serve various functions. They are a great setting for propaganda. Attracting hangers-on from British commerce, academia and politics also make them a staple source of information and connections for the UFWD and a cosy ecosystem for hard-core spies in the employ of China’s intelligence agencies.

Testimony to Zhang’s personal sociability is provided by a healthy crop of political selfies, including with former Prime Minister Theresa May, former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, former Asia minister Mark Field, and serving Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Here is an account of Zhang’s work offered last year by a magazine run by the UFWD:

“She has hosted numerous international events and interviewed various business leaders. She has thrice hosted a ‘Spring Festival Gala’ organized by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council [the Office is an alter ego for the UFWD under the characteristically Communist ‘two names, one organisation’ system], served as a bilingual host at the Chinese New Year dinner in the UK House of Lords twice, hosted the London Trafalgar Square Spring Festival gala four times, representing Asian women on the international stage, and hosted what BBC called the world’s largest Spring Festival event outside China, attracting up to 700,000 live viewers annually.”

What of Mr Leng and Ms Liu? Neither has enjoyed a career comparably close to the CCP. Leng’s LinkedIn initially identified him as a consultant for the Financial Times, but the paper has since clarified that it contracted him for just two days once. He used to work at a Confucius Institute and now runs gym classes. Liu, who has tried to capitalise on CCP jingoism online since the incident, runs a company placing Chinese grads in internships and jobs.

The three advanced upon Dr K in reverse order of seniority, first Liu, then Leng, then Zhang. The most intriguing aspect of the incident, though, is the presence in the background of another woman, perhaps in charge. In X posts published afterwards, Liu herself claimed that this was Christine Lee, who MI5 alleged to be a UFWD agent in 2022. Liu appeared to write:  “We were filming for Chinese TV, nothing to do with CCP, just a Chinese New Year Video to celebrate a Chinese new year from important figures in the Chinese community in the UK. […] Christine Lee was in the back with my boyfriend, but she was just accompanying.”

Liu then deleted the tweets and then her account was suspended. It is not known why. On top of that, the woman identified as Lee does not actually look like Lee.

It is not easy to see the full picture, but viral events like this act almost as a primer for those unfamiliar with the CCP’s influence efforts abroad: every aspect of the incident reflects some classic phenomenon. Perhaps more importantly, they are also an introduction to the resistance against CCP influence efforts among an emerging coalition of emigres: Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hongkongers, Christians, democratic activists, persecuted artists and lawyers. It is sometimes called a “united front against the united front”. This resistance is carried on above all by those that the CCP desperately wishes were loyal “Overseas Chinese” who support “reunification and rejuvenation”.

The aftermath of “Pianogate” abounds with examples. Take that of British Hong Konger, Jazzua Leung, who went to play his home city’s anthem (banned by the CCP) on the by-then infamous piano. After uploading a video of his performance, Leung’s YouTube account was suspended because of spam complaints by CCP trolls.

Or take the example of any member of the crowd of ethnically Chinese Dr K supporters who flocked to see the pianist on his return to St Pancras. One was my friend Lyndon Lee, a Christian refugee, journalist and human rights lawyer. Or there is Namewee, the Taiwanese musician known for satirising Xi’s CCP, who is now plotting a musical collaboration with Dr K, as well as the army of “Overseas Chinese” amateur sleuths from around the world who endeavoured to dissect every aspect of “Pianogate”.

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Look around the world and you will see countless examples of a twilight conflict pitting this resistance against the CCP’s United Front and its pets. Last year, Canada endured an astonishing CCP infiltration scandal that saw the resignation of a serving MP accused of covertly working with the CCP, an attack directed by Prime Minister Trudeau at Canadian intelligence agents leaking info to the media, and revelations of a $1 million plot to influence Trudeau himself. Then and since — a foreign interference inquiry has only just begun in the country — grassroots campaigners such as Natalie Hui and Mehmet Tohti, but also leading politicians such as Michael Chong, have been instrumental in de-stigmatising the conversation around CCP interference and demanding answers about the phenomenon from Trudeau’s government.

The UFWD is not particularly secretive about its intent to interfere in democratic processes: documents I have seen note the growing number of ethnic Chinese running for election in Canada and elsewhere and states a desire to mould them into “a new force in the reunification of the motherland and the rejuvenation of China”.

Ethnonationalist rhetoric such as this has led to radicalisation. This was evident in California last November, when Xi Jinping’s visit prompted both the United Front and its pets and the anti-CCP resistance to take to the streets. This led to brawls between Tibetan-American teenagers, refugees from Hong Kong and dissidents living in the US on the one hand, and middle-aged, red-armbanded Chinese men on the other. The previous year, the state witnessed a mass shooting of Taiwanese-American Christians by a radical opponent of Taiwan independence.

The CCP has long spoken of “Five Poisons”: those in favour of Taiwanese independence, those in favour of Uyghur independence, those in favour of Tibetan independence, practitioners of Falun Gong, and Chinese democrats. Hong Kong independence advocates have been informally added to the list and cast as “parasites” and “roaches” to be “eradicated”. Xi himself, in 2019, warned that anyone who tries to undermine China’s unification will end up with “bodies pulverised and bones crushed.”

This may be Xi’s dream, but the ragtag anti-CCP resistance is his nightmare — and, as Pianogate revealed, it’s not going anywhere.  What’s needed, however, is more awareness of their struggle. It is too significant to be relegated to social-media discourse. Far from being solely a threat to Chinese emigres, the CCP’s “war by other means” is an attack on democracy itself.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

There is less agreement about the onset of our second bout of David Cameron. His appointment as Foreign Secretary last month roughly coincided with Xi Jinping’s first visit to the United States since 2017. The two events conspired to convey a sense of things going “back to normal” on China. There were Biden and Xi smiling together. Here was Cameron, who during his time as prime minister instigated a “golden era” of relations with China, responsible for Britain’s foreign policy.

Have we learnt the lessons of that era? Or, pandemics aside, do we remain naive about the CCP? An exchange last month between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions offers some clues. Starmer began his attack with a jab at our new Foreign Secretary’s work with Beijing since leaving office in 2016, citing concerns expressed by the security services that Cameron’s jaunty and likely lucrative interim may have been “engineered” by the Chinese government, who clearly think they have a friend in Dave.

In response, Sunak delivered a string of official terminology: “The government’s position on China is clear: China represents an epoch-defining challenge, that’s why we have taken strong and robust steps to protect ourselves against the risk that it poses.” He went on to say he wouldn’t take lectures from Labour, who have “taken almost £700,000 from an alleged Chinese agent!” Their discussion of China ended there.

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Sunak’s accusation aimed to strike a nerve. In January 2022, MI5 issued a warning to MPs about Christine Lee, a lawyer known for her connections across the political spectrum and for donations to Labour and the Lib Dems. Lee was also known in the British Chinese community for having campaigned to raise its election turnout rates, and for an initiative to identify and promote young British-Chinese politicians.

This was not, however, a classic case of “spies expose secret information in service of public”. MI5 were alleging that Lee’s donations were engineered by the CCP, which no publicly available data seems to suggest. Lee’s work and closeness with the CCP, however, were openly described — albeit in Mandarin — on Chinese government websites, where she was named as a “director” of a body overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), which operates mostly in China but has a side-hustle running influence and interference operations abroad. This had been the case since 2018 and had been highlighted by news articles and a book on CCP infiltration published in 2020.

Lee’s connections in China were even older. In fact — and this is a key point routinely overlooked — they were a crucial part of her influence in the UK in the first place. MI5’s announcement was the first time the UFWD was named as a specific threat in the UK, but during Cameron’s “golden era”, those with connections to the UFWD were hailed by the British government as “bridge builders” and “ice breakers” and given opportunities to make money and friends in high places. Lee’s own law firm was listed as a preferred partner by the Department for International Trade up until a week or so before MI5 outed her in January 2022.

At that time, the rumour among China watchers was that MI5’s notice — which came to light amid the scandal over lockdown parties in No. 10 — had been, as one person put it, “sitting on a desk in the Home Office for a long time”. It was supposedly released by Priti Patel, then Home Secretary, to divert media attention from the lockdown parties.

Few people know whether this is true. Certainly, however, the notice has not been truly substantiated, the promise of further such notices (and an inquiry) has not materialised, and Lee is suing the Government. Hence Sunak’s surreal use of the phrase “alleged Chinese agent”. It is, after all, the Government that “alleged” Lee was an agent. There remains no alternative account of why the warning was released when it was.

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No similar notice has been issued about Xuelin Bates, a Conservative party donor who married Lord Michael Bates in 2012. During Bates’s nearly two-year stint at the Home Office, during which time he worked as under-secretary for Criminal Information, Xuelin worked as a consultant for the Chinese government while appearing at events to promote Chinese education and business alongside a convicted fraudster linked by court judgments to the proceeds of organised crime. Shortly after Bates stopped his work as a Minister of State in the Department for International Development in 2019, Xuelin was appointed to a role at the same UFWD-overseen body in China as Christine Lee.

This hardly sounds like a house well in order. Many within the British state are still surveying the damage, patching leaks, and wondering how deep the rot has set. Part of the problem is that China is not limited to conventional intelligence services such as the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) intelligence wing, which are comparable — though much less constrained in their operation — to Western intelligence agencies. Rather, it operates in a far more unfamiliar, sweeping, penetrating manner with intelligence and surveillance running through the CCP at every level.

Take the UFWD, which is one of the six main CCP departments. One of its formal responsibilities is to gather intelligence on the activities of what it calls “Overseas Chinese”, which mostly includes recent or temporary Chinese-born migrants in places including the UK. For the purposes of so-called “Overseas Chinese Affairs” — a category important and well-known enough to be given a two-syllable acronym, qiaowu (侨务) — the UFWD can call upon a senior official in the Chinese embassy in London, Jiang Lei.

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Part of Jiang’s job as “Overseas Chinese Affairs Counsellor” is to go to as many “Overseas Chinese” events as possible — from sports prize ceremonies and cultural evenings to business networking meet-ups and academic conferences. At these events, Jiang can network with and offer business opportunities to all manner of people. The British Chinese businessman at the centre of the “Chinese overseas police stations” furore openly discussed the UFWD’s assistance for “Overseas Chinese” entrepreneurs in an online interview with Chinese state media.

As well as micro-managing Chinese civil society outside of China, CCP surveillance also targets Westerners. UFWD cadres tend to zoom in on an influential British person or group who appear sympathetic to China — and then seduce them with promises of funding, prestige, paid work, and useful connections. This form of “soft espionage” targets business, research, public bodies, culture, industry, and politics, shaping narratives and gathering information.

The complexity of this holistic approach partly explains why British politicians disagree so much over how to define the threat China poses. The Government’s “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”, published in 2021, called China “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security”, “an increasingly important partner in tackling global challenges like pandemic preparedness, biodiversity and climate change”, and more simply as a “systemic competitor”. A later version of the review called China an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge” — hence Sunak’s recital.

Many have since lined up to criticise this nauseating pick-and-mix approach, calling for China to be labelled a “threat”. But the symbolic discussion about rhetoric has also morphed into a concrete one about policy. The Government is currently drawing up plans for a formal registry of foreign influence agents. This could classify China as a “threat” in such a way that would affect the “grey-zone” activities of Lee and Bates and their ilk.

Whatever form the registry takes, it is unlikely to be a panacea. The Australian and American versions are deeply flawed. In Australia’s case, the public register introduced in 2018 was at one point spammed by former PM Kevin Rudd in an act of protest. In the US, there are unfeasibly few China-related entries, and the system functions more than anything as a way of prosecuting those who fail to register, as in the case of individuals associated with one of China’s “overseas police service stations”.

The UK government is currently consulting over exactly how the register should work, with unenthusiastic parties, such as China-facing consultancies, asked to share their concerns. Businesses have also been given the chance to state objections regarding separate powers, legislated for in 2021, that enable the Government to scrutinise investments by Chinese entities in sensitive industries. There thus remain doubts about the “strong and robust steps” Sunak referred to in the Commons — especially since there has long been a sense that big business, hooked on China’s huge market, continues to pull the Government back.

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The response of the CCP-sceptic lobby to this dynamic has been to cast doing business with China as a “risk”, and to brand moving investments out of China — or “de-risking” — as a means of protecting future balance sheets. Key to this argument have been tensions over Taiwan. If China invades, so the story goes, and if the US sanctions China, then your company will pay for not “de-risking”.

The conversation about British “de-risking” ought to be fraught. Between 2012 and 2022, China was the UK’s seventh-fastest growing export market — a significant statistic given that the six countries ahead of China were all smaller geographically than England (North Macedonia, Panama, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Switzerland, Gibraltar). Most important, however, is the fact that the UK’s bloated financial sector is massively exposed to China, by some metrics more than any other Western country.

In October, UK banks held secretive meetings about this exposure and drew up an overview that they shared with Western governments. The UK’s largest bank, HSBC, is in a particularly tight spot following attempts by a Chinese shareholder — seen off for now — to split the bank in two, with its profitable Asian business going to a theoretical China-headquartered daughter firm. The coup attempt was dealt with partly by reference from executives to healthy profits. But given that nearly half of the bank’s profits are made in China, is there any way HSBC can perform an elegant “de-risking”? Probably not, which means that if the “Taiwan risk story” comes true, the UK will suffer an exceptional hit.

With Britain facing such towering risks and diplomatic sensitivities, good judgement is required. Lost amid the outpouring of disdain for Cameron’s lobbying for Beijing is the real scandal: our new Foreign Secretary’s “epoch-defining” record of poor judgement on China.

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The key is 2013. That year, Xi sealed his position as China’s undisputed leader by releasing a communique, Document Number Nine, which stated that China was being infiltrated by “Western anti-China forces” posing a threat to the existence of the CCP, and that an aggressive counter-offensive was required. Free media, free speech, academic freedom, economic liberalism, independence movements are all bad, per Document Number Nine, and must be obliterated within China.

This was the year that Cameron chose to launch an unprecedented period of UK-China cooperation. As British civil servants, university administrators, and business executives began to devise ways to make sure Britain became China’s “best friend in the West”, CCP cadres and officials executed Xi’s aggressive counterattack.

All the while, the CCP worked hard to propagate the image of a friendly Xi, peaceful and productive. Pumping money into academic institutions and the media helped (The Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Economist have all been paid to publish CCP propaganda). This was Xi the eco-warrior, the anti-corruption crusader, the defender of globalisation. Above all, this Xi was nothing to be feared. As he told the United Nations in 2017: “For several millennia, peace has been in the blood of us Chinese and a part of our DNA.”

Document Number Nine was largely ignored in the West, but it set the tone for a transformation in Chinese society: the implementation of Xi Jinping’s personality cult, the securitisation of society, a military build-up, political purges, the neutralisation of Hong Kong, the intensification of ethnic cleansing in China’s colonies of Tibet and Xinjiang, a revolution in “Overseas Chinese affairs” work, territorial clashes with China’s Indian and Bhutanese neighbours, support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more assertive incursions against Taiwan and the coastal waters of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.

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Taken together, these policies make the character of Xi and his regime clear. The writing is on the wall. Yet, even now, we have only half woken up to it. Some still see Xi as peaceful, at worst merely a committed and effective “CEO China” who has amassed power “without bloodshed”, as one prominent British professor, Kerry Brown, wishes us to believe.

This is not to say that our politicians and diplomats should go out and insult China or commit to defending Taiwan or the Philippines. Nor is it to say that it is Britain’s job to challenge China on the world stage, or to follow the United States in whatever Pacific tangle it might find itself in. It is just that whatever else Britain’s China policy does, it must never again make Cameron’s mistake of taking the CCP at its word. It must guard first and foremost against the illusions that would incapacitate us.

The Romans said “Fas est et ab hoste doceri” — right it is to learn, even from the enemy. Whether or not the UK government chooses to designate the CCP as an “enemy”, we should aspire to learn from one of its favourite slogans “shishi qiushi” — seek truth from facts.

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The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

This development is not exactly a surprise, but it has arrived sooner than expected. Overwhelmingly to blame is the plummeting birth rate — something that, you may point out, the Chinese state would once have celebrated. The nation’s One-Child Policy is the stuff of Geography textbooks everywhere. Whereas the Communist lunacy of the Great Leap Forward was relatively easy to reverse, the One-Child Policy — which cruelly persecuted and hounded people who wanted to have two children, never mind three — casts a long shadow.

But to blame it for China’s current demographic crisis is too easy. Egregious though the One-Child Policy was, it is not at the root of the nation’s current problems; it merely brought them on earlier than would otherwise have been the case. In the Seventies, before the policy was introduced, China’s fertility rate fell precipitously, halving from around six to around three children per woman in the course of a decade. It would have continued to nose-dive even without intervention.

The underlying reason for the lack of births in China is fairly obvious. The nation has developed. And urban, wealthy, educated people do not have large families — often choosing not to have children at all. Economic and cultural factors may differ a little between nations, but this is pretty much true the world over. It’s intriguing, then, that young Chinese people blame a lack of prosperity for their reluctance to have children; the Guardian reports one Weibo user posting, “Now who dares to have children, housing prices are so expensive.”

What has really changed is not economics, but expectations. When prosperous professionals have a sixth of the offspring their penurious peasant grandparents produced, lack of funds cannot be the ultimate explanation. The issue here is not material well-being; it is the matter of how one’s affluence compares to what one’s peers are experiencing. In days of old, people had large families in hovels not knowing where the next meal would come from. Today, quite understandably, the new normal is to want a decent home and a degree of financial security.

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The consequences of this demographic shift are already showing, with Chinese factories already reporting a shortage of labour. But we haven’t seen anything yet. The workforce is in free fall. Back in the mid-Eighties, four or five people entered it for everyone who reached retirement age, but the two groups are now roughly equal. Rust-belt cities are losing their life. Regions like Dongbei, once the beating heart of Maoist industrialisation, are now shadows of their former selves. The ballooning number of elderly rely on thinly-stretched single children to look after them — offspring of the One-Child Policy who have no siblings with whom to share the burden. One typical young adult, trying to juggle caring for her parents and working full-time (so that she can pay their medical bills), laments: “It’s a real struggle. Sometimes I just want to quit my job, but now I need the money more than ever.” In just a few decades, there will likely be two people in their early sixties for every person in their early twenties.

The median citizen of the People’s Republic is already in his or her late thirties — similar to the median American and only slightly younger than the median Brit. But while America and the UK will age only moderately, in a generation or two the average Chinese person will be pushing 50. An ageing China might be relatively peaceable and crime-free, but it will lack the dynamism which has vaulted the country up the economic and political ranks over the past 40 years. The crisis is bad enough for Xi Jingping to have vowed to implement policies to boost the birth rate, in an effort to reverse national ageing.

China is the world’s great population behemoth: what happens to the nation’s demography has significant ramifications for the rest of the world. As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets.

What can be done? Wealthy Western countries can choose to plug a shortage of workers with immigration, but this is not an option for China — for three reasons. First, as a middle-income country it is relatively unattractive to those seeking brighter lights and pavements paved, if not with gold, then at least with tarmac. Second, China is geographically and culturally distant from the parts of the world whose population is still booming, namely sub-Saharan Africa, where French and English are widely spoken, and Paris and London are easier to reach. And third, whereas a country like the UK can meaningfully top up its population with immigrants to ameliorate pinch-points in the labour market, China, with a population more than 20 times ours, would have to hoover up hundreds of millions to make much of a difference.

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China’s demographic decline will impact geopolitics as well as world economics. True, the nation will still have plenty of young men to fill its army’s ranks, but as it ages its politicians may be less inclined to lose them. Parents who have been forced by the Party to have only one child — and who have traditionally valued sons above daughters — will be doubly reluctant to lose them. In Russia in the Eighties, mothers received coffins containing the bodies of their sons who had died in Afghanistan; their protests have been evoked in the nation’s most recent war. Although worries about maternal discontent were not enough to stop Putin invading Ukraine, the precedent may give Xi Jinping pause for thought before he sets out on any military adventures.

And more significantly, there is a country jostling to fill the void that China will leave at the top of the world’s population ranks — a country that has not, historically, been the PRC’s friend. The global balance of power will of course be shifted by the fact that, for the first time in thousands of years, China is about to be eclipsed as the world’s most populous nation by India. India has a very long way to go before its economy catches up with China, but its demography means that it is almost certain to be the faster growing of the two economies over the next 20 years or so.

India has not suffered such absurd policies as China; when vasectomies were forced on men in the Seventies, there was a furious backlash and the policy was dropped. Though the Indian government has long encouraged smaller families — “Ham Do Hamara Do” (“We Two and Our Two”) was the slogan of the day when I first visited in the Eighties — population control has been more persuasive than coercive. Development has also been slower: less urbanisation, less education, less prosperity. It is no surprise, therefore, that India’s fertility rate has been coming down more slowly than China’s.

But it has been coming down nonetheless, from about six children per woman in the mid-Sixties, to just over two today. Still, the population can sustain itself — and besides, India has years of “demographic momentum” ahead of it: the population will continue to grow simply by dint of the large number of young people starting families, even if those families are fairly small, compared to the small number of older people dying. India can look forward to a couple of decades in which it can reap the so-called demographic dividend, with plenty of young people entering the workforce, relatively few leaving it, and the new workers not burdened by a surfeit of children. These are the circumstances which coincided with fantastic economic booms in places like Korea, in the Seventies, and Indonesia, in more recent times.

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Scratch beneath the surface of the national data in India, however, and all is not well. Fertility is still high in the north’s poor Hindi belt, in places such as Uttar Pradesh (which has a population three times that of Britain’s) and Bihar. In those Indian states where the economy is flourishing, however, like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the average woman has a similar number of children to women in the UK. In West Bengal, fertility is closer to the level of Japan. As India plunges headlong into greater prosperity, it is rapidly losing its demographic edge. Indeed, India’s demographic crisis, though a few decades behind China’s, appears to be just as extreme; the first whiff of escaping dire poverty and birth rate seems to collapse. It looks as if India, for reasons that are hard to pin down, having reached replacement level fertility, is going to swiftly plunge below it. Countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, by contrast, have managed to hold steady at around two children per woman for decades. India too will be ageing and waning before long.

Beyond individual nations, if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude. And on this front, there’s only so much a government can do. China may be famous for its controversial demographic policy, but the only way to really shape a population’s size is a cultural, rather than a political, shift — a change in attitude such as that witnessed in Georgia when its leading cleric called on its people to procreate. As China’s population starts to decline, and India’s looks set to follow, the question for the whole of humanity is: who, in the long run, is going to be keeping the lights on?

These social, political and economic shocks might have traumatised a lesser nation, but China has managed to maintain relative stability. Indeed, the Communist Party has ruled over the country for three-quarters of a century — a product not merely of its authoritarianism but also, as Kerry Brown has argued, its ability to provide ordinary Chinese with a unifying national narrative around “which the Communist Party relates to their daily lives”.

When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, this unifying story became known as “The Chinese Dream”, a slogan that was plastered over billboards and hoardings across the country. Through the Chinese Dream rhetoric, Xi confirmed that the country would become “moderately prosperous”, employment opportunities would improve, and individuals would thrive. Xi was laying the foundations, as he put it, for the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

The Chinese Dream was symbolised by social engagement, as opposed to the American Dream, which reflected Western individualism. To demonstrate the seriousness with which he took this notion of communal solidarity, Xi directed the authorities to clamp down on corruption and personal aggrandisement within the ranks of the CCP. For him and the country, social improvement was to be a collective effort, and all would reap the benefits. These included the promise that GDP per person would double within Xi’s original term of office, that citizens would have access to massively improved welfare provisions, and that China would start to develop a military “capable of fighting and winning wars”.

It was all going so well — until Covid-19 hit. Even when China was initially building a consensus for lockdown, the restrictions were sold as a selfless, patriotic duty. While the Covid-related fatality statistics remained low — perhaps implausibly low — people bought the narrative of a paternalistic party protecting its people. But over the last few years, China’s lockdowns have done untold damage to people’s families, their businesses, and their health. As time dragged on and Chinese citizens gradually realised that the government had no Plan B, they slowly began to withdraw their loyalty.

Until recently, demonstrations of frustration with the state and its armed goons have been curiously middle-class affairs, like the tang ping (lying flat) movement of students who refused to get out of bed. That was a form of passive resistance, and therefore fundamentally unthreatening. The real attack on Chinese authority came when striking workers broke out of the Foxconn plant, and then unemployed youth united with ordinary people and began tearing down Covid barriers and demanding freedom.

During the course of the demonstrations in November, many shouted slogans insisting that Xi Jinping step down, called for an end to CCP rule, and demanded greater civil rights — a direct challenge to the Communist Party. China has responded by becoming the only country to have overturned Covid policy in response to popular anger, which is ironic given the caricature of Chinese people as passive subjects of their rulers.

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The problem now facing the CCP is how to rebuild its popular legitimacy — and rewrite its national narrative — as nearly three years of Covid policy end in disastrous failure. What kind of narrative will Xi turn to in order to explain all this away?

For a hint, we can look at the “For a Life of Contentment” report, published last week by the state media’s think tank, New China Research. It sets out a strategy to recapture “harmonious” public order by outlining China’s place in the world. The document has been a long time in production, but its release has clearly been rushed out after the shock of the anti-Party disturbances. It tells a new narrative — one that is more strident, authoritative, and decisive than the Chinese Dream. And, in a bold move for China, it puts human rights centre stage.

China has long held pretensions of challenging America’s hegemonic role in world affairs. The party’s concept of Chinese rejuvenation — dubbed the “New Era” — was always premised on developing sufficiently to rival America. In 2017, for example, China was insisting that it was prepared to “take centre stage in the world”. Five years later, Beijing is sounding a more defensive, pessimistic note. It says: “the Cold War mentality as well as the hegemonic practices of putting one’s own country’s interests above the interests of others and even the international community at large, and pointing fingers at other countries are not welcome.”

This is not to say that China no longer has global pretensions — only that it is a little more circumspect. It seems that the street protests have rocked the confidence of the ruling party, and Xi needs a new narrative. Faced with widespread popular anger, for instance, the idea that the Chinese state “cares for its people” is clearly not going to work as it has over the last seven decades. Xi is going to have to earn some trust.

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And so to “human rights”. China’s conception of human rights is a pragmatic (and self-serving) one. The CCP clearly believes that it can improve its image at home by advancing the lot of Chinese people; when in doubt, the party has long fallen back on giving people more money. It claims that happiness is the ultimate basis for human rights and thus, by providing material benefits to the population (better infrastructure, jobs, pay and conditions), the regime is also promoting human rights. Ironically, China appears to be tapping into the “happiness agenda” beloved of Western environmentalists by turning the “abstract concept of human rights into a set of tangible rights”.

Of course, the CCP is banking on the fact that the West still relies on it. If the party can reinvigorate the Chinese economy and hold onto the reins of power, it will be a lifeline for ailing Western economies. If China can say that their minorities are exploited but happy, that their peasants are over-worked but with cash in hand, that the Uyghurs are denied rights but have decent pay and conditions, will Western leaders really condemn it? Tapping into Western relativism, China says: “There is no fixed model of human rights protection in the world. Different countries have different national conditions, histories, cultures, social systems and economic and social development levels. A proper path of human rights development should be explored to suit national conditions and the needs of the people.”

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China, then, appears to be regrouping, and a weakened West is giving it the time and space that it needs. Beijing says that it wants to bring “novel ideas, measures and practices in terms of how to respect and protect human rights (as) a refreshing addition to the global human rights cause and to the diversity of civilisations”, as well as offering “inspiration for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries”. In other words, Beijing might be in a weaker-than-normal position, but it is still trying to export its social and political model overseas. It knows it cannot afford to be completely defensive. Whether Xi can get away with this in the fragmented international community is one thing — but as the past month has shown, whether the Chinese Communist Party can convince people at home is quite another story altogether.

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For three years, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing, and digital Covid-passes. It has set up vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks at a time, and, more recently, “closed-loop” factories.

But many have finally had enough. Over the past several days, protests have erupted in at least two dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the Zero-Covid nightmare. In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighbourhoods. In Lanzhou, they overturned Covid-testing booths; in Chengdu, they chanted “give me freedom or give me death!”

This is without doubt the largest wave of protest seen in the country since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In some cases, protestors’ frustration with Zero-Covid tyranny has translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi Jinping.

What has really sparked these protests, however, is the Zero-Covid regime’s lack of basic respect for humanity. On 24 November, a fire at an apartment complex in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killed as many as 44 people, including children. Social media posts alleged they could not escape because the doors and windows of their building were wired shut (you know, for safety), and because responding firetrucks were not allowed past a checkpoint into the “quarantined” zone, preventing them from reaching the building (you know, for safety). While authorities have denied this — instead blaming residents for lacking “the knowledge or capability to rescue themselves” — China’s citizens are convinced otherwise.

They can see the residents were killed by the senseless, inhuman bureaucracy of China’s Zero-Covid machine. They know that they could easily be next. It is their anger and frustration with this system’s mindless stupidity that has prompted them to finally come out en masse.

Like every Kafkaesque technocratic nightmare, the Zero-Covid machine is seemingly constructed entirely out of arbitrary rules. This is a regime that deploys armies of flying robots to pointlessly spray vast quantities of (probably toxic) disinfectant into the air over entire cities; that installs machines in libraries to painstakingly sterilise every book, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that Covid doesn’t transmit through surface infection.

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Most visibly, this regime is embodied by the Dabai (the “Big Whites”), the omnipresent “public health” thugs who have flawlessly succeeded in dehumanising themselves into zombie-like agents of the machine by donning their iconic (and totally pointless) full-body white hazmat suits 100% of the time, no matter what their job is or what miseries they’re inflicting on the people while just following orders.

The most surreal and tragic part of all of this, is that there is absolutely no practical or scientific reason for it. As the protests rage, China’s state media asserted again and again that they will continue with Zero-Covid because it is “scientific and effective”. But of course it is neither. Lockdowns don’t work: a fact that was clear from very early in the pandemic. Even masks don’t appear to demonstrate any really any significant effect on transmission. By contrast, the “Swedish Model” for “living with Covid” has by now been fully vindicated.

The rest of the world has pretty much come — kicking and screaming — to accept this reality and allow people to move on with their lives. Which is why when Chinese citizens were exposed to insufficiently censored footage of the packed, maskless crowds of the World Cup, they were in for a shock that may have helped push the country over the edge.

I find it rather odd, then, that Western media outlets have insisted on upholding China’s Zero-Covid narrative. The BBC, the New York Times, Axios, and the Financial Times have all praised China’s “freedom fighters”, but they also echo the Official Line: sombrely asserting that China’s leaders are “in a bind” and can’t actually open up like the people naively want. If they do the hospitals will immediately be overwhelmed, untold millions will die, and the economy will suffer massively. Zero-Covid might be a bit excessive — what with people starving in their apartments and throwing themselves off buildings — and the government should probably loosen up somewhat, especially to get commerce flowing again. But ultimately top-down control will have to be maintained for the people’s own good. It’s an understandably difficult situation for Beijing.

I will go ahead and call total bullshit on this. To do otherwise would require pretending we don’t now have three years’ worth of collective experience from around the world, during which time every “expert” model predicting mass death in the dangerous event of freedom was consistently proved wrong. With only rare exceptions, health care systems in most countries ended up being able to handle the impact of the pandemic without any kind of collapse. Every big Covid wave quickly reversed itself and diminished. Why? Because herd immunity works.

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Ultimately SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with a greater than 99.9% overall pre-vaccine infection survival rate for those under the age of 69, and above 99.5% even if the most elderly are included. Vaccines have long been available for all those who want them. None of the humanity-crushing germophobic paranoia and tyranny is necessary or ethically justifiable in the slightest, and never has been.

No, there is only one real reason for China’s insistence on the Zero-Covid policy, and it’s one we also have some recent experience with in the West: pure ideological psychosis, rooted in the CCP’s pathologically fearful desperation to maintain total control of everything at all times, no matter how self-destructive the results.

The control-obsessed minds of the CCP’s leadership have been broken by the uncontrollability of the pandemic. The propaganda narrative they quickly built up around Covid — the web of lies intended to inculcate a “healthy” fear of the virus and thereby enhance social cohesion and control — took on a life of its own and became self-perpetuating. Now, in a closed information environment, the Narrative is setting the policies of government instead of the other way around. Much as during other massively self-destructive episodes of CCP history (the Great Leap Forward comes to mind), they are trapped not by a difficult reality but by a collective unreality — one from which at least some Chinese people have now woken up.

The pandemic has helped to shatter the image of modern China as a bastion of effective technocratic governance: a country run by sensible engineering PhDs, and possessing the enviable authoritarian “state capacity” to build marvellous mega-projects. Gone are the days when New York Times columnists and Canadian prime ministers daydreamed about what could be accomplished if their countries were but “China for a day”. The truth is of course that even technocratic central planners can be possessed by horrifyingly blind ideological madness just like everyone else.

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It is pretty clear why the mainstream international media won’t talk plainly about China’s Zero-Covid mistake. To do so honestly would be to strike directly at the same animating myth that drove “emergency” Covid measures in their own countries. The lockdowns, vaccine passports, QR codes, mass censorship, and brutal treatment of so-called “far-Right” or “conspiracy theorist” dissenters that we saw gleefully implemented by governments all over the world — and which were based directly on the China model — were always worse than irrational and illiberal. To point out that such measures are a continuing crime against humanity in China would be to point out that they were a crime against humanity everywhere.

That would be pretty awkward for Western governments. Besides, it seems we’re not done yet with technocratic solutions to “public health” threats: new plans for sweeping, “technology-enabled ‘always-on’ global health infrastructure”, including a global digital health pass that will determine whether or not anyone anywhere “can move around,” was just agreed to by the leaders of the G20. The last thing our governments need is for their grand plans to be derailed by the kind of pro-human independent spirit on display in China.

Fortunately for everyone (except the people), police have successfully flooded the streets of China, and the protests seem to have died down. Stability will likely be restored; revolution doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Regimes and their journalists everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief. After all, what would the future be like if everyone was inspired to stop obeying disembodied robot-megaphones demanding that we show our health pass?

***

This essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

TSP Chairman Chen Yi-chi is diminutive, spritely, and much more youthful than his 50 years. Inspired by his time in the Netherlands, where he studied for a PhD in political economy, he sees the country’s “progressive, tolerant society” as a model for Taiwan. Resting on his desk is a plastic fan featuring the image of the TSP’s candidate in Saturday’s local elections. Wu Hsin-dai, a 35-year-old cardiovascular surgeon, is running in Taipei’s Nangang district. Chen is not optimistic about her chances. “It’s hard to break the grip of the two big parties,” he says, referring to the pro-China KMT and the ruling nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Attention for Saturday’s midterm vote is focussed on constituencies in the north, where the KMT hopes to wrest control from the DPP. Despite the prospect of a KMT reinvigoration, the vote largely seems insignificant to international observers. News about Taiwan is usually pegged to China’s sabre-rattling, particularly after outgoing US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August. While they might give a sense of public attitudes towards Beijing ahead of the 2024 presidential election, these local polls are largely irrelevant to cross-strait relations.

However, amid the din of campaign-truck loudspeakers, news of a concurrent referendum to lower Taiwan’s voting age from 20 to 18 has been drowned out. And while an unfeasibly high threshold makes passage unlikely, the plebiscite highlights Taiwan’s ontological dilemma: the existence of an alien constitution, imposed by a colonising power.

Promulgated by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party (KMT) government in Nanjing in 1946, the Constitution of the Republic of China derives from the political philosophy of Sun Yat-sen. The teachings of the KMT founder and “Father of the Nation”, as he is known in Taiwan, are emphasised in the constitution’s preamble. To combat the corruption and lawlessness of early-20th century China, Sun espoused an enhanced separation of powers, into five branches — or yuan. In addition to the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial yuan, he proposed the creation of Control and Exam yuan modelled on China’s old imperial censorates. These latter two organs would be tasked with supervising official performance and overseeing civil service exams.

After he lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Communists, Chiang, his KMT forces and roughly a million refugees fled to Taiwan, transplanting the ROC Constitution to the island in the process. The Taiwanese were given no say in this, and those who called for political participation were imprisoned or murdered.

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Fast forward 75 years to a democratic country around 267 times smaller than China, with a population less than 4.5% the size of China’s back then, and it is obvious these supervisory bodies are unnecessary. Taiwanese politics may be plagued with corruption, but these extra layers of oversight don’t help. If anything, they’re part of the problem. Appointments to the Examination Yuan have been labelled “fat-cat patronage” by opponents, with academics vying for the exorbitant salaries of the positions they carry. Control yuan positions are similarly cushy: members are frequently friends with the politicians they should be monitoring. It’s hardly surprising cross-party support for the abolition of the two yuan has increased in recent years.

But there is a more fundamental problem with the constitution. Having remained intact during the KMT’s five-decade dictatorship in Taiwan, it has undergone minimal revision since the country’s democratisation. As such, it continues to enshrine the One-China principle in law, legitimising the CCP’s otherwise spurious claims over Taiwan.

Saturday marks the country’s first constitutional referendum since the 2005 abolition of the National Assembly — a detested symbol of KMT cronyism. Nicknamed the “old thieves”, the assemblymen nominally represented constituencies in China for decades, drawing huge salaries, and maintaining the fiction of the KMT’s continued authority over the “Mainland”. By the Nineties, a democratising Taiwan had had enough, and the “10,000-year assembly” was wound down.

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Yet the amendment that abolished the assembly replaced one undemocratic element of the constitution with another, albeit less egregious, one. Until then, constitutional amendments were ratified by the assembly. Now, a bill must be initiated by 25% of Taiwan’s legislature. After that, approval from three-quarters of voters with a quorum of three-quarters of legislators is required. Finally, the amendment must be ratified within six months by an absolute majority of the eligible voting public. Before it even gets to the legislature, a proposal needs signatures from 1.5% of the eligible electorate — currently about 180,000 people.

It’s a credit to Taiwan’s civil society activism — particularly the efforts of youth NGOs — that we’ve got this far with the voting age amendment. Still, the prospect of its passage remains dim. And if this relatively uncontroversial amendment can’t be passed, what hope for root and branch reform?

“The constitution is both procedurally and substantively undemocratic,” says Lin Chien-chih, an associate research professor of jurisprudence at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s preeminent research institute. “The hurdle to amending the constitution is unreasonably high — the highest among non-federalist countries.”

The procedural obstacles are even more disconcerting when considered alongside the constitution’s content. Article 11 of the additional articles from 2005 refers to the “rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area [Taiwan]”. National unification is also specified as a goal. “In other words,” says Lin, “our constitution still bizarrely argues that the PRC is part of the ROC or at least that the territory controlled by the PRC is part of the territory of the ROC.”

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Not only is this “undemocratic in the sense that it defies what the Taiwanese people think or hope for”, but it also bolsters Beijing’s One-China narrative. Chinese officials regularly cite these provisions as confirmation of PRC sovereignty, a situation that Lin has described as “embarrassing and actually hard to gainsay”.

Does this mean the cause is lost? Not entirely. Social movements are one avenue to so-called “Taiwanisation” of the constitution. The 2014 Sunflower Student Movement was a notable success in this regard. After occupying the Legislative and Executive yuan, protestors managed to block the KMT government’s sleight-of-hand passage of a trade bill with China. But, as Lin notes, such protests cannot fundamentally alter the One-China bent of the constitution. The same goes for judicial review by Taiwan’s constitutional court, which avoids “the political thicket of controversies concerning national identity, operating at the margins rather than the centre”. A further possibility is constitutional desuetude — where provisions that fall into disuse are informally abandoned. With pro-unification politicians in Taiwan continuing to invoke the constitution’s One-China articles, Lin sees this as doubtful.

The best hope in the short term might be a return to the incrementalism that accompanied Taiwan’s democratisation. “This referendum could be a first step,” says Lin. “You start with less politically sensitive issues, and if successful, you move to things like the Control Yuan.”

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Despite a reputation as a radical with a penchant for hurling flip-flops at adversaries and paint at dead dictators, Chilly Chen agrees with this approach. From his 11th-floor office, a view onto the Control Yuan building is a daily reminder of everything he rejects. As director of the Taiwan Republic NGO, Chen agitates for an end to the ROC and independence for Taiwan under that name. But he is pragmatic. In the face of Chinese threats, Chen accepts international recognition under the ROC rubric as a temporary compromise. “The end goal is to build a country called Taiwan,” he says. “But we have to keep this island safe. We’re democratic. We follow the rules. Nobody wants a bloody revolution, and nobody wants to see a war. So, we’ll go step by step.”

Yet in a climate of heightened Chinese aggression, many analysts believe that wholesale constitutional overhaul must wait. Even the groups behind Saturday’s referendum share this view. “Most Taiwanese won’t accept just ending our constitution immediately,” says Michelle Wu, director of Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy. “It can be adjusted softly.” While Lin agrees that enactment of a new constitution is “neither feasible nor necessary in the near-future”, he fears that failure on Saturday could convince radicals that incrementalism is doomed. This, in turn, could destabilise Taiwanese politics. “I’m pessimistic, but I do hope it passes.”

Back at TSP headquarters, Chen Yi-chi expresses similar sentiments. As he escorts me to the elevator, we pass the wall of shame again. Shaking his head in frustration, Chen says Taiwanese have been reduced to “self-censorship” for fear of enraging China. The constitution, he believes, should never be sacrosanct. “Revising the constitution represents protection of democratic freedom,” Chen says. “If Taiwan wants to decide its future and China says ‘no’, they are attacking the practice of democracy.”

The country is about to mark the third anniversary of the discovery of a strange form of pneumonia in Wuhan, but the recipe for dealing with new outbreaks remains largely unchanged. At present, the southern economic powerhouse of Guangzhou is one of several cities currently locking down millions of people to try to stop the spread of the virus, while production at crucial companies such as iPhone-maker Foxconn and electric vehicle-maker Nio has slumped, with workers either quarantined or fleeing quarantine.

Criticism about overzealous lockdowns prompted the country’s National Health Commission on Friday to criticise “one size fits all” policies and encourage local authorities to be more flexible in their interpretation of central rules. This came a day after the freshly-appointed Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China doubled down on its Zero-Covid policy. Its two instructions were for “more decisive” measures to “minimise the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development” and to “restore normal production and living order as soon as possible”. The connection of the two objectives is a sign that the top leadership recognises the growing unpopularity of Zero Covid.

These first signs of relaxation are more likely to benefit foreigners and people returning to China from trips abroad. There will be a further easing of quarantine restrictions for people entering the country. There is also an instruction to change the gradations of Covid control measures, allowing local authorities more flexibility in how they impose lockdowns. Step-by-step reopening will require different regimes in different places and restrictions on movements between them.

How likely is China to move away from Zero Covid? Despite moves to make the policy more flexible, there are two main reasons why Zero Covid won’t be abandoned, at least in the short term. Firstly, because China is woefully unprepared for the spread of the virus; and secondly, because the Communist Party loves Zero Covid.

While the headline figures on vaccination look impressive — with more than 90% of adults having received two doses — a more detailed examination shows major gaps, particularly among the elderly. Figures from May showed that only 62% of Shanghai’s over-60s had been vaccinated, and only 38% had received a booster. The problem is likely to be worse in less developed areas of the country, and is compounded by a nationalistic refusal to use imported vaccines and doubts about the efficacy of Chinese-made vaccines. Combine this with the huge size of China’s population, and any decision to allow Covid to “let rip” is going to result in millions of hospitalisations and many tens of thousands of deaths.

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The consequence of such mass death on public opinion, after three years of huge national sacrifice in the name of Zero Covid, must terrify the Politburo. And this is far from the only domestic challenge facing the Communist Party. Youth unemployment stands at almost 19%, growth is slowing to European levels, and the giant game of “pass the government debt burden down the line” is approaching its $1.6 trillion denouement. It’s not hard to imagine a perfect storm of popular dissatisfaction in the not-too-distant future.

All of which means that Zero Covid will be a very useful policy in the coming years. When, for example, irate customers attempted to demonstrate outside the offices of a collapsed bank in Henan province, many of them found their health status on their smartphone apps suddenly turned red, preventing them from travelling. Such micro-targeting will enable the authorities to keep a lid on unrest.

More fundamentally, Zero Covid is an opportunity for the Communist Party to do what it loves doing most. As John Culver, former US National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, has noted, this is a chance for the Party to return to its old ways. The economic reforms of the Nineties that drove the country’s rapid economic growth also brought about the end of the Party’s “work unit” system, which had been the foundation of its control over the population throughout the post-revolutionary period.

During his decade as Party general-secretary, Xi Jinping has prioritised one thing above all: control. We can argue about whether Xi is a Marxist or not, but there can be no doubt that he’s a Leninist. For him, the Communist Party is the machine that keeps the country together and drives it forward. All the ills of the 2000s — the corruption, loose morals and the weakening of the sinews of state — can be blamed on the loss of Party discipline.

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For the past decade, Xi has been revivifying Party control of society and the economy. In 2017, for instance, the Party’s charter was revised to include the line: “Party, government, army, society and education, east, west, south and north, the party leads on everything.” State-owned enterprises have been rebuilt, private firms and foreign companies have been obliged to set up Party cells.

Zero Covid, then, is a means to exert the same level of control over apartment blocks, residential compounds and private lives. Even after the tide of Covid eventually retreats, China will be left with the reinforced surveillance and the digital and physical barricades that have been constructed over the past three years. Yet if, as expected, the economy heads further south in the coming months, the Party is going to need something else to keep the people mobilised.

The most obvious contender is nationalism. So brace yourself for some intensive patriotic messaging in the coming years, whether it be over Taiwan, foreign insults, or assorted enemies within. The Party will be walking along the tricky line between nurturing the “hurt feelings of the Chinese people” and keeping a lid on popular resentment. That’s where the local Party cadres and neighbourhood wardens will earn their pay, spotting the sparks of discontent and ensuring they are swiftly snuffed out.

This seems to be the prognosis for China; a careful opening in some places but also a tightening of control wherever the leadership deems it necessary. The question worrying the Politburo is whether the online participants in Singles’ Day, awaiting their deliveries of freshly purchased consumer goods, will march in step with the Party’s mobilisation and messaging, or turn off and tune out.

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress this week, Xi Jinping will be nominated for a precedent-defying third term of office. But his grasp on power has not gone unchallenged. Days before the Congress began, a rare protest took place on Sitong bridge in Beijing, calling for the removal of “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping”. “We want to be citizens, not slaves,” read one banner.

The second issue is Common Prosperity. Resurrected in 2021, Common Prosperity is a political slogan and a theme that Xi has described as an essential part of socialism. It is designed to capture the government’s intention to improve the quality of life for China’s middle class and its aspirant members, including owners of small-businesses, migrant workers, and farmers. Its alleged goal is to lower those income and regional inequalities that have blighted China’s economic and social progress, and which might, if unaddressed, trigger social stress and unrest.

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There is no question that China has a major problem with income inequality, which is not only high now, but has remained persistently high over time. Its Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality where 0 equates to perfect equality and 1 to total inequality — was about 0.54-0.55 in 2019, according to the China Family Panel Studies survey. This was far higher than in most developed economies. The top 20% of income earners receive about 46% of income, virtually unchanged over the last decade or so, while the bottom 40% get slightly more than 13%. Until now, Chinese citizens have been willing to accept that the CCP would continue to enhance living standards and prosperity for future generations, but if citizens begin to doubt this, the government will have to watch out.

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One of the most pressing tasks is to increase educational attainment and employment opportunities for China’s citizens, especially those who live in rural areas. Whereas in the past, China needed workers who were simply numerate, literate, and disciplined, it now needs workers who are educated to much higher levels and who can compete in an increasingly technological and digital work environment. But the trend is going the wrong way: in 2020, around 60% of Chinese workers in urban areas were employed in the informal sector where low skills and poor pay prevail, up from 40% about 20 years ago.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Instead, Putin has decided to escalate further, announcing the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists in an effort to salvage Russia’s position as its forces flounder in the face of a sweeping Ukrainian counter-offensive. The mobilisation — along with accompanying threats to use nuclear weapons if Russian territory is endangered — is unlikely to have improved Xi’s mood. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin immediately called for a “ceasefire”. Foreign Minister Wang Yi later pressed for mediation and “every effort to strive for peace” in the conflict, while China’s ambassador to the UN Zhang Jun urged de-escalation and “a political settlement as soon as possible”.

China’s frustration with Russia is clearly growing. The conflict has left Beijing in an exceptionally awkward position. A short, sharp war that toppled the pro-Western Ukrainian government — i.e. what Putin appears to have originally expected — would undoubtedly have been a big win for China, severely undermining the unity and influence of the Western liberal order that it also seeks to overturn. It’s possible this was the bright future Xi was told to expect when, just before the war, Putin met him in February and the two leaders signed a joint statement declaring there were now “no limits” to the China-Russia partnership. Fast forward to today, however, and the protracted conflict, and the exposure of the Russian army’s simultaneous weakness and brutality, has turned into a serious headache for China.

Diplomatically, Beijing has attempted to straddle the fence on the war by supporting Russia rhetorically and morally even as it refrains from providing it with any of the material support Moscow has begged for with growing desperation. Russia has had to settle for shoddy, second-hand armaments from North Korea and Iran instead of the high-tech kit from China that it probably expected to receive. Even Washington has, almost grudgingly, admitted that China has so far complied with its sanctions on Russia.

The distinctly materialist Marxist-Leninist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) probably assumed its response would be appreciated around the world. Instead, no one is happy: the West has reacted with moral outrage that China hasn’t openly denounced Russia, while the Russians doubtless privately seethe with a sense of betrayal, having discovered that “our Chinese friends are tough bargainers”, as Putin let slip.

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Overall, the war is increasingly turning into a diplomatic disaster for Beijing, helping to drive perceptions of China to record lows around the world. In particular, it has shattered previously close ties with Europe. The European Union is now preparing a series of measures targeting forced labour and “economic coercion” that are likely to limit the EU-China trade relationship. Even the once reliably friendly — some might say naïve — Germans are now rapidly rethinking their tight economic relationship with China. The newly elected Giorgia Meloni, soon-to-be prime minister of Europe’s third-largest economy, is also a ferocious China hawk who has pledged to reconsider Italian support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative and make Taiwan “an essential concern for Italy”. Meanwhile, once-enthusiastic countries in Eastern and Central Europe, led by the Baltic States, have begun to drop out of diplomatic and economic arrangements with Beijing. And with the advent of the war worsening existing concerns about Xi’s draconian zero-Covid policies, China has, as EU Chamber of Commerce president Jörg Wuttke recently pointed out, begun to rapidly lose “its allure as an investment destination” for European companies overall.

For Xi, this could not come at a worse time. China is facing an exceptionally challenging economic outlook, including a worsening real-estate crisis, a debt bubble totalling at least 300% of GDP, an unprecedented level of capital flight, and a youth unemployment rate already over 20% — not to mention the damage inflicted by rolling Covid lockdowns. China simply cannot afford to lose additional trade and investment right now, especially from an economic partner as large as Europe. Meanwhile, the broader inflationary and recessionary pressures unleashed by the war and Western energy sanctions threaten to badly limit the market for worldwide exports at the very moment they are most needed by China’s struggling economy.

Worst of all, China is only two weeks away from the 20th Party Congress, the defining event of the Chinese Communist Party’s cutthroat internal politics. Held only once every five years, this will be the moment the party’s next top leadership is selected — and the moment Xi makes a bid to remain in power beyond his allotted two terms in office, potentially setting himself up to rule for life. For ten years Xi has plotted and manoeuvred to make this opportunity possible, and all he needs now is some stability and the chance to maintain a cultivated image of steady, all-knowing competence. But Putin has helped dash Xi’s hope for an uneventful 2022, opening a chink in his carefully crafted armour.

Last weekend, wild rumours that a coup had deposed Xi swept the internet. Elite military units under the command of a 105-year-old politician had taken over Beijing and placed him under house arrest. Military convoys were on the move across China. Flights cancelled around the country were the result of mutinies or military manoeuvres, not the weather. One of Xi’s rivals was about to take charge; the whole regime was about to collapse.

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All of this speculation was baseless, and Xi soon reappeared to pointedly lead all his top colleagues around a museum exhibit on “Forging Ahead in the New Era”. But the fact that the rumours seemed plausible to so many speaks to a growing view, inside as well as outside China, that events and his own policies may have left Xi vulnerable — or even cost him the “Mandate of Heaven” that legitimises an Emperor’s rule.

Even so, Xi remains in little danger of failing to secure a third term, let alone falling from power. The analysis of a new database of CCP power networks by the Asia Society Policy Institute demonstrates just how completely he and his loyalists have managed to seize and consolidate control over the three crucial levers of hard power in China’s Leninist system — what Mao Zedong famously described as “the gun” (the military), “the pen” (the propaganda organs), and “the knife” (the security and intelligence services).

Xi may be increasingly vulnerable in a different way, however. While his own position appears relatively unthreatened, the same can’t be said for his plan to pack the Politburo (the CCP’s top 25 leaders) with his protégés and factional allies, ensuring his path to lifetime rule and completing his personality cult. Xi’s economic mismanagement and strategic misstep of personally linking himself too closely to Putin have exposed him and his political faction to internal criticism in a manner that was almost unthinkable even two years ago. Xi had clearly hoped to replace his most obvious rival, Premier Li Keqiang (China’s second-ranked leader), with his personal protégé at the Party Congress, but this now looks substantially less probable. It is now more likely that Xi will have to compromise by accepting the elevation of Wang Yang, a senior leader connected to Li’s faction, to this position, as well as permitting the promotion of other reform-minded economic technocrats more sympathetic to Li throughout the system.

There has also been evidence in recent months that pro-Russia cadres within the diplomatic corps are beginning to be sidelined in favour of more pro-Western figures. The formerly high-flying and vocally pro-Russian Le Yucheng, who was once seen as a shoe-in as China’s next Foreign Minister, was suddenly demoted this summer and removed from the foreign affairs system entirely. Those who have emerged as the most likely replacements for the position, including Ma Zhouxu, Xie Feng, and Liu Jieyi, all have deep career ties to Europe, the United States, and international institutions such as the UN.

All this points to the possibility of an impending turn in Chinese policy. This doesn’t mean Xi is likely to throw Putin under the bus anytime soon — their high-profile “friendship” would make doing so disastrous for Xi’s credibility. But Xi’s patience with Moscow is clearly wearing thin. When Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu blithely declared on television last week that “we are at war not only with Ukraine and the Ukrainian army, but with the collective West”, faces in Beijing must have grown pale. This is not something China can afford to be prematurely dragged into right now.

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Instead, regardless of whether he is under pressure from other political factions within China, Xi currently has an incentive to stabilise relations with Europe and the United States as much as is still feasible, and to seize on all available sources of growth for the Chinese economy, at least for the coming year. By contrast, he has little incentive to be generous with Moscow: now that Russia has been largely cut off from Western markets and suppliers, it needs China a lot more than China needs Russia.

It’s at least conceivable, then, that Xi could very well begin to privately pressure Putin to find a way out of the war and back to some semblance of global stability. Even if he doesn’t, unless Russia can turn things around in a hurry, Beijing is more likely to try to cut its losses and take measures to selectively distance itself from Moscow as it prepares to make the best of a world in which Russian power and influence are significantly reduced. We may have already seen an example of this two weeks ago when Xi — just ahead of his meeting with Putin — flew to Astana and pledged that China would “resolutely support Kazakhstan in the defence of its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”, effectively evicting and replacing Russia as the Central Asian state’s security guarantor and patron.

China did not sign up for the massive blunder Putin’s adventure in Ukraine has become, and Xi no doubt wishes the whole affair could simply go away. But Russia’s flailing means he will face an increasingly stark choice: either continue to draw away from Russia and its mess, or pivot dramatically and unleash enough Chinese military assistance to make sure Russia can win decisively, setting up an epochal clash with the West. Fortunately, all signs currently point in the direction of the former.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Nevertheless, Western media has repeatedly validated the claim, often celebrating it. The result is that in the minds of billions of people, China was uniquely successful at containing the virus. What few, if any, have realised is that among the many false narratives constructed and deployed by the Chinese government, Zero Covid has been the most successful — a fact evidenced by the widespread adoption and use of that patently self-contradictory term itself.

Like any global, historically significant false narrative worth its salt, Zero Covid has not been monolithic in its claims. Rather, it has been modulated by the Chinese propaganda apparatus, with, of course, the witting or unwitting collaboration of Western media that has been essential to its success. The most recent manifestation of the Zero Covid false narrative is one that speaks to its daring and sophistication — the idea that, in response to criticism and pressure, the Chinese government came to terms with the fact that it could not cope with the swell of Omicron cases and so needed to ease restrictions.

The new “China is easing restrictions” phase of the CCP’s Zero Covid campaign began to emerge in March when a high-ranking Chinese health official began arguing in the Chinese business news outlet, Caixin, that China should fight the disease “more sustainably”. “We should carve a very clear path and not spend all our time debating whether we should continue zero Covid or coexist (with the virus),” wrote Zhang Wenhong, a senior infectious disease specialist known as the “Chinese Fauci”. Zhang followed up with another opinion piece a week later: “China’s Pandemic Fight Can and Should Allow for Normal Life.”

This development seemingly exposed the flaws in China’s Covid strategy, which is exactly what was messaged by the US media. The Associated Press article that reported Zhang’s comments added that despite the new policy advice, “the government is sticking with the tried-and-true policy of lockdowns, repeated mass testing of millions of people and a two-week or more quarantine for overseas arrivals…Opening up carries risks, because the country’s success in protecting people from Covid-19 means many don’t have antibodies to fight the virus from previous infection.”

The reality that the AP report papered over — and what virtually all Western media has missed as it swallowed CCP’s Covid narrative whole — is that China’s true Covid strategy wasn’t aimed at containing the virus; it was aimed at containing the narrative. “The Chinese CDC was told how it’s going to go,” a private intelligence analyst with knowledge of the data said. The source explains that the CCP’s methodology of choice is not to flatly deny data or take down reporting wholesale but simply “round the edges” off the story by obfuscating just enough to blunt any alternative narrative from forming.

This new inflection in the Zero Covid narrative, which claimed that Omicron reveals the “limits” of China’s approach, merely served to reinforce the idea that China had successfully contained Covid had up that point. In an article on the limits of Zero Covid in the Omicron era, the BBC credulously noted, “If you adjust for population size, there’s been around three deaths per million people in mainland China, compared with about 3,000 in the US and 2,400 in the UK.”

Even entertaining China’s absurd Zero Covid claims requires suspending basic human logic. Consider the case of Singapore, a country much richer and more advanced than China that was able to drive compliance at least as well. (Though considering the entire country is an urban island, in distinction to China’s vast rural expanses, probably much better.)

According to analyst George Calhoun, official Chinese data put China’s mortality rate 50 times lower than Singapore’s. South Korea — which has a single, permanently closed border which effectively makes it an island — is another standout for Covid success. Yet by Chinese official reporting, South Korea’s Covid mortality would be 73 times higher Covid-19 than China’s.

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Late last year, The Economist published a machine learning study on global Covid-19 under-reporting rates, comparing reported Covid deaths to estimated excess deaths. The study found that it looked like the US under-reported Covid mortality by around 20%, though a number of Western European countries at times over-reported by around 2-3%. The highest rates of under-reported mortality top out at around 1,000% for countries including India, Afghanistan, Venezuela and a handful of others. That is, except for China, which the study estimates to have under-reported mortality by an eye-watering 19,000%.

Looking at China’s official death counts tells an equally surreal story. Like a fairytale princess, China’s total death count was frozen for well over a year from January 25, 2021 until March 21, 2022 at the magical number of 4,636. Prior to that, from April 20, 2020 to January 25, there were four deaths. Taking these numbers at face value, this would make the death rate of the United States, where superior vaccines were distributed with high compliance rates, 800 times higher than China’s.

In the US, we have an old saying about gullibility which goes that if you’re willing to believe some outlandish statement then we have a bridge to sell you (that being the Brooklyn Bridge). If we were to abstract this reality and describe this situation generically to a group of listeners, be they savvy statisticians or plain-thinking journalists, the chances that they would believe these numbers to be real would be next to zero.

And yet, not only have we all believed China’s claims about its Covid “success”, specifically Zero Covid, we’ve built an entire political theory around it. This theory states that while China’s authoritarian system of government certainly has its downsides (human rights and civil liberties and all that), the big upside is that it’s effective. With the pandemic, this reasoning goes, China was naturally somewhat draconian, but ultimately successful. Authoritarianism saves lives, you see.

“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” a WHO report on China’s handling of the pandemic observed. Interestingly, one of the members of the WHO mission that produced the report, epidemiologist Tim Eckmanns, told Science magazine, “I thought there was no way those numbers could be real.” And yet, despite his own disbelief, he believed them to be real.

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In a 2020 column titled “China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump.” Thomas Friedman touted the wild success of the CCP. “[W]ho can blame the Chinese for gloating? A pandemic that began in Wuhan, and, for now, has been contained in China.” Friedman even allowed for a little number-fudging, writing, “Maybe China’s fibbing. OK — so quadruple its numbers — China still has been vastly better at protecting its people than the United States.”

Friedman never pondered the possibility that he might need to not quadruple China’s numbers but multiply them by 180 or 800 times. The patently ridiculous baseline mortality numbers set by China and validated endlessly by the Western media allowed commentators like Friedman to factor in CCP lying by a factor of four and still be off by an order of magnitude. (Who can blame China for gloating, indeed.)

What’s curious about the narrative that emerged in Western media is that it’s almost exactly the same one that Beijing was (and still is) advancing. While Western observers might think that the CCP’s wanting to “round the edges” of reporting on data would want to do the same regarding the rougher edges of its political approach, that’s incorrect. The CCP’s own messaging used the term “draconian” to describe the measures taken in response to Covid. For us “draconian measures” is harsh criticism; for the CCP it’s self-affirmation.

As egregious as it is, Zero Covid is only one facet of China’s propaganda campaign. Another equally important piece of this puzzle, one that ties Zero Covid to the question of the pandemic’s origin, is the date of the first outbreak. While most of the media has let the question settle comfortably on China’s official story, the reality is much more questionable.

According to China (and some Western experts), the first recorded cases were diagnosed sometime in mid-December 2019, which connects the outbreak of the pandemic to people who visited the now infamous seafood market. But evidence has emerged suggesting that the first outbreak might have emerged as early as November that year that would make the seafood market origin much more difficult (if not impossible) to support.

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The same arsenal of tactics has been deployed, such as disqualifying early cases in China because they didn’t meet an almost impossible criteria — for example, being admitted to hospital and testing positive with a PCR test, which required being admitted to one of the very few hospitals that administered PCR tests in those early days. A key article in Caixin tracking these disqualified early cases was swiftly taken offline with a redirect put in place to the Office of Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission. It cites a statute that calls on Chinese citizens to “fulfil social responsibilities, adhere to correct public opinion orientation and value orientation, promote socialist core values, and publish high-quality information content that is upward and good,” as DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneuf documented.

In a way, the CCP can be forgiven its epistemic sins. It was, after all, just doing its job: consolidating power, weaving false narratives, tamping down dissent. What’s more concerning — what is in fact, a four-alarm fire raging deep in an institutional sub-basement — is that the CCP campaign could never have succeeded without Western complicity, and most of all, with the complicity of the American media, broadly construed.

If it weren’t for the fact that China’s false mortality data was presented in Google search results; or that Twitter-verified members of China’s State-Sponsored Media could post without being flagged; or, most glaringly and egregiously, that the legacy press actively spread the mistruths and openly celebrated them, the narrative could never have been built. And even if it had been, it would never have mattered.

“The world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready,” Xi Jinping said in advance of the great authoritarian spectacle, the Beijing Olympics, which took place when Zero Covid was still the official party line. Xi was right that China was ready, but though the West had turned its eyes to China, it failed to scrutinise it whatsoever.

The seemingly irrational, self-defeating Zero Covid strategies in recent months have destabilised economic growth, at huge and cruel expense to the Chinese people. Shanghai’s economy has lost around £135 billion due to the latest lockdown, with huge numbers of job losses and business failures. Yet perhaps more importantly, Zero Covid has managed to germinate the seeds of dissent that the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades carefully suppressing.

President Xi Jinping is keen to avoid any association with the grim realities of the Mao era, particularly as he tries to consolidate his position as the Great Helmsman of China for a historic third term. Yet we can’t ignore the obvious parallels between Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the current Zero Covid era.

It is 60 years since the end of the grotesque Great Leap Forward experiment (1958-1962), when Mao attempted to rapidly industrialise China’s economy at huge human cost. Every village set up mini furnaces to reach absurd steel manufacturing targets under the pretext of rivalling the West. Furniture was chopped up to feed the fires and cooking utensils smelted into worthless ingots. Meanwhile, forced land collectivisation — involving the seizure of private farms, the torture and execution of landowners, and nonsensical agricultural techniques — led to catastrophic grain shortages and widespread famine.

Ordinary people were dragooned into this mass lunacy that produced nothing but suffering. Over those terrible four years, up to 45 million Chinese people died of starvation, or were simply beaten and worked to death. It is a sordid period in Chinese history, seldom talked about openly still. Partly as a result of such wanton destruction of its own population, China became a pariah state across the world.

This national tragedy afflicted all corners of the country and, to greater or lesser extent, affected every single Chinese family. Chinese people have learned to live with the shame, horror and sometimes the guilt of what went before. “(Ni) chi le ma?” is an everyday greeting, meaning “have you eaten yet?”, with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine. The common phrase “mei banfa” means “there is no other choice” — a fateful resignation to hardship and an ultimate expression of futility among a citizenry with no meaningful democratic accountability.

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But the state too has been shaped by historical experience. President Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 and demoted to a lowly position at Mao’s command. Xi himself was publicly denounced at the age of nine and sent to live in a cave in a remote region of Shaanxi Province, where he worked the land for many years. Of course, that’s not to excuse Xi’s authoritarian tendencies as the product of a dysfunctional parent or being mistreated as a child, but his instinct is to avoid inflaming memories of the bad old days. It’s odd then that, much like Mao, Xi appears to be sabotaging the Chinese economy in pursuit of ideological Zero Covid goals.

The Mao-era “Four Pests” campaign during the Great Leap Forward was targeted at the extermination of mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. For a country striving to increase its agricultural productivity, these pests were blighting crops, eating the seeds, and destroying the stores. Peasants were compelled to stand in their villages banging pots and pans, blowing whistles, or shaking rattles in order to make so much noise that the sparrows could not rest. The birds had to stay on the wing until they died of exhaustion and fell to the ground. Over the course of the campaign, one billion sparrows were killed.

With hindsight ­— or perhaps a bit more forethought — the Chinese authorities might have realised that destroying the sparrows would leave fewer birds to eat other pests. The destruction of one immediate nuisance — the sparrow population — simply gave insects the opportunity to thrive. With nothing to keep the insect population in check, the number of locusts increased massively, and crop yields collapsed. Famine ensued. This farce was not a conscious act of self-destruction, but merely a set of idiotic targets set by apparatchiks ignorant of, or unconcerned by, the knock-on effects of their instructions.

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Today, China has been equally ruthless in its attempt to eradicate Covid. It is chasing an impossible dream of Zero Covid but cannot back down for fear of shattering public faith in the Party’s infallibility. However, politicians are oblivious to the unintended consequences of their actions. An assault on civil liberties has been the Party’s only consistent tactic for two years, confining what they believe to be a compliant population to barracks — literally in some cases. The noise of stranded families standing at their windows, banging pots and pans to express their anger and disquiet was an ironic flashback to a failed zero-sparrow policy of 60 years ago. As before, pests are not tolerated.

Locking innocent people up certainly looks like Chairman Mao-style totalitarianism. In Shanghai, with a population of 25 million, the authorities confined almost every single person in their apartment for three months. The state’s mouthpiece, China Daily, excused the draconian lockdown measures by pointing out that “China could face 1.55 million COVID-19 deaths if it abandons the current dynamic zero-COVID policy”. As far as the Party is concerned, the revival of the memory of millions of deaths during the Great Leap Forward could not be countenanced today. As a result, China’s Covid response has been driven by an absolute insistence that rising fatality statistics must be avoided at all costs.

Official statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt, but at the moment the authorities claim that there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths in China since January 2020. (India, with a comparable population has recorded 100 times as many, for instance.) Yet how many tragedies lie behind those locked doors of residential compounds? Like starlings, people in high-rise buildings haven’t been allowed to touch the ground for months and many have surely collapsed with exhaustion.

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Watching thousands of residents of Beijing or Shanghai immediately leave the city after being released from lockdown says a lot about their fear that the government can shut down their lives again. Maybe, just maybe, the Party doesn’t work in their interests. Middle-class residents have been shocked by the destruction of livelihoods in some of the most modern cities of the world. A mood of unease has flowered, posing a rare challenge to the Party’s authority. For a country that relies on harmonious social stability, this is a growing problem for the president.

Admittedly, at present, things are positive as lockdowns wind down and people flock to the streets to drink and chat, but also to complain, to criticise and to conspire. The repopulation of the streets shows that life is being restored in Chinese cities as the people start to rebuild, but the sense of resentment and anger is not something that can be dispelled easily. Already we have seen student protests at a number of Beijing universities. Will Xi avoid the temptation to clamp down on dissenting voices, critical opinions, and seething anger in the hope that the population go back to their everyday lives and try to forget what has just happened?

Xi will do whatever it takes to maintain his authority. But rather than emulate Mao’s crackdown on dissent during the Great Leap Forward, it is likely he’ll simply ramp up the state machine of high-tech surveillance. It won’t look as brutal as the vicious state control of the past although it is destined to be even more insidious. Whether people accept it, after what they have been through, is an open question.

Clive Woodley, 67, currently attached to the Department of Shock Physics at Imperial College in London, has worked on high-tech weaponry since his youth. So he had much to say about the conference theme: “New Material Technology for Ammunition.” The event “marked a new chapter in the development of artillery, shells and missiles”, according to an official report issued afterwards.

Most of Woodley’s research has been funded by the Ministry of Defence. A former president of the International Ballistics Society, he served as Chief Scientist at the MoD-controlled company QinetiQ from its inception in 2001 — when the MoD privatised its own labs — to 2018. He has advised the MoD about many of its key lethal systems.

Woodley’s contributions in Jinan followed a grand opening ceremony conducted by Qi Xiaoliang, the Communist Party Secretary of the Shandong Institute, one of China’s top military research centres. Joining him, the conference literature makes clear, was almost every leading figure in the Chinese weapons industry, including key figures from Norinco, a Chinese state-owned giant that makes tanks, fighter jets, drones, missiles, big guns, and bombs. Another sponsor was the China Ordnance Society, which brings together 22,000 researchers from both China’s universities and its arms firms, all devoted to “fostering the development needs of national defence”.

Most extraordinary of all was the timing. In 2012, and for some years afterwards, Britain and China basked in a “golden age” of warm relations initiated under David Cameron. China was not then so widely known for the genocide of its Uighur Muslim minority, nor had it crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms. It was not until 2020 that the UK government decreed that equipment made by the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei must be ripped out from Britain’s 5G networks on grounds of national security.

However, the conference in Jinan took place very recently, on 14 and 15 October 2021. It was supposedly “international”, but in fact, the only non-Chinese delegates were Woodley, a Russian and a Pole. A few weeks later, MI6 chief Richard Moore gave a landmark speech, saying the threat from China was now his agency’s “single greatest priority”, and warning that we must beware of “large-scale espionage operations against us, targeting those in research of particular interest to the Chinese state” — in other words, experts such as Woodley.

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Yet the Jinan event was no one-off. Working with an expert who is fluent in Mandarin, I have established that over the past eight years, Woodley has participated at least seven times in seminars and lectures for senior figures from China’s defence industry and university departments that work with its military. He is also a co-editor of two Chinese journals funded by weapons firms. Since 2014, he has had eight papers either published in Chinese journals or co-written with Chinese scientists working with Chinese arms makers — the most recent, in 2021.

And Covid rules permitting, Woodley will soon be jetting off yet again to Beijing. There, over four days in July, he will co-chair the International Conference on Defence Technology, presiding over sessions covering the latest discoveries in sensitive military technologies. Helpfully, Woodley lists their subject areas in his “welcome letter” on the conference website. They include hypersonic weapons (as deployed by the Russians with lethal effect in Ukraine), “explosions and impacts”, new types of armour, quantum computing and “wound ballistics”.

Just as in October, most of those in attendance will be from China’s weapons industry: Woodley’s co-chairs will be two of China’s most eminent defence scientists, Feng Changgen of the Beijing Institute of Technology and Li Baoming of Nanjing University and the Ordnance Science and Research Academy of China. Both are high-ranking members of the Communist Party, and their careers have been dedicated to China’s military.

In recent months, newspapers have carried many stories about China’s involvement with British academics and universities, and the risks this may pose. But until now, Woodley’s activities have gone unreported. The MoD says it does not recognise they might pose any risk. Its spokesperson refused to answer a single question about Woodley’s involvement with China, other than to say: “We have robust procedures in place to make sure research contracts do not contribute to overseas military programmes and that individuals or organisations with foreign-state links cannot access our sensitive research… we ensure that stringent vetting checks are carried out.”

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Imperial College said: “We take our responsibilities to UK national security seriously”, but also refused to answer questions. Its spokesperson added, somewhat bizarrely, that when Woodley wrote papers jointly with Chinese colleagues, he “should not have used” his Imperial College title. Here, Woodley appears not to have got the memo: for the forthcoming Beijing conference, he is, as usual, billed as an Imperial researcher.

As for QinetiQ, its spokesperson said the firm had “robust processes in place to vet our people and their activities both within and outside the business”. He said that Woodley was working there, and that he “frequently engaged with a number of other countries across the world, working collaboratively to support the international scientific community. Our UK Defence customer was both aware of and supportive of all these activities.”

Others, however, have expressed concern. A former senior MI6 officer told me: “The fact there have been not just one or two talks but a consistent and continuing pattern of meeting and contact is deeply concerning. I can’t think of another case where a British lecturer has visited China many times to talk about weapons technology, nor written papers about it in Chinese journals.”

Woodley’s intentions, he went on, were, presumably, innocent: a desire to share research with colleagues abroad. But he was, the former official added, at best deeply naïve: “An open relationship, with talks or lectures in scientific forums, can all too easily be a cover for attempts by a hostile intelligence service to conduct more in-depth discussions. To me, this looks like a classic example of the way China’s intelligence service works.”

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He added that China may have tried to steal data from Woodley’s laptop or phone during his visits there, without him even knowing it: “Business people travelling to China are always advised to take only burner phones and computers with no sensitive data on them.”

Indeed, in 2013, the year before Woodley’s work with China began, it emerged that Chinese spies had stolen vast amounts of sensitive information from his then employer QinetiQ by hacking its computer system via two employees’ laptops. They stole 13,000 QinetiQ server passwords and acquired more than 1.3 million pages of documents.

I shared my findings with the Tory MP and former army officer Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said that after this article was published, his committee would investigate. Tugendhat said: “This case raises serious concerns about the integrity of our military secrets and the level of cooperation between a British expert and a potentially hostile state, and we will be looking into what exactly has happened — and why no one has raised such concerns before. No one could say his work is dual use. His career has had one end only — the development of weapons.”

Woodley’s activities are particularly concerning, given his long-standing reputation as a giant in his field. His contributions have included the development of plasma-powered cannons, fired by high-voltage electric pulses in place of old-fashioned explosives; ingenious ways of improving firing mechanisms and shells using mathematical modelling, so that big guns can be targeted more accurately; and ways of increasing the violence and speed of their shells’ detonations. Another of his areas of expertise is railguns — next generation hypersonic artillery weapons that fire projectiles at six times the speed of sound, so that a shell fired from London would land somewhere in Manchester in just over a minute.

There is, it should be noted, no suggestion that Woodley has disclosed classified information, or consciously tried to damage Britain’s national interest. Nevertheless, it is a fact that China has acquired a decisive lead in the race to deploy railguns. In 2020, it revealed a prototype mounted on a naval vessel and said it planned to deploy these “superguns” widely by 2025. Britain and America are said to be lagging far behind. In 2019, Woodley delivered a conference paper co-written with Li Baoming and his Nanjing University colleague Qin Linhua. Its title? “Recent Update on the Multi-Physical-Model of Electromagnetic Railgun.”

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Woodley has been visiting China since 2014, when, Mandarin websites say, he gave “an important lecture” to scientists from Norinco. The same year, he joined the editorial board of a journal published in Mandarin, The Chinese Journal of Explosives and Propellants, co-owned by Norinco and the China Ordnance Society. The head of both institutions is a senior member of the Communist Party, Jiao Kaihe.

Woodley’s first paper for the journal was published in its December 2014 issue. It described how microscopic particles of aluminium could speed the detonation of explosives, and so make guns more deadly. The paper stated that this innovation would be “of great benefit to all small arms, medium calibre and large calibre gun systems including naval guns, land-based artillery and direct fire guns”. The paper’s acknowledgements stated: “This work was funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), part of the UK MoD, under the Hazard Modelling and Simulation task of the UK Energetics (UK-E) programme.”

Woodley published another paper in the same journal in 2015, and a third in 2018, about mathematical modelling of the behaviour of guns and explosives. His last Chinese Journal of Explosives paper to date, published last August, dealt with new forms of explosives in what were termed “closed bombs”. It was co-written with four Chinese experts from the Xi’an Modern Chemistry Research Institute, part of Norinco. The Institute’s website says it is “China’s largest comprehensive research institution working on explosives and damaging combustion technologies”.

Meanwhile, in 2016 Woodley authored a paper in a second Chinese journal, Defence Technology, which is sponsored by the weapons industry body, the China Ordnance Society. It discussed the use of explosives at low atmospheric pressures and in temperature extremes, stating it was based on research “funded by the MoD”, under its “Weapons Science and Technology Centre” (WSTC).

He also became one of the journal’s three executive editors, along with the two scientists who will be co-chairing the conference with him in July, Li Baoming and Feng Changgen. Feng is a former member of China’s puppet parliament, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and is based at the Beijing Institute of Technology, one of China’s “seven sons of national defence” — universities with especially close military links and numerous top secret military labs. He sits on the Science and Technology Committee of the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, which coordinates China’s weapons research.

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Until the pandemic, Woodley visited China almost every year. In 2015, he attended the autumn seminar at the State Key Laboratory of Explosion Science, part of the Beijing Institute of Technology. The following year he gave a week-long series of seminars at Li Baoming’s lab in Nanjing about his work at QinetiQ — which, photos reveal, were illustrated with slides bearing the QinetiQ logo. According to reports in Mandarin, as well as his lectures and seminars, he held private talks with his Chinese colleagues.

In 2018, he co-chaired the first International Conference on Defence Technology in Beijing, together with Feng and Li. The event was sponsored by Norinco, the China Ordnance Society, and the China South Industries Group Corporation, another major weapons maker. The event was attended by personnel from Norinco, several “seven sons” universities, and the Army Engineering University, which describes itself as “the premier research and educational institution for the PLA Ground Force”. The second of these conferences, in the autumn of 2020, had to be held online thanks to the pandemic. By then, the “golden age” was well and truly over, amid emerging evidence that China had concealed the true source of the Covid outbreak. Nevertheless, Woodley was there.

I have tried repeatedly to ask Woodley questions about his publications and trips to China in a series of emails. When he failed to respond, I visited his home in Kent. He told me that if I didn’t leave he would call the police, slammed the door in my face, and refused to accept my questions in writing. Among the things I had wanted to ask were whether he has received any payment for his work with Chinese colleagues and journals; what security precautions he has taken during his visits; and whether he considers collaborating with researchers from China is any different to working with experts from countries allied with Britain.

Charles Parton, a former diplomat and China expert at the Royal United Services Institute, who has written extensively on the need for the UK to improve its defences against China, told me that the curious case of Mr Woodley “requires urgent investigation and explanation. What was discussed with whom and in what terms? Were any benefits received? It also shows badly we need to up our defences. We need to define the areas of scientific research where we can cooperate with Chinese scientists and those which we must rule out on security grounds.”

Espionage expert Professor Anthony Glees, the founder of the Institute for Intelligence and Security Studies at Buckingham University, added: “Engaging with China over weapons research today represents the height of folly and could have potentially catastrophic consequences. Even with the best intentions, Woodley’s visits to China and his relationships with those who are bound to be Chinese intelligence assets places him in the utmost danger.”

As the scale of the strategic threat China poses becomes clearer, it may just be that Woodley’s friendships could have endangered the rest of us, too.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”