Or not. Farewell, then, Jensen Huang, whose philandering was almost as remarkable as his leadership of Nvidia. In 1993, he and two other engineers sat in a booth in a Denny’s diner and sketched out a plan for a new chip company. Huang led the startup from the outset, and it was thanks to his vigor and foresight that Nvidia came to supply the chips that today power the AI revolution.

Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company; Huang, evidently, became one of the most irresistible men in commerce. In the past few days, though, the now former CEO’s clandestine love life has unraveled. On 29 October, The New York Times disclosed that he had developed a “close relationship” with Alice Huang, a Chinese intelligence asset. Alice is no familial relation, but there was certainly some incestuousness to the acquaintance: not only was she an executive at a firm supplied by Nvidia, she was also, it soon transpired, Jensen’s mistress. News of another mistress, this time one of Huang’s direct reports at Nvidia, soon followed. Huang, under investigation, resigned. Hours later, a third mistress came to light.

Huang’s story, then, is both an epic, corporate bildungsroman and a riotous, geopolitical bonkbuster. But it is also a whodunnit, for intelligence reports tend not to leak accidentally, and Huang had many foes. Silicon Valley is ablaze with rumor: who wanted Jensen gone, and why?

There are several competing theories. The less refined conspiracists, noting that three Israeli executives were among those who could replace Huang, have immediately blamed you-know-who. “I don’t have enough evidence for it,” said the Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker of this fanciful hypothesis, “but that’s not going to stop other people from suspecting that that is what took place.”

A more compelling theory was advanced yesterday by my UnHerd colleague Wolfgang Münchau. Wondering whether some bad commercial news was imminent, he wrote: “The Nvidia share price has fallen by nearly a third from its peak in early October. Will we hear the interim CEO declare her shock when she looks at the books?”

The most widespread speculation, though, is predicated on Huang’s championing of a wide and fast-growing ecosystem of AI developers. Many in this ecosystem use “open-source” AI. Namely: AI whose code is publicly available and thus easily augmented — by Chinese and Western developers alike. Techno-optimists, Huang included, view open-source as conducive to innovation and prosperity; it also ensures Nvidia a long queue of customers.

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Those who are more fearful of powerful AI, however, consider open-source to be tantamount to nuclear proliferation. As such, the AI safety community, out of which grew the frontier lab Anthropic, wants powerful AI to be developed only by a small number of companies, each continuously scrutinized by third-party inspectors. These arguments have received friendly hearings in the Democratic Party, which, buoyed by its success in the midterms, is coalescing around the view that AI ought to be robustly regulated.

That adds up to plenty of enemies for Huang. But there are more: the US government’s China hawks. Seeking to keep its chief geopolitical rival away from the AI frontier, the White House has restricted the sale of chips to China. Somewhere in Inner Mongolia, though, the Chinese startup DeepSeek has been training its best model on Blackwell chips, the precursor to Rubin. Huang, who has publicly lobbied for the controls to be removed, is accused of turning a blind eye to large-scale smuggling of chips — with the suspicions exacerbated by his closeness to Alice.

So: whodunnit? Some in San Francisco have pointed the finger at Dario Amodei himself. Amodei is the chief executive of Anthropic and one of the figureheads of the AI safety movement. Could he be responsible for Huang’s defenestration? Was he heading off a secret Huang plan to develop frontier-class open models?

That it was Amodei specifically seems unlikely. Still, with only a little squinting, the hand of a rival can potentially be discerned in the reporting. Intriguingly, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the story of that “close relationship” has related how a “tech industry contact” prompted him to look into Megaspeed, Alice Huang’s company. Tripp Mickle, the reporter, said on Tuesday that the source told him: “You really need to drop everything and look at this company.”

That conversation, according to Mickle, took place in August 2025. “And then about a month ago,” he continued, “we hear that our colleagues in Washington on the national security beat all of a sudden are hearing things about Alice Huang.”

Most telling here is the fact that the Times could refer to what ought to have been private briefings. Some part of the American deep state, it seems, lent the journalists a hand. It did so despite President Trump’s apparent affection for Huang — and despite the story’s potential disruption to Anthropic’s IPO, the success of which depends, to a significant extent, on investor confidence in the AI boom. The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, no friend to the deep state, writes that whoever wanted rid of Huang “wields extreme levels of power”. The briefing against Alice Huang, he said, was evidence-free, yet “instantly and uncritically ratified” by the American media. As for the infidelity: “Nobody actually believes that, in the age of Donald J. Trump, very powerful people rapidly fall due to extramarital affairs, right?”

Many additional questions present themselves, of which the most pressing is what happens next. Nvidia stock has nosedived, losing $550 billion of value. Huang, whom a Bloomberg report suggested is distraught, faces a congressional hearing. Perhaps the deep state will bring Nvidia to heel. Perhaps the leakers will be unmasked. Whether the American government will impose stringent regulation on the sector remains uncertain, and is likely to hinge on either an alarming demonstration of AI’s danger or simply a change of administration.

We can be confident, in the meantime, that the shenanigans, seen and unseen, will continue, that AI’s increasing geopolitical importance will manifest in further dossiers and defenestrations. Formerly the rockstars of technology, Huang and his peers have now been forced into the drearier role of hyper-scrutinized statesmen; scrutinized and threatened by their rivals, by their ideological enemies, by their own government and by foreign governments. More so than at any other time in modern history, senior appointments will need a clean record — which might come at the expense of some of the unorthodoxy upon which innovation depends.

For the moment, though, the honeytraps will continue. Security experts report that China is increasingly using the method to fish for intelligence about American startups. Opportunities for both espionage and espionage-related smearings abound. In San Francisco, the epicenter of frontier AI, there is a comically high preponderance of both nerdy men and what are affectionately known, even to themselves, as ABGs, or “Asian baby girls”. Huang is not the first businessman to develop a wandering eye, and he will not be the last.

What next, though, for the former CEO? For now, joked one wag, Huang’s nearly cleared diary will enable him to “spend more time with your wife”. Elon Musk, also the proprietor of a chip-making business, has said it would be an “honor” to hire Huang. Perhaps Huang might eventually return to his old job, as Sam Altman did when ousted by the OpenAI board in 2023.

In his final hours as Nvidia CEO, Huang reportedly called himself a “piece of shit”. In business, if not in marital, terms, he will be remembered as a titan, the man who, as much as anyone else, presided over the AI boom. Should the bubble burst, or should regulation arrive, it will not be on Huang’s watch. Similarly, if capitalist gravity eventually brings Nvidia’s market share back down to earth, Huang will not be to blame. The real threat to his legacy might be those GPUs in Inner Mongolia — and whatever other Nvidia equipment found its way across the border.

The interior of Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, finished in the Twenties, literally resembled a cathedral with its soaring levels of concrete pillars and ribs. Even in the era of globalization, a powerful car industry centered in Germany and exporting to the world has been an enduring source of European prestige. So it is not entirely an exaggeration to say that the twilight of this car industry heralds a spiritual crisis for the continent. 

The reversal of fortunes has been swift and brutal, manifest in a wave of Chinese electric vehicles and hybrids now crashing over European trade barriers. As recently as 2021, just 1% of new cars sold in Europe came from Chinese brands; last month, one in every seven new cars did, despite EU tariffs of around 30% on Chinese EVs. The challenge could not have come at a worse time. Europe’s car makers have been crippled by the loss of Russian energy supplies, Trump’s tariffs, and the EU’s bungled efforts to phase out petrol engines. They are suffering an even worse mauling in the lucrative Chinese market. 

China has been the focal point of the car industry for decades; but until recently it was European marques selling their vehicles to the expanding Chinese middle class and bringing the profits back home. Volkswagen arrived there in the late Seventies as an auto-making god, teaching Chinese engineers the manufacturing standards that underpinned their own nascent industry. It would later hold the title of China’s top-selling brand for 25 years. Today, as VW undertakes a restructuring that threatens 100,000 jobs globally, it is partnering with Chinese brands to learn how to make the automobiles of the future. Some of those Chinese models may even be produced in its emptying German factories. Imagine if French wines were shouldered out of their own market by foreign upstarts; this gives some sense of the humiliation that will be entailed by VW making Chinese-designed cars in Saxony.

Embarrassed Europeans have typically blamed China’s export success on a sinister plot to deindustrialize Western countries by undercutting their manufacturers with heavily subsidized goods. As Rishi Sunak warned last month, Xi Jinping wants to “make the world dependent on China while China depends on no-one”. There is certainly some truth in this account, but it rests on a misleading image of China as a purveyor of cheap knock-offs. Sadly, the snobbery implied by the phrase “Temu Range Rover” — as the popular Jaecoo 7 has been nicknamed in Britain — has not been earned. Even if China cannot match the German mastery of the internal combustion engine, its car industry has bested the European one in innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial strategy.

The best illustration of this is BYD – an abbreviation of the pinyin name Biyadi – the Shenzhen-based firm which displaced VW as China’s largest brand in 2023, and which has since become the global leader in EVs and hybrids. Fifteen years ago, when BYD was seeking a toehold in the United States, a baby-faced Elon Musk dismissed the challenge to Tesla with a scoff: “have you seen their cars?” It has indeed been a long road for a company founded by the son of rice farmers in rural Anhui province, which started out in the Nineties making batteries for laptops and mobile phones. Yet Musk’s Silicon Valley approach to cars, focusing on a tiny range of products to serve everyone, has proved inferior to BYD’s strategy of challenging incumbents across a wide spectrum of vehicles, from city runabouts to monster pick-ups. 

As of this year, BYD has two models tailored to the European market. According to the company’s adviser for the region, these will answer peculiar conditions such as German Autobahns, Italian mountain roads, and British potholes. They look just like European cars, and deliberately so: BYD is offering something familiar for a lower price, along with an assortment of clever tech to dispel any residual uncertainty about buying a Chinese product. Who has not wished for a tiny vent to douse your smartphone with cool air while it charges wirelessly?

Like the Chinese auto industry at large, BYD rose through a combination of imitation, innovation, and shrewdly adapting itself to government programs at both national and city levels. Its earliest vehicles, not yet electric, were closely modeled on Japanese brands such as Toyota. It released the world’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid in 2008. Around the same time, the Chinese leadership began to throw its weight behind EVs in earnest, offering a range of subsidies for both producers and consumers. It had long shown an interest in developing homegrown “new energy” vehicles, which promised to provide China with a niche in the global market and to alleviate its dependence on imported oil. 

But academics Fengming Lu and Xiao Ma argue that China’s cities were the most important drivers of the industry. BYD entered partnerships with numerous municipal governments, beginning with Shenzhen and Changsha. These deals often proved hugely profitable for both parties. The company received favorable access to land, infrastructure, electricity and labor, in exchange for which it invested in local car-making plants and provided the cities with electric buses and taxis. BYD even opened a railway division to make the most of municipal transport programs. 

Private capital also played an important role. Stock markets allowed local governments to cash in on the shares they had acquired in EV makers and begin the investment cycle again. Venture capital funds, both Chinese and foreign, were crucial to the boom in EV start-ups that took place after 2015, with hundreds of entrepreneurs from the tech sector flooding into the industry. China thus ended up with an absurdly large number of carmakers. This intense competition did not just force companies to innovate, but encouraged brands like BYD to become export giants, exploiting less competitive EV markets overseas.  

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So BYD is not so much a creature of state subsidies as the product of a state-engineered process of Darwinian struggle. The central government used tools such as credit availability, tax incentives and influence over local government priorities to stimulate an explosion of private and municipal ventures, before tightening business conditions so that only the fittest could survive. Since the early part of this decade, China’s EV industry has been in this second phase of cutthroat consolidation. 

One reason that BYD has emerged as a victor is its high degree of vertical integration: rather than outsourcing the production of every last nut and bolt as most Western carmakers have done, it controls most of its supply chain. It has partnered with mining companies around the world to ensure access to crucial minerals such as lithium, which it processes in its own refineries. It develops and produces its own batteries, powertrains, semiconductors and software systems. Consequently, the company is protected against supply shocks, can respond swiftly to market demand, and is able to innovate across numerous domains. 

This all amounts to a humbling lesson for Europe, a continent which long viewed the clean energy transition as an opportunity to show that it can still shape history and determine its own destiny. Instead, the EU is scrabbling to build defenses against the tide of Chinese EVs. Decarbonization targets may be relaxed, and a “Made in Europe” drive is underway to limit state support to European suppliers. 

The situation in Britain is somewhat better or even worse, depending on your perspective. Its government has done little to protect a long-suffering domestic car industry, and its drivers have little sentimental attachment to national car marques, most of which are foreign-owned servants of the luxury market. Britain last year produced its lowest car output since 1952. The country is less threatened by China’s dominance because it has no pretense of even being in the race. Indeed, Chinese EV imports are integral to the Government’s goals of reaching Net Zero and bringing down inflation, since they are cheap and don’t produce CO2 emissions — at least, not after they leave the factory. And the policy is working: though BYD only began selling its cars here in 2023, it was Britain’s second-most-popular brand in September. Hence the irony of a Labour Party that longs to reverse Brexit insisting that the freedom to set its own EV tariffs is a “red line” in negotiations with Europe. 

Why was Europe’s mighty car industry blindsided by the challenge from China? According to historian and commentator Adam Tooze, one reason may simply be corporate greed. Tooze argues that European brands used the post-Covid supply shortages of the early 2020s as cover for a profit-maximizing strategy, making fewer cars and aiming them at the higher end of the market. The deeper causes, however, take us to the fundamentals of political economy. The Chinese state has been ruthless at building up the supply chains, energy security and industrial base needed to succeed in high-tech manufacturing, but it has been equally ruthless in using market competition to foster innovation. Europe, by contrast, has long neglected industrial strategy through a naive faith in global free trade, yet it still allowed its powerful legacy industries to squat over the political system in such a way that new players and technologies have been denied space to breathe. 

However, such bloodless explanations feel insufficient for a matter of deep significance to Europe’s history and identity. They do not pass the cathedral test. One can tell that Europe’s cars are long past their creative peak simply by looking at them: a mass of SUVs with different names but near identical appearances and dimensions, fat blobs in shades of white, silver and black. Gone is the chic elegance of the Citroën that inspired Barthes; gone is the cold, Teutonic glamour of the old Mercedes, the charisma of the red Alfa Romeo driven by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. The decline can be measured in the reaction of passers-by when a vintage car rolls along the street, with its elegant profile, purring engine and rich color palette: they stop, point, let out a spontaneous groan of appreciation. True, cars now accelerate faster than they once did, but the thrill is dampened by an optimization for comfort that gives the impression of being wrapped in cling film.

My neighbor, a professional mechanic, explains the problem concisely: “Old cars have character. Today they’re all made of plastic, and they all look the same.” Some of this is due to government regulation, and the sharing of designs in a heavily consolidated industry; but it also reflects artistic failure in the form of a herd-like pursuit of the average consumer. As a result, we are forced to seek distinction in utilitarian matters such as battery range, trunk space, and, of course, price. The erotics of form has been replaced by the fetish for technological trimmings that dominates YouTube’s vast catalog of car reviews: the voice assistants, the 540-degree parking cameras, the entertainment systems and cruise control settings. If cost, efficiency and gadgetry are what matter now, then it’s not obvious why European consumers should ignore the fruits of China’s booming auto industry, which does these things rather well.

Perhaps cars offer us a barometer of civilizational vitality. Even if automated production lines do not employ the millions they once did, the fact that cars have around 30,000 components and require extensive research and engineering skills makes them fundamental to any serious industrial nation. Developing countries are acutely aware of this, hence why so many of them long to have their own brands. The rise of the AfD amid the bitterness of Germany’s disintegrating automotive sector certainly carries a whiff of Untergang. As for China, the unique prestige of automobiles is undoubtedly a reason that its leaders put so much emphasis on beating the world at EVs. Its industry may be conquering the globe on the basis of efficiency and clever software, but it is still young. It may yet develop a poetry of its own.

The dupe of this latest Mata Hari scandal is Jensen Huang, CEO of the chipmaking firm Nvidia, which he has led since founding it in 1993. Semiconductor chips are “the building blocks of the modern digital economy”, found in everything from laptops to cars, sensing devices, and smartphones. Nvidia designs the most coveted chips, those that are used by AI models such as Claude and ChatGPT, a position that has propelled the company to prominence as one of the most valuable firms in the world, and Huang to rockstar fame. With a fortune that Forbes estimates now places him in the top 10 richest people on the planet, Huang has acquired cultish celebrity: one of his leather jackets raised $960,000 in a charity auction. 

But over the weekend, Huang sent a letter to all Nvidia staff, apologizing for an extra-marital affair. “Corporate CEO has sidechick” doesn’t sound like it should be such a big deal, but this one’s different. The affair was with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese national and senior executive at the Singapore-based cloud provider Megaspeed. This firm was already suspected of smuggling restricted American tech to China, and Ms Huang suspected of being a Chinese spy. The discovery has sent shockwaves through an already jittery tech market, knocking 8% (approximately $350 billion) off Nvidia’s value. 

More than a sex scandal or a story for the business pages, l’affaire Huang is high geopolitical drama, for the light it shines on the stop-at-nothing rivalry between the USA and China on tech. When Bill Clinton advocated China joining the WTO in 1999, it was believed that China getting richer would inevitably make it more democratic, catalyzing the replacement of the CCP with a more Western-like regime. As we all now know, that’s not how things worked out. Instead, the US sacrificed its own industrial base to fuel the rise of a peer rival. But as if that’s not bad enough, today the eagle and the dragon are locked in a neck-and-neck race to preeminence in AI development. It’s this context that makes it so shocking that Jensen Huang, one of America’s nerd princes, should have found himself trapped by a honeypot spy, loyal to America’s chief rival. 

So intense is the competition between American and Chinese AI labs, and so contested is access to the most advanced hardware that powers them, that in 2020 export restrictions were imposed on Chinese import of American semiconductors. Megaspeed, meanwhile, has been under suspicion for some time of trying to find ways round these restrictions. This firm rents data processing power to AI firms across Asia, and uses $1.4 billion of Nvidia chips to power its data centers. But in 2025 an inspection found the number of chips in use was much lower than the number Megaspeed had purchased. Where were the others? Hawks feared they had been smuggled to China. 

The battle for semiconductors is granted another twist by the persistence of a supply bottleneck, that both constrains the AI build-out and affords a persistent sore point to China: Jensen Huang’s island of birth, Taiwan. Nvidia subcontracts the most complex part of its chip manufacturing to factories in Taiwan, an island around the size of the Netherlands and roughly 100 kilometers off the coast of mainland China. Taiwan became the home-in-exile of the Chinese Nationalist government, after their displacement by communists in 1949 — but Beijing insists on the PRC’s right to govern Taiwan too. Chinese maps show Taiwan as part of the Middle Kingdom, and Christian Dior was forced to apologize to Chinese customers in 2019 after making a presentation that included a Taiwanless map of China. 

Taiwan’s principal defense against being annexed by Beijing has long been its dominance in semiconductors. A farsighted program established by Taiwanese technocrats during the Seventies was delivered first by acquiring semiconductor know-how from an American firm, then training a generation of engineers, and finally developing a model that enabled Taiwanese plants to serve US firms without being perceived as a competitor. Aided by this long-term strategy, and a now richly developed base of secondary suppliers and expertise, this precariously positioned island secured a position as chokepoint in one of the most vital technologies of the 21st century. And this in turn has secured ongoing Western support for its independence: what former Taiwanese prime minister Tsai Ing-Wen called its “silicon shield”. 

Will it last? That’s less clear. The tectonic plates may be shifting: the US has poured considerable effort and money into reducing its dependence on overseas semiconductor manufacture. In 2021 Intel and TSMC both responded to US political pressure by announcing the construction of new semiconductor plants in Arizona. Then, in 2022, the bipartisan CHIPS Act provided the US Government $50 billion to invest in semiconductor research, development, and manufacturing within the USA. And while some had expressed skepticism on the “reshoring” project, it seems to be picking up speed: buoyed by AI demand, Intel recently announced that its delayed Ohio semiconductor plant will be re-started.

With semiconductor manufacturing re-shored, would “honeypot” scandals come to an end? I doubt it. There have been many such scandals throughout history, and in each case the basic mechanism is the same: some powerful man gets persuaded by the one-eyed monster not to think too hard about why an attractive woman is suddenly so interested in him. Only the specific configurations of power and money vary.

But as long as powerful rivalries and information asymmetries exist, there’ll be plots to even the scores through seduction. With the US-China rivalry in full spate, the tech bros should perhaps be more braced than they seem to be for an army of Mata Haris. Even if Taiwan loses its unique position, or one side definitively wins the AI race, there will always be new geopolitical tensions, and new information asymmetries.

But if there are lessons in this story for the nerd kings of America, there are also lessons for us in Britain — both in those ways we can’t be China or the USA, and also perhaps in those ways we could be more Taiwan. There’s no meaningful sense in which we can compete as peers with two continent-sized empires. But we might infer from l’affaire Huang that it’s a bad idea to lose all the China experts from your government. Whoops. Also maybe not to take the Chinese government at their word, when they pinky-promise that the mega-embassy they want to build with secret underground rooms, near important buried data cables, isn’t a listening post. 

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Another, perhaps more strategic consideration might be wondering what Britain could learn from Taiwan, about how to live next door to a much larger geopolitical bloc without being too badly bullied. Taiwan shows how a nation that’s not big enough to lead on everything can still preserve independence, by being indispensable in one vital sector. As the US continues its project to re-shore semiconductor manufacturing, and Xi Jinping pledges to assimilate Taiwan, it might not last forever. But the strategy hasn’t failed yet. 

What’s the equivalent for Britain? Perhaps it’s a wild idea, but my starter for ten would be offshore data centers. These are experimental, but not completely so: China launched the first underwater data center earlier this year. I gather the water temperature around the British Isles is well-suited to the cooling needs of such installations, and a prototype is scheduled to launch in the North Sea soon. Of course housing vulnerable and strategically important infrastructure off Britain’s coastline would necessitate restoring our degraded naval defense capability. But this too would be a happy return to historic national norms. 

Jensen Huang, at least, believed in Britain, even if we don’t. Before his personal life blew up, he visited to mark Nvidia’s investment in British startups, while lauding our potential and intellectual superpowers. While recent evidence suggests he’s perhaps not always a flawless judge of others’ motives, his track record suggests he understands a thing or two about building. And we could do with building. Torn as we currently are between the US and EU, we need less effort on “soft power”, “moral leadership”, and pointless acts of post-colonial self-flagellation, and more on a realist effort to build out resources our neighbors need badly enough, to come to our aid in extremis. 

Actually doing this would necessitate being governed by engineers and those who think long-term, rather than bee-brick bureaucrats and decline managers. This would certainly be a change of gear. It might even require a bit of Mata Hari-ing here and there. But I’m with Jensen Huang: it can be done. He might be a flawed messenger but let’s take him at his word, and be more Taiwan.

It’s not immediately clear why Beijing has given Charlotte Brontë’s classic such prominence in the classroom. Thankfully, the West’s top China watchers are on the case. If you’ve read the spate of recent articles from Western media outlets concerning Jane Eyre in China — articles in which there’s been much white-knuckled pearl clutching over China’s “compulsory curriculum” (The Times), “mandatory reading list” (CNN), and other histrionic synonyms for, well, a middle-school syllabus — you’ll find one explanation repeated ad nauseaum. The Ministry for Education has, so we’re told, assigned the didactic, pro-family Jane Eyre as a last-ditch effort to reverse China’s precipitous population decline. As the Economist puts it: “The independent-minded heroine, Ms Eyre, who rejects two proposals before ultimately marrying and bearing a son, has a thing or two to teach young Chinese, the Communist Party thinks.”

To be sure, Chinese officials are wary of the looming demographic crisis. As of this year, marriages have hit a decade-long low; birth rates an all-time low; and China expects a population decline of 250 million by 2050. But even if the nomenklatura did imagine that a 19th-century English novel was the way to win young Chinese hearts and minds to baby-making, Jane Eyre would be a strange choice. For one, the novel just doesn’t really seem to care about Jane’s maternity; Jane’s son, whom Brontë never bothers to name, exists by virtue of a single subordinate clause tossed off in the middle of the book. Our author devotes twice as many words to describing the embroidered chaises of Thornfield Hall as she does to Rochester Junior. Second, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice enjoy similarly storied literary reputations in China; and the orphaned children, Christian ascetics, and wife in the attic that make Brontë’s novel such an unlikely candidate for the transmission of stolid family values are conspicuously absent in the other two novels. If the Ministry for Education really wanted to assign a conservative-minded English classic, why wouldn’t they have gone with Jane’s more presentable cousins?

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When one turns from CNN to the Chinese sources, however, a much clearer picture emerges of Jane Eyre’s actual purpose in the classroom. Anyone expecting Brontë to be filtered through dense layers of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and Xi Jinping Thought, however, will be sorely disappointed. According to the Beijing Daily article which announced the updated curriculum, the novel will be taught in a course module on “Maturity”, which takes a fairly orthodox view on Jane Eyre’s key themes: “[Jane Eyre] recognized that love ought to be founded upon the basis of spiritual equality, rather than wealth, social status, or outward appearance.”

For the Chinese government, then, the point of teaching Jane Eyre isn’t to promote biological reproduction, but true love. I realize that, at first pass, the notion of faceless Communist Party bureaucrats spreading romantic ideals among the youth sounds absurd. However, Beijing’s pedagogical intervention makes perfect sense when seen against the backdrop of the gender wars raging everywhere in contemporary Chinese society.

Like pretty much everywhere else in the world, gender relations in China are in complete free-fall. We’re all too familiar in the West with developments like the manosphere, tradwives, looksmaxxing, incels, cucks, chads, etc; recent Chinese history has seen the emergence of similar controversies, coded dogwhistles, and ultra-extremist ideological factions along gendered fault lines. One key moment was the April 2024 suicide of Fat Cat (胖猫), the online alias of Liu Jie, who jumped off a bridge following a breakup. In the aftermath, his girlfriend became the target of a concerted nationwide witch hunt led by Chinese incels on the assumption she was a 捞女 / lāo nǚ, or gold digger. Meanwhile, a terminally online subset of “feminist eugenicists” have developed what they term “uterine morality”, or a refusal to settle for “ugly, poor, sick, and abusive men” in an effort to secure the best possible genetic material for their offspring. This January, China’s Ministry of State Security even issued a communiqué framing 性别对立 / xìngbié duìlì or “gender antagonism” as a threat to national security. It’s this toxic mire of gender politics that Chinese teenagers will have to negotiate in order to date, marry, and have children; a plight that makes even the wildest of Rochester’s indiscretions seem tame by comparison.

Contemporary China has left behind what was arguably the central achievement of the Mao era: economic parity between men and women. Following socialist collectivization, Chinese society became highly egalitarian, with the percentage of women working outside the home hitting roughly 90% in urban areas by the Seventies. With women entering the workforce en masse, the state took on the role of performing domestic labor, investing heavily in free childcare centers, collective kitchens, and other welfare programs. The state meanwhile suppressed the development of feminism outside of the proscribed boundaries; as China scholars Angela Xiao Wu and Yige Dong argue, the state’s firm control of “women’s work” reduced femininity to economic categories. Popular representations of women were accordingly non-sexualized, and to some extent androgynous, emphasizing their class identities as proletarians and farmers.

China’s socialist era ended with Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms, whereupon the state abandoned its commitment to egalitarianism for the full-throated pursuit of economic development. As privatization shuttered the state-funded public daycares and kitchens, domestic labor was relegated back to the domain of the family — in practice, back to women. These developments were part of a broader retrenchment of traditional gender norms in the Deng era. The Puritanism of Mao’s China was submerged under a tidal wave of (at the time) risqué advertisements, television shows, and eventually, digital media, as an emerging consumer culture found a natural ally in sex appeal.

While Deng’s reforms generated rapid economic growth, they also intensified class stratification. By the Eighties, socialist egalitarianism was fading; as Wu and Dong write: “against the spectacular rise of wealthy elites and a massive middle-class were forty million laid-off state workers and more than 200 million migrant laborers”. Chinese citizens could stomach the decidedly unsocialist existence of an ultra-rich class so long as everybody else’s living standards went up, too. But this is no longer the case. Youth unemployment in 2026 hit a record high, while precarious gig work is rapidly replacing full-time employment. And with China’s broader economic slowdown showing no signs of abating, there seem to be few options available to check a rising tide of class resentment. This neoliberal precarity is one of the structural problems behind today’s gender crisis.

While most Western readers can easily relate to issues like youth unemployment and class resentment, there’s another problem at work that’s unique to the Chinese situation: a “marriage squeeze” resulting from a dangerously lopsided gender ratio. This is one of the unintended consequences of the government’s laws on family planning. When the one-child policy was implemented in the Eighties, many couples practiced sex-selective abortions to ensure they had sons, given the traditional preference for a male heir. As a result, there are 24.7 million more Chinese men than women, a surplus greater than the population of Florida.

To combine years of neoliberal precarity with a radical gender imbalance would destabilize marriage rates in any country. However, in China’s specific cultural context, the confluence of these two structural factors have created a marriage market that’s nothing short of apocalyptic. These two factors come to a head in the widespread custom of bride price, or 彩礼 / cǎilǐ , a prerequisite step to marriage where the groom’s side of the family must make a payment to the bride’s. From a traditional Chinese perspective, because the bride was considered exclusively a member of her husband’s family, cǎilǐ was paid as ritual compensation to the bride’s family for having “given away” their daughter. Historically, this took the form of tea, jewelry, or deer hides and for most of modern China, bride price was seen as a quaint formality. However, escalated competition over marriageable women has now resulted in a textbook case of supply and demand. Twenty years ago, the average bride price hovered around 10,000 to 20,000 RMB (~$1,500 – $3,000). It has since skyrocketed to around 140,000 RMB (~$21,000) in 2021, a crippling economic burden, especially for rural, low-income households.

Even under ideal economic circumstances, the surge in bride price would have presented a serious financial barrier to would-be grooms. China’s fiscal downturn has made scrounging together the funds more difficult — and the situation is made even worse by the particular cultural dynamics at work when two families come together to negotiate cǎilǐ. In a perverse twist, the poorer the groom, the higher the expected bride price, and vice versa. The logic here is that if the bride’s family feels uncertain about the groom’s financial prospects, they’ll hedge their bets by setting a higher cǎilǐ, which then acts as a kind of surety for the bride’s future. 

In a culture where remaining single and childless carries a heavy stigma, the romantic prospects for the less fortunate among China’s 25 million surplus men are, to put it mildly, bleak. Frustration is boiling over in the nascent Chinese manosphere. Echoing a widespread view, one popular post on WeChat ties the rise in bride price to feminism: “I was born in the 1980s. When I got married, there was no bride price […] Now feminism has even brainwashed some women born in the 1970s into thinking they’re ‘goddesses.’ Policies to boost childbirth are useless. Why not crack down on feminism instead?”

The language of anti-feminist reaction merges with pre-existing chauvinistic rhetoric. “Feminists are anti-family, anti-Han race and anti-state,” imputes one aggrieved commentator. Thus, parallel to the red-pill rhetoric of Western incels, a vocal minority of Chinese men are framing themselves as victims of an international feminist conspiracy. Some of these anti-feminists have even taken to attacking married men; by paying cǎilǐ, so the argument goes, successful grooms undermine “the collective male effort to lower the ‘cost’ of marriage”, making them traitors to their gender.

Meanwhile, Chinese feminism has also developed in response to the destabilized marriage market. Recall that the defunding of socialist institutions for childcare and housekeeping pushed these obligations back onto the family unit, increasing the pressure on women to re-adopt traditional roles as homemakers. In response to these institutionalized values, one strand of Chinese feminism advocates malicious compliance: “entrepreneurial” feminists attempt to leverage their attractiveness to maximize bride price returns on the marriage market. One such entrepreneurial feminist known online as Ayawawa became infamous for her “PU-MV” equation; according to this heuristic, Chinese women ought to balance a high MV, or “mating value” (sexual attractiveness) with a low PU, or “paternity uncertainty” (alleviating masculine concerns of infidelity by appearing chaste, innocent, virtuous, etc.). 

Then there’s the other branch of contemporary Chinese feminism: the “non-cooperative” feminists, who join the chorus of victimized men in their outright rejection of the marriage market: “No kids, no ring, keep living serene” is their go-to slogan. Instead of relying on well-matched grooms to provide economic security, these feminists take the path of Western girlbosses in striving to secure financial independence via their own careers. Mirroring their counterparts in the manosphere, the extremely online “zero-compromise” feminists decry married women as “love-brained”, “precious wives”, and “marriage donkeys”.

Any hope of reconciliation under present circumstances seems well nigh impossible. For a generation of red-pilled men whose ideals of masculinity are still based on “economic success and possession of female sexuality”, confronting the sexually unavailable, financially independent grouping of non-cooperative feminists would amount to a double emasculation. Meanwhile, the utilitarian mindset of entrepreneurial feminism would appear to confirm the manosphere’s most paranoid fantasies about gold-digging wives. As for the few Chinese couples who do end up tying the knot, marriage nowadays is no longer seen as the fulfillment of romantic love, but as a byproduct of rational economic calculation. As things stand, further rounds of acrimony and radicalization are inevitable.

If only due to its destabilizing knock-on effects on marriage, childbirth, and general political stability, the gender wars have come under increasing scrutiny from Chinese officials. At first glance, though, the recent government actions taken on this issue seem haphazard. The CCP has led a (spectacularly unsuccessful) effort to crack down on bride prices even while it enshrines cǎilǐ into law as the bride’s premarital property. And keywords such as “extreme feminism” are censored online even while the Supreme People’s Court rules in favor of the female plaintiff in a landmark case on engagement rape, enraging the manosphere. 

Further reading

What the West forgets about China

By David Lloyd Dusenbury

Yet from a wider perspective, a consistent pattern does emerge. For the manosphere, soaring bride prices are due to unchecked greed of gold-digging feminists — not the result of family planning policies or China’s neoliberal turn. Similarly, for many contemporary feminists, women’s aspirations for economic independence can only be achieved through individual action: either by gaming the marriage market (if you’re an entrepreneurial feminist), or by focusing solely on one’s own career (if you’re the non-cooperative sort). The exclusive focus on the individual action of economic agents, on the grindset, ignores the conscious dismantling of Mao-era collective institutions which forced women back into performing domestic labor in the first place.

How does Jane Eyre fit into all this? What may have seemed like the height of idealism is, properly understood, a fairly cynical ploy. In treating Brontë’s novel as a sermon on the transcendent value of love (“only when two people truly love one another can they achieve true happiness,” quoth Beijing Daily), it becomes another avenue to direct frustration about social ills away from the decisions of policymakers, and into the safely apolitical domain of interpersonal relationships. Schoolboys otherwise in danger of becoming “red-pilled” may learn from the lesson of Rochester, who finds his beloved in Jane regardless of his looks or finances. And as China’s schoolgirls follow Jane’s repeated repudiations of earthly wealth for the higher affairs of heart and mind, they’ll be less inclined to countenance the economic focus of non-cooperative feminism. The story of Jane and Rochester, then, will act as a gentle corrective to the radicalizing tendencies of both the manosphere and Chinese feminism — a balm which nonetheless serves the very same ends of occluding a structural critique. Because so long as netizens are busy talking about gold diggers and gender traitors — or, indeed, waxing poetic about true love — they won’t be talking about high-level policy decisions that led to the broken marriage market, or the changes that would need to happen to fix it.

While the bush taxis, charcoal and chickens remain, the bush is now criss-crossed by futuristic infrastructure. Overhead are overpasses, which see freight train and haul truck traffic, and conveyor belts. Each train and truck are laden with bauxite ore — the source of aluminum, the backbone of modern power infrastructure.     

The cargo, coming from mines that resemble massive dirt-red scars on Guinea’s tropical landscape, is headed for multiple terminals, built along once-pristine mangrove estuaries. There, it is loaded with cranes onto streams of incoming hundred-meter-long bulk carriers, which bring the materials to even larger vessels anchored out at sea. These giants, measuring up to 300 meters in length, bring the precious ore to ports in China, mostly in Shandong province, home to the country’s aluminum-refining industry.

Offering both lightweight and decent conductivity at the same time, aluminum is one of the most widely used industrial materials, and has fed China’s transformation into the global manufacturing hegemon. With China’s push for electrification, both domestically and globally, it is gaining even more importance as an essential component in products such as transmission lines, solar panels and electric vehicles.

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Between 2015 and 2025, Guinea’s bauxite exports increased nine-fold from 20 million tonnes a year to 182 million tonnes, making Guinea the world’s biggest producer of the ore. With approximately 82% of the production bound for China, this surge is largely the product of Chinese capital, which facilitated the construction of the necessary port, road and rail infrastructure.

The production surge shows no signs of slowing down. As recently as last week, a consortium of Chinese companies tabled plans worth $3 billion to construct yet another railway and deepwater port, aiming to unlock another major bauxite deposit. 

Until the recent mining boom, driven largely by Chinese investment, Guinea was one of the poorest countries in the world. This transformation is representative of a wider pattern seen across the resource-rich Global South. Since the late Nineties, when China first experienced trade surplus and became a net capital exporter, it has gradually built up a near-total dominance of global mineral supply chains and offered itself as a reliable strategic partner. 

As of 2025, China accounted for about 60% of the global production of aluminum, and exercised similar dominance in the production and processing of other critical metals. Approximately half of the global supply of steel and refined copper is produced in China. Its supremacy is even stronger in a category of metals known as rare earths — about 20 elements with special magnetic and optical properties critical for the production of high-end technologies. There, China controls 60% of the global mining output and around 90% of the refining capacity. 

With the escalation of the new Cold War, China has shown increased willingness to leverage its near-total control of these supply chains. Perhaps the most humiliating confrontation with reality for the US was the April 2025 “Liberation Day”. Following Trump’s imposition of an additional 34% tariff on Chinese imports, China imposed reciprocal tariffs alongside severe export restrictions on seven dual-use rare earths – prompting a brief escalation followed by full-blown TACO, whereby Trump suspended all the newly imposed tariffs. 

But the weaponization of rare earths has continued. Last month, Reuters reported that some Chinese suppliers refuse to ship rare earths to the US for fear of repercussions from Beijing.    

The Trump administration appears to have acknowledged this as a problem. “We outsourced the manufacturing so we could focus on designing these goods. And then one day we woke up and we realized we had outsourced our economic security and our very future,” said Marco Rubio in his opening remarks at the Critical Minerals Ministerial held in Washington in February. It was easy to detect regret of the four decades of neoliberal dogma that have held sway over American economic policy-making, dictating minimal state intervention and free trade. “We were at the mercy of whoever controlled supply chains for these minerals, so my hope is that we are gathered here today as the first but important step to rectifying this mistake,” he said to a room filled with delegates from 55 partner states, with whose cooperation the administration hopes to counter China’s strategic dominance. 

But these efforts appear to have run aground. This is, for what it seems, not necessarily a function of policy-making incompetence but more reflective of deeper structural forces that allow China to engage in capital-intensive and risky projects offering only long-term payoffs. 

Freed from the whims of the four-year electoral cycle, the system allows for long-term economic and social planning. In the case of China, policies are implemented with decades-long strategies in mind.     

With unrestrained state intervention and high levels of state ownership, policymakers allocate resources to the priority sectors. In the Eighties, these were steel, cement and coal. In the 2020s, these sectors are dominated by high-tech renewable energy, electric vehicles, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. 

As China transformed into the global industrial powerhouse, its trade surplus grew significantly, spiking from $8 billion in 1994 to a historical high of $822 billion in 2025. With this massive surplus of international currency, China has obtained substantial capacity to export its capital across the globe. 

This came in the form of concerted efforts to develop infrastructure and build access to strategic resources, mostly in Asia, Latin America and Africa – activities that in 2013 took on the moniker of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

Guinea was an obvious target for Chinese capital. Home not only to the world’s largest bauxite reserves but also to Simandou, the largest untapped deposit of high-grade iron ore, it has always been of high speculative interest for mining investors. 

The first Francophone African country to gain independence, Guinea is still deeply marked by the legacy of its totalitarian, inaugural leader, Sékou Touré, who ruled the country from 1958 until his death in 1984 – creating an oppressive and invasive state apparatus that quickly metastasized into a tool of extraction. 

Plagued by political violence and instability, deeply embedded corruption and non-existent infrastructure, the country was long considered unbankable. Rio Tinto, for example, kept its rights to the Simandou deposit, which it acquired in 1997, at arm’s length for almost two decades.

Things only started moving when the country fell into China’s line of sight. In its first major investment in the country in decades, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation completed a 240 MW hydropower plant in 2016, more than doubling the country’s electricity generation overnight. This was followed by the construction of another 450 MW facility in 2021, which again doubled Guinea’s power supply. The total investment from the two projects came to $1.6 billion.

At the same time, rich bauxite deposits in the hinterlands were being connected to the coast — where a string of new ports were under construction — by a network of railways, conveyor belts and dirt roads, equating to roughly $5 billion in investment. 

It was likewise Chinese capital that finally got the Simandou project rolling into motion. Underpinned by an investment of roughly $20 billion, the project involved several port terminals and a 670-kilometer long railway — arguably the biggest mining infrastructure investment in African history — with an estimated three-quarters of the capital coming from Chinese sources.

It was here that the dark side of Chinese engagement took shape. In September 2021, Guinea’s incumbent president, Alpha Condé, who had extended his rule into a third term with an unpopular constitutional change, was overthrown in a coup staged by the head of his presidential guard. An imposing figure at 6’5” tall, Mamadi Doumbouya — married to a former French gendarme — ultimately soured on the democratic handover he had initially promised, instead eliminating virtually all political opposition through a campaign of kidnappings, disappearances and bloody clampdowns on protests.

As the Chinese government’s 2025 Guinea Country Guide to Outward Investment and Cooperation indicates, Beijing is well aware of the regime’s brutality. But China refrains from judgment, concentrating on what these actions imply for the regime’s durability and thus investment security. “Although there have been occasional mass incidents or small-scale riots in various places, the military government has been able to handle them effectively,” it notes, adding that “the military government demonstrates a strong ability to maintain control”.  

When Doumbouya eventually dared to face the electorate in late 2025, he was able to present a track record of concrete development — a convincing counterweight to the rise in political violence and the suppression of freedoms. Since he took power, Guinea’s GDP per capita has grown by more than 50% With Chinese help, the Simandou works were completed just a month before polling stations opened.

Billboards bearing Doumbouya’s likeness — clad in sunglasses and magisterial white robes — next to the slogan “Simandou 2040, Guinea’s economic transformation” became omnipresent in the streets, while Doumbouya’s ministers toured the country promising a windfall of cash and staging dance competitions to pro-Doumbouya pop music.

What the US is able to offer pales in comparison. The collective West has just a single bauxite asset in Guinea. Producing about nine million tons of bauxite a year, Alcoa’s mine relies on infrastructure built largely in the mid-20th century.

Owing to its noncompliance with good governance standards — which include controlling corruption, upholding human rights and democratic elections — Guinea was historically excluded from the American infrastructure-development initiatives such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation. 

A privately-funded American initiative, centering on an iron ore deposit that neighbors Simandou, has yet to see the light of day. This inertia is perhaps reflective of financial markets’ unwillingness to take long-term bets in high-risk states. And elsewhere on the continent, examples of US mining and infrastructure success stories are virtually nonexistent. Much of the discourse around the American mining investment on the continent has centered around the Lobito Corridor in Angola, which, in 2025, secured a $553 million loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation, created under the first Trump administration to counter the Belt and Road Initiative.

The fund was used to enhance the capacity of a railway connecting an Atlantic port in Angola to the Central African Copper Belt, split between the DRC and Zambia, and secured several additional billions in commitments to implement associated projects. But awkwardly, even Lobito bears the mark of Chinese capital. The former colonial railway, almost entirely destroyed during the Angolan Civil War, was originally, between 2006 and 2014, rehabilitated with the help of a $2 billion Chinese loan — part of a bigger $30 billion loan package that China spent on rebuilding Angola’s infrastructure. 

Trump’s other supposed success story, the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement — signed in December 2025 and granting the US preferential access to Congolese minerals in exchange for settling the conflict with the Rwanda-backed rebels in the east — likewise turned out to be not much more than a PR exercise to signal Trump’s deal-making genius. 

More than a year on since the US promised to bring peace to the region, the conflict continues to rage, and American capital inflows remain to be seen.                   

This impotence has come alongside the wider recession of Western influence in the Global South. With China churning out unprecedented volumes of capital, tied to the development of hard infrastructure, the West has ultimately come up short and is incapable of offering anything remotely competitive.

For decades, the only way for developing countries to access aid was through agreeing, even if in a token way, to comply with Western norms of good governance and liberal values. This era seems to be over. Uninterested in seeing its face reflected across the globe, China is content to let partner states abide by their own norms.

The spike in Chinese investment has, therefore, given dictators and rogue regimes, previously largely reliant on the West as a sole source of meaningful finance, freedom of choice and leverage, and as the case of Guinea shows, legitimized their rule.

It is, however, questionable whether these countries were ever viable targets of liberal democratic evangelism, and the fact remains that China brought cash and development to regions with no historical experience of substantial capital inflows. Perhaps the ultimate, uncomfortable truth is that China has produced an extractive-authoritarian equilibrium that actually works, offering a modicum of stability, infrastructure and growth.

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In Guinea, Doumbouya’s militaristic regime, continuing a total war against political opponents, is set to preside over a growth rate of 8.7% this year, according to IMF, making the Guinean economy the fastest growing in Africa only after Ethiopia. IMF estimates that government revenues from Simandou alone could amount to 3.4% of GDP between 2030 and 2039, compared to just 2.2% of GDP for all mining government revenues in 2022.  

Ever more fearful of a mutiny among his armed forces, divided along ethnic lines and subject to long-standing frustrations, Doumbouya has nevertheless apparently done a decent job in entrenching his rule. With little transparency over how the proceeds of the mining windfall are being spent, the security apparatus has ballooned. Since 2021, Groupement des Forces Spéciale, Doumbouya’s de-facto praetorian guard, has grown from 500 to at least 2,500 well-paid men. Downtown Conakry, where the presidential palace is located, is now guarded by modern surveillance systems and armored vehicles and gunmen stationed at every crossroads, pointing machine guns at passing traffic. The Hotel Kaloum, a Chinese-built five star hotel not far from the palace, hosts a high-tech surveillance suite on its top floor. Doumbouya’s personal survival is not guaranteed, but the repressive state apparatus will be a formidable asset for whoever might come next.

While it is hard to argue with fast economic growth being ultimately a good thing in a cash-strapped nation like Guinea, its fruits, at least for now, are being distributed very inequitably. The mining industry is extremely capital-intensive, thus creating very few jobs. In the absence of comprehensive redistribution mechanisms, the mining boom has benefited primarily a handful of lucky contractors and those close to power. It has also come along with community displacement, rise in violence and full-blown environmental destruction — pristine forests have been erased, estuaries polluted and wildlife endangered.

This warrants some nostalgia about once non-negotiable conditionalities in the allocation of developmental help and investment, and demands a response from the West. But the current economic model seems incapable of providing one that is adequate. Proselytizers of free trade and a small state have gone noticeably quiet. In the Trump administration’s attempts to play China at its own game, however, it is merely doing a version of it that is both incompetent and ineffective. As the fruits of China’s decades-long strategic planning continue to materialize, the collective West may find itself forced to rethink the very foundations of the existing neoliberal economic order of small government, free trade and unrestrained financial markets, built upon the dollar as the global reserve currency. As Branko Milanovic thoughtfully pointed out some years back, Trump, incapable of understanding the complexity of the institutions underpinning the system over which he presides, might turn out to be America’s very own Gorbachev. 

Certainly, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, is prepping for it. “I have stocks of rice, I have a hand pump at home, and I have also made preserves from fruit from my own garden,” he told the Polish magazine Fakt last week.

It is easy to mock Sikorski and his jam. But he does have a point. In times of war, nobody cares about the percentage of GDP that their country is spending on defense: they care about food and water. Not  that our military leaders and planners will listen, though; soldiers like to talk about battles and gear, not rice and jam.

Tales of heroic battlefield victories are far more persuasive, after all, than those of supply chains. And yet, defeat often comes because of weakness elsewhere. A few years before Napoleon lost his famous battle at Waterloo, he had launched a disastrous attempt to invade Russia. Although the brutal winter contributed to his failure, Napoleon had struggled to keep his troops fed and healthy. Hunger and disease took a terrible toll. As much as the enemy, it was his supply chains that thwarted him.

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Likewise, when the German high command unveiled its master plan to invade France in August 1914, the generals hadn’t factored in an unexpected heatwave. The right wing of the German army was to invade France from the north and encircle Paris. But the soldiers were marching in thick woolen uniforms and carrying heavy backpacks in 30-degree heat. As the men advanced, the supply lines fractured leaving the troops exhausted, hungry and weakened.

Meanwhile the Allied naval blockade of 1914 triggered food shortages in Germany which escalated over the years into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe. Germany and Austria did not lose the First World War on the battlefield alone, they also lost it in the warehouse and the kitchen. The people starved.

The food situation was better during the Second World War, but this time the critical shortage was of oil. Back then, the US produced over 60% of the world’s oil and together, the Allied powers controlled most of the global oil supply. But the German generals were heavily reliant on machinery that used diesel and the chronic shortage of oil was why Hitler diverted his troops from the outskirts of Moscow to the south of Russia: to capture the oil fields in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. En route, they became trapped in Stalingrad and suffered their worst defeat of the Second World War.

The battlefield perspective of history, then, critically underestimates the importance of supply chains. The stories of Europe’s wars are understood much better in terms of logistics than in tales of battles.

And nothing has changed. One of the consequences of the Iran war is the fluctuating cost of crude oil. But that is only part of the story. As the Ukraine war has led to critical shortages of diesel and kerosene on global markets, the price of European diesel has gone through the roof. In a display of his classic short-termism, Donald Trump suggested that the US should stop supplying Europeans with diesel. He almost certainly did not think this through. If the US were to carry out his plan, Europe would suffer an immediate supply emergency. And we need only look at the vast number of diesel-powered lorries on European motorways to realize how critically reliant we are on the fuel. The economy would grind to a halt. It might be a smart idea if our leaders addressed that situation before heading into battle with the Russians.

But it’s not just diesel. The other shortage is natural gas. Iranian attacks have taken out 17% of liquid natural gas (LNG) production in Qatar, the world’s second largest LNG producer after America. Russia is the fourth — but Europeans have imposed an import ban on their gas. That’s why Europe is currently assessing whether it has enough fuel to get through the winter. And remember, this is still peacetime.

On the other side of the ledger is Russia. It, too, suffered from a diesel shortage last spring after Ukrainian attacks on its energy infrastructure. But Moscow immediately increased production in the east and halted exports of diesel to stabilize the situation. By doing so, Putin reduced the globally available supply of diesel and contributed to the rise in prices.

Russia’s food supply is also secure. This year, it had a bumper crop of grains, the wheat crop is forecast to be one of the best on record and oilseed production is also better than usual. Is this the “bad position” Rutte was talking about?

And let’s not forget those other vital commodities: good, old-fashioned money and debt. Russia is practically debt-free. It runs a small fiscal deficit because of the Ukraine war, but nothing compared with the crippling deficits of the US, France, and nowadays also Germany.

As a consequence, the West is vulnerable to a potentially crippling financial crisis. Last week, the interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bonds, the most important financial security on earth, rose to a 21-year high of 5.2%. Ordinary investors such as pension funds are dumping their US bond holdings because they are no longer secure following Joe Biden and Donald Trump outbidding each other in terms of fiscal irresponsibility.

All the while, the war in Ukraine drags on. And could get much worse this winter. The peace process is effectively dead; Putin gave up on it after Ukraine rejected his demand for the entirety of the Donbas region and is now determined to achieve his military goals by war alone. Ukraine is running short of interceptor missiles and so is more vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure. And there is no sign of Ukraine’s western supporters stepping up military supplies — if only because they need what they have for themselves. Exacerbating the situation in Europe are the attacks, possibly orchestrated by Russia, on western supply infrastructure for Ukraine within Germany and Poland.

So this is how the Ukraine war risks escalating. Consider if Russia shoots down a plane over Nato territory carrying supplies to Ukraine. If Nato were to retaliate with a strike on Russia, we would be at war. Over the past few months, my assessment of this scenario has shifted from small but non-trivial, to one with a significant probability.

We should be under no illusion about a war with Russia. We are absolutely not in a position to win. Whose bond markets are going to be blown up first? Who is going to run out of interceptor missiles first? Thanks to the much maligned Common Agricultural Policy, Europe is not going to run out of food. But on every other count — military, energy, finance — Europe is at a disadvantage.

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By Wolfgang Munchau

That’s not all. There is a relatively plausible scenario in which Ukraine and Iran merge into a single West Eurasian war — and become the ultimate proxy conflict between the US and China. The love-in between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China notwithstanding, the rivalry between the US and China is and will remain the dominant geopolitical story of our time.

Trump’s war against Iran and Putin’s war against Ukraine have demonstrated how difficult it is even for a larger power to impose its will on a smaller adversary. Putin may have the advantage over Ukraine, but his struggles there suggest that war against Nato wouldn’t produce a quick or decisive victory.

More likely, it would be the kind of war where, in the end, nobody would care who won and who lost. You might as well stock up with jam.

But these risks, while worthy of focus in themselves, carry with them a deeper question. AI, like printing and writing before it, is the kind of technology that shapes the evolution of civilizations. In turn, how well societies adapt to those changes depends on the existing cultural landscape, including deep assumptions about human nature, the relationship between mind and body, and how society functions.

Here, concerns with AI safety throw the differences into sharp relief. While Trump dismisses safety concerns, the major AI companies increasingly agree on the need for safety. However, it remains to be seen whether this extends beyond rhetoric to a willingness to curb their own competitiveness. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s concern with ensuring China does not surge ahead may be honest — but it also provides a convenient reason not to follow through on slowing down frontier development. If China will build its own AGI anyway, better that a US firm gets there first. It might bring on the apocalypse, but at least it will be an American apocalypse rather than Armageddon with Chinese Characteristics.

Trump’s dismissiveness towards safety concerns seems to be in tension with the AI companies’ approach of calling for a slowdown that, for game theoretic reasons, they cannot implement just yet. But they both reflect a general modern Western concern with freedom from constraint. In the labs’ case this is often accompanied by messianic visions of AGI just beyond the horizon — a silicon savior which will achieve miracles ranging from eliminating pestilence to generating limitless material abundance. This is a vision of unbridled progress enabled by free competition and innovation, guided by the utopian visions of individual technologists but directed towards universal benefit.

A different version of this is represented by Trump and the deepening relationship between Big Tech and political power. On one level this is apparent in the entourage of tech leaders who accompanied Trump to China and attended this week’s summit. On another, it is manifest in the visions of technologists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, their personal ties (volatile as those can be) with figures in the Trump administration, and, in the case of Thiel, the provision of AI as an instrument of law enforcement and military power. These are far from visions of universal benefit, instead being centered on national supremacy — a will to power channeled through transformative technology. This is the counterpart to utopian liberalism and the contemporary form of the Nietzschean impulse, channeling the drive for self-actualization into the strongman leader rather than pushing it as a universal objective.

Both visions have a common origin traceable through the Enlightenment and Christianity. This is a faith in the ability of the mind, expressed in the self, to operate independently of the body — and ultimately a desire to free it from physical constraints. Our society is one in which professional and personal existence is increasingly online, in which the work of the mind is elevated over that of the body, in which we express ourselves through self-applied identity labels dislocated from our biology, in which we are beginning to demand the right for our minds to choose when and how to end the existence of our bodies. This is fed by an economic culture of maximal choice — self-actualization through consumption. It should not come as a surprise that the contemporary West’s vision of AI is one of disembodied agents who reason and communicate solely via language and apparently require nothing else to become superintelligent. Pure, unconstrained digital selves.

Meanwhile, in China, they build robots as well as LLMs. Of course, the Americans do too, but the robots are far fewer. China has become a world leader in the field, giving it a major advantage in pursuing embodied AI — a potential path to AGI made that much more plausible by the fact that a robot-borne program can interact directly with the physical world. The Chinese government has pursued a systematic AI strategy for a decade and has done so as part of a wider focus on developing “new quality productive forces”, foundational technologies enabling a fourth industrial revolution. This is accompanied by a drive for energy security and electrification as well as comprehensive frameworks for AI governance — that is, the pursuit of policies across economy and society that enable the deployment and diffusion of artificial intelligence. The CCP has emphasized safety since the beginning, and identified early on that the requirements for AI would vary significantly depending on its application to areas as diverse as security and surveillance, manufacturing, infrastructure, law, healthcare, and care for the elderly. It has regulated accordingly, tailoring rules to each sector (including a remarkably robust and not unironic concern for consumer privacy). China’s companies face ruthless domestic competition, but also operate in a society which leapt from industrialization to digitalization in decades rather than centuries. They release their models earlier in development than their American counterparts, but do so in a country in which the Party-state is able to enforce and manage safety concerns in a way Washington cannot.

The CCP intends that China leads the world in AI, but does so in a way which maintains domestic and international stability. The promise of leadership, in the CCP’s view, will be realized not by the individual breakthroughs of a genius techno-utopian or the company he runs but by deploying the technology across manufacturing, healthcare, administration, and surveillance. Xi and his colleagues grasp that while LLMs (and other AI models) might appear to us as disembodied minds, key to the control of their development is control of the physical stuff that allows them to exist, right down to the minerals that go into the chips. And they understand that there is an opportunity to lead by providing the rest of the world with open-weight models and the international initiatives and regulatory frameworks to govern their use. It has been China that has offered a Global AI Governance Initiative, hosts the World AI Conference on governance, and engages in extensive AI and data governance agreements across the Global South.

None of this eliminates the potential risks of losing control. But it does mean that China is significantly better placed to mitigate them, and to respond effectively should they occur. None of the above, equally, mean that Chinese AI is inherently more benign. To the contrary, under the watch of the CCP it enhances an already pervasive surveillance machine, enables more efficient repression and pre-emptive action against potential dissenters, and grants the CCP a potent means to control the flow of information through Chinese society and beyond. On the plus side, in a world of Chinese AI we may well be less likely to all die at the hands of MechaHitler.

Just as self-actualization-through-technology, Nietzschean or utopian, has its conceptual roots in the West’s intellectual heritage, so this alternative vision of AI — an all-of-society enhancement that is context-specific, regulatorily-iterative, embodied, and safely controlled — has its roots in China’s. It is the kind of approach one might expect from a civilization whose philosophy has emphasized a continuous relationship between the mental and the physical, the mutual influence of society and the wider cosmos, and the complexity of the web of factors that influence individual behavior. Such principles lie behind ideas ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to Confucian moral self-cultivation, emphasizing propensity and interconnectedness over determinism and separation.

As with Western thought, this tradition has optimistic and pessimistic flavors. The countercultural impulse of the Daoist sage to retreat into the mountains and be at one with the way of the cosmos is the sibling of the Legalist statesman’s understanding that his enemies are best destroyed by comprehensively targeting the intricate network of economic, demographic, political, and military factors on which their rule depends. The Confucian conviction that all humans can improve themselves through practicing the correct rituals finds its counterpart in the Maoist awareness that those forced to repeat the same behaviors can be “brainwashed”.

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So there is much to fret over, regardless of who drives the direction of AI. Ultimately, it is hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that this technology may well spell the end for the societies we in the West consider ideal. For many decades, if not centuries, our societies have seen rapid technological change, but never in that period have we been confronted by a technology with quite so much transformative power over how we receive information, how we communicate, and how we relate to others and ourselves. Writing and the printing press were technologies which, through interaction with economic shifts as profound as the emergence of a merchant class or the newfound sustainability of cities, enabled the thorough and often bloody transformation of political systems. Such technologies define the development of human civilization for centuries thereafter.

Printing emerged far earlier in China, and did so into a society that had developed many of the trappings of early modern European states centuries beforehand, from bureaucratic government to standing armies. But for us in the West, the arrival of printing caused immense disruption, ushering our societies out of feudalism and into an era of mass literacy that made liberal democracy possible. AI now appears to be a similarly transformative technology, and is swiftly being embedded in the bureaucracy, in the military, and across a corporate sector over which the government has little control. The institutions of Western democracies are ill-equipped to deal with such a radical shift in the creation, control, and distribution of information and the new centers of authority it is creating.

In contrast, China has developed its economy and institutions alongside the emergence and proliferation of digital technologies. It has also done so at a time when advances in science and technology tend towards an emphasis on complexity, messiness, and unpredictability. Contemporary scientific understandings of evolution or the relationship between mind and body, for instance, are entirely at odds with the mind-body dualism of the Enlightenment. A philosophy that worked for a world of steam and printing — discreet manipulable objects and Newtonian physics — is not necessarily up to the messier challenges of silicon and neural networks. A society whose systems of thought are predisposed to understand humanity and the world in a way which complements the science underpinning modern technology is surely likely to adapt to that technology more effectively — and implement it more effectively too. CCP-sponsored AI might very well wish to read the contents of your mind, but a brain-computer interface designed by Xunzi would perhaps be less likely to assume that one can straightforwardly transfer the mind’s contents to a machine with no ill effects than would one designed by Descartes.

For these reasons, it is likely to be China that ultimately better adapts to an AI-enabled world. It is not that China and the West are incommensurably different, nor that they do not face analogous challenges with these new technologies. It is simply that adaptation is an evolutionary process, and in evolution success depends not on perfection but on being marginally better suited to one’s conditions than the competition. China’s approach is much more orientated to the complexity of this technology, and unlike the US, China is building an architecture designed to facilitate the spread of its own vision. America risks failing to anticipate the profound domestic challenges AI is catalyzing, while China gains an international reputation as the more responsible AI superpower.

We should take this prospect extremely seriously. Of course, we must worry about US-China strategic competition, from the economic challenge of supply-chain interdependence to the escalation risks posed by two superpowers increasingly reliant on military AI. But we must also think about culture, and what might enable us to better adapt. This is especially pressing for those of us outside America and China. We face two alternatives — the apogee of unconstrained self-actualization or efficient, holistic security. Or, for the more pessimistic, MechaHitler or MechaMao.

It seems doubtful that the sitting US president will have spent much time with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I feel confident that several of his lines in the “Song of Myself” might still resonate with Donald Trump. “I know perfectly well”, the poet says, “my own egotism”. Whitman is not alone in this self-consciousness. “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”, he goes on, “I show that size is only development”. A line like that could be the motto of any New York property developer. Whitman then asks, bringing a rare end-rhyme to development: “Have you outstripped the rest? are you the President?” Mr Trump could coolly answer: Yes.

With all this in mind, it is worth noting that Whitman penned a fair number of fraternal lines about China. In a poem of delirious cosmopolitanism, “Salut au monde”, he claimed: “I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl.” We would now write Whitman’s “Yiang-tse” as Yangtze and his “Amour” as Amur; but what matters is that China’s rivers were flowing in the Brooklyn poet’s mind in the middle of the 19th century.

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Whitman even went to Qing-dynasty China, in a poetic transport, to see for himself how the common people lived. “I go among them”, he dreamed. “I mix indiscriminately”. And he found the people of China to be, in the blinding light of his ecstasy, no different from him or from the Americans of his day. “Each of us [is] inevitable”, he thrummed, “Each of us [is] limitless.”

We do not know what it is in Whitman’s ultra-democratic poetry that stirred something in a young Xi Jinping. But as China’s paramount leader returns to the US for another state visit, he surely knows that America has long dreamed of his people.

And it is not only in poetic reveries that the West and China have been friendly. Before the full-bore Industrial Revolution; liberal trade policies (and concomitant trade wars); and the high-watermark of Western imperialism in Whitman’s 19th century, the West and China had several hundred years of largely peaceful cultural, commercial, and intellectual contact. From roughly 1500 to 1800, China and the West rather candidly recognized each other as the world’s most advanced civilizations. Leibniz — a baroque savant and China-watcher avant la lettre — did not hesitate to call them “the two most cultivated parts of the world”.

More recently, and no less importantly, the 21st century’s two great powers were ultimately aligned in all three of the 20th’s great contests: the First World War, Second World War, and the Cold War. This is currently better known in Beijing than it is in Washington, London, and Brussels. And, because we rarely hear it in the West, it’s worth taking each conflict in sequence.

A couple of years before Whitman’s poems began to appear in translation in the pages of the New Culture Movement’s Young China magazine, the Chinese republic declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The casus belli was a lawless German strike, in February 1917, on a French transport ship sailing in international waters. Hundreds of Chinese nationals aboard the vessel had drowned. In March 1917, the Chinese parliament voted to break diplomatic relations with Germany. But this brought no change to Germany’s scandalous U-boat policy. In August 1917, Beijing then joined London and Paris, Petrograd and Washington in their titanic struggle against the Central Powers.

China’s man in Washington at the time was a formidable diplomat with an evocative name: Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo. In a letter printed a month or so later, in The American Journal of International Law, Wellington Koo notified the US Secretary of State of his government’s grave decision: “I have the honor to inform you that China… declares that a state of war exists with Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Notably, Wellington Koo stressed in this letter that his government would “observe all the stipulations of the conventions signed at the International Peace Conferences at The Hague”. The Republic of China, founded in 1912, would uphold the laws of “civilized warfare” that Imperial Germany had relinquished. In other words, Wellington Koo’s Asian republic was more civilized than one of Europe’s great monarchies.

In the Second World War, meanwhile, the Republic of China staked a similar claim, fighting alongside Washington in defense of civilization. But now, the lawless power China had to resist was Japan: a monarchical Asian ally of a post-monarchical Nazi Germany. On 7 December 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor without formally declaring war. This “treacherous” strike was made in violation of the conventional laws of war and later judged to be illegal — which is to say, uncivilized — by a postwar tribunal. The more immediate effect of Pearl Harbor was to forge a momentous link between the US and China.

Why so momentous? Well, on 1 January 1942, a statement titled the “Declaration by United Nations” was drawn up and signed at the Arcadia Conference in Washington, DC. The ur-document of the United Nations, it had four original drafters and signatories: the US, UK, USSR and China. It is no coincidence these four great powers still form the core of the UN Security Council (with France joining later). China belongs to the innermost circle of powers that created the postwar order, and the UN.

Just a couple of days after the Arcadia declaration was signed, Chiang Kai-shek — or “Generalissimo Chiang”, as he was known — accepted the “supreme command over all forces of the United Powers… in the Chinese theater”. The idea for this centralization of “United Nations” forces in Chiang’s hands came from President Roosevelt himself. And there can be no doubt that FDR had a strategic vision for what he called “the gallant people of China”. By May 1942, he was declaring that “in the future a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in eastern Asia but in the whole world”.

China remained “unconquerable” at the close of the Second World War. But its anticolonial struggle had not decided the issue of a decades-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. Of course, Chiang and the Republic of China did not hold the mainland; in the bitter fight for sovereignty, the Maoists prevailed. A successor republic, a “People’s Republic”, was formed in Beijing in October 1949. And with it, a steely party-state was formed which had immense debts to one of America’s other wartime allies: Stalin’s USSR.

The cruelties of China’s civil war and the fantastical complexity of early-Cold War geopolitics cannot be dealt with here. But two brief points can be made. First, China’s postwar settlement in no way cancels out the vast sacrifices made by the “gallant people” of the country during the Second World War. Second, the communist ascendancy in China was not preordained. Indeed, certain actions by the US may have moved the dial in favor of Mao and his Soviet-backed troops. Frank Dikötter has stressed in a recent book that it was FDR’s successor, President Truman, who put an arms embargo in place in 1946: not on Mao and his communist brigades, but on Generalissimo Chiang and his nationalists.

A 1946 New York Times headline tells us why: “Aid to China Hinges on Ending of Strife and Unification of Nation”. Truman confirms this in a personal note he sent to Chiang. In it, the US president made clear that his government’s “generous attitude” towards the Republic of China was highly conditional: Chiang had to demonstrate “genuine progress” towards achieving a “peaceful settlement” with Mao. In hopes of seeing a coalition government formed in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital, Truman leveraged US money and materiel, imposing more than one ceasefire which, in Dikötter’s view, “changed the course of the civil war”.

The early years of the Cold War were therefore treacherous and highly complex. There is much we still do not fully understand. But however we choose to reconstruct that era, it’s clear that a dangerous bloc-formation swiftly formed within the “Big Four” powers that built the UN: the US and UK in the “West”, the USSR and China in the “East”. And no one disputes that China, having aligned with Washington and London in the century’s first two global conflicts, took a hostile posture during the third. This revolutionary, Soviet-backed posture of Mao’s China held up for roughly two decades.

But it is surely worth noting that, for a great power with a 2,000-year history, that’s the blink of an eye. The People’s Republic of China had only been in existence for 22 years when President Nixon touched down in Beijing to make his visionary overtures in February 1972. In the years that followed, Maoist China decided to normalize relations with Washington. And, less than 20 years after that, due in part to the West’s strategic rapprochement with China, the Cold War ended.

This point is especially important. The liberal Nineties narrative of the USSR’s dissolution is highly Eurocentric — but modern China has never been a geopolitical periphery. Any rigorous account of the collapse of the USSR must frankly reckon with the fact that it was not only the Western powers, but the Western powers plus China, which created the conditions that doomed the Soviet system.

Strange to say, the US had a strategic commitment during the Cold War to what we would now call a sort of multipolarity. Cultivating ties with peripheral communist regimes was part of this strategy: Washington’s heavy investment in Tito’s Yugoslavia is a case in point. Nixon’s grand maneuver in 1972 was to invite Mao’s Beijing, a central communist regime, to form a third pole in the bipolar world order of the Seventies. And, indeed, a new pole was formed. “Without abandoning its communist trappings”, as Bruce Mazlish puts it, “China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors has been pursuing its own amalgamation of socialism, Confucianism, and capitalism in a unique blend.” The PRC’s scale is unique, too, and the systemic effects of its late-Cold War opening are often missed in Western discourse.

The triumphalist liberal narrative of the Nineties is also ideologized. Any serious account of China’s reopening to the West must reckon with the fact that it was not instigated or navigated in the early days by Western liberals. Whatever we make of this fact, the breakthrough diplomacy in China was undertaken by Western conservatives: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with some fine diplomatic play by Margaret Thatcher. Beijing has not forgotten who conceived its Cold War détente with the West. Nixon is highly respected in 21st-century China, as he seems to be among a growing number of young Americans.

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But China cannot be reduced to a partisan question in the West. It is too massive, too comprehensive, for that. Our ideologies do not capture it. And it cannot be stressed too heavily that it was Western diplomacy in the Seventies — not politics, not ideology — which drew Beijing back towards Washington, London, and Brussels. It was diplomacy which made “unconquerable China” a stabilizing presence in late-20th-century geopolitics.

It’s probably too much to hope for President Xi to be given a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass during his stay in Washington, DC. But there is, in any case, a pair of words that Whitman brings forward in “Salut au monde” that still speak to the occasion. As he gazes out on the world of the 1850s, Whitman tells us that he sees “barbarisms” and “civilizations”. Not much has changed, perhaps. But this is no time for great-power barbarisms. The stakes are too high.

The task, then, is for China and the West to exemplify their long-related civilizations. Today, we’d be more likely to call them the world’s largest economic zones, and it’s tempting to see these tensions, over AI or rare earths, as insurmountable. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to make the shift to brute economic calculation. For diplomacy is, ultimately, a civilizational legacy. And if diplomacy is what we need in the early 21st century, then surely we can find the strength and calm to engage in it: by returning to the deeper traditions which made several centuries of relatively peaceful trade and intellectual exchange possible between a strong China and a powerful West.

Later, in bed, like twentysomethings the world over, you defer sleep with your phone: scrolling through selfies on WeChat, video essays on bilibili, and microcelebrity meltdowns on Weibo. When you open the photosharing app, RedNote, one post catches your eye.

“You’re awake,” the title reads. “It’s ‘08 in a Beijing alley, and the Olympics are set to begin.”

The images flicker through dimly remembered scenes from childhood: cluttered newspaper stands, roadside skewer vendors, kindergarten kids in bright tank tops. Prominently featured are the Fuwa, the five adorable multicolored mascots of the 2008 Olympics. The posts have gnomic, melancholy titles (“Why cry? Wasn’t this the life you always wanted?” or “Never to find those happy days again”) that serve as little daggers to the Gen Z heart.

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But what really gets you — what really sets off the Sehnsucht in your bosom for the lost dreamworld of childhood — is the music. “Beijing Welcomes You”, the old Olympic anthem, is a soaring, catchy ballad that can crack the cool facade of even the most stoic of Chinese Zoomers. Its lyrics (“Open, always, is the gate of my home…”) capture a China that was confident, cosmopolitan, and welcoming; a China that now seems as forgotten as the threadbare plushies of our childhood.

What gives the song such emotional significance is the sheer breadth of its saturation. In the Summer of 2008, you heard it broadcast on the bus ride to school; on a walk with your parents in the park; as you snuck into the cornershop to buy red bean popsicles.

It’s clear from all the comments that the rediscovery of “Beijing Welcomes You” is, for China’s Gen Z, only part of a wider reckoning with the recent past. “In those days we all believed in progress and world peace…” writes one poster on bilibi (China’s YouTube analog). “This song has such pure intentions; there’s no political agenda to it at all. Culture above all else…” adds another. A reply to this notes that the star-studded cast features A-listers from both shores of the Taiwan Strait, as well as the Chinese diaspora: “Back then, everyone set aside their ideologies and national differences to showcase to the world nothing other than Chinese civilization and the Olympic spirit… Truly, those were the good times.” Without getting lost in the vexed politico-linguistic question of Chinese autonyms, it’s notable here that the commenter uses the term “中华文化” (Zhōnghuá wénhuà) for Chinese civilization, which has the expansive sense of an overarching culture spanning all Chinese-speaking people, as opposed to the more parochial “中国文化” (Zhōngguó wénhuà), which refers to Chinese culture within the People’s Republic. Such are the linguistic pains taken by the user to emphasize the ecumenism of Chinese unity manifested during the 2008 Olympics.

British readers might feel a pang of recognition at the potency of Olympic patriotism; images from the London 2012 opening ceremony are still apt to prompt wistful accounts from progressives about the forward-looking, multicultural, welcoming country they thought they grew up in. But whereas Britain’s Olympic games live on in cultural memory as the last gasp of liberal Britain, Beijing 2008 was supposed to be the inauguration of a newer, more open China — a China that never was.

The aesthetic that Chinese Zoomers have fashioned in response to these foreclosed hopes is a variation on “dreamcore”, a style that first took shape on US-based platforms like Tumblr and DeviantArt in the mid-2010s. American dreamcore is marked by its obsession with eerie liminal spaces like hotel lobbies, parking lots, or the yellow, fluorescent-lit basements of old furniture stores that inspired Backrooms, this summer’s horror blockbuster. Chinese dreamcore retains some of the formal elements — eerily empty streets, 2000s internet graphics — while sinicizing its content; this is, in other words, nostalgia with Chinese characteristics. It could even be seen as further confirmation of the late Mark Fisher’s pet concept, hauntology, the idea that we’re living now in the “slow cancellation of the future”, surrounded by the dreams we once abandoned.

That the Chinese youth are just as pessimistic, anxious, even fatalistic, about the present state of affairs as young people in the West may come as a surprise. From Friedrich Merz to Mark Carney, politicians on both the Left and Right often invoke China as the presumptive winner in our global return to bipolar Great Power geopolitics — the country with the technology, infrastructure, jobs, growth rates, and above all, the sense of collective purpose buoyed by national unity. But behind the phalanxes of dancing robots and ribbons of high-speed rail is the stark economic reality facing the generation now coming of age, who, like their counterparts in the West, are coming to terms with the closure of the guaranteed upward mobility that their parents enjoyed.

In the late Seventies, China’s then-leader Deng Xiaoping implemented a wildly ambitious suite of market reforms. As Deng overhauled the creaky Soviet-style economy that he had inherited from Mao, a corresponding ideological makeover of the Chinese Communist Party was inevitable. Gone was the fiery Marxist-Leninist exporter of international revolution, replaced by the staid, technocratic guardian of state capitalism we’re familiar with today. Jettisoning the Mao-era baggage, however, meant losing the story that gave the Communist government its legitimacy — the grand Us vs Them narrative of the working class as co-authored by Marx and Engels, a story second only to the New Testament in its ability to form social cohesion and inspire mass action.

What narrative could fill the ideological vacuum left by Marxism? Political scientist Feng Chen argues that the CCP’s pivot to “eudaemonic legitimacy” accomplished precisely that. Here, eudaimonia, Greek for happiness or flourishing, refers not to any lofty Aristotelian actualizing of human potentialities, but to satisfying people’s demands for iPhones, McDonald’s, electric cars, hotpots, Korean beauty products, and so on. The result was a tacit social contract that “led the masses to link their assessment of the regime to their personal material advancement”. In the post-Mao period, political legitimacy depends on the uninterrupted economic growth that allows the government to deliver the (literal) goods.

One shortcoming of deploying eudaemonic legitimacy as a long-term political strategy is that it’s crassly reductive. Human beings are more than rational self-maximizers; man does not live by designer handbags alone. We have an exasperating tendency to put forth moral, not just material, demands — and when these moral demands are unmet, political stability falters. For Chen, eudaemonic legitimacy depends not only on delivering economic growth to the people, but also on ensuring that those people adhere to a notion of morality that is itself narrowly economic.

In the Mao era, moral character meant subscribing to a mix of proletarian solidarity, anti-imperialism, and ascetic self-discipline. A capitalist China required, at minimum, an abandonment of these collectivist socialist ideals — and, ideally, something to replace them. From the late Nineties, Chinese media saw a number of happiness campaigns — deliberately engineered self-help movements involving everything from TV talk therapy to positivity gurus to a torrent of translated American self-help paperbacks. The plan, as the anthropologist Jie Yang documents, was to inculcate new values in Chinese society — values such as “self-care, self-realization, and self-enterprise”, enabling the Chinese people to positively affirm themselves as autonomous agents, happily engaged in private enterprise.

So as the government delivered on economic growth, the governed reconceived of the good life along exactly such lines. What could go wrong?

The more basic problem with the quid pro quo of political acquiescence for material gain is what to do when growth tapers off. In the popular Chinese consciousness, the tapering took place sometime between 2018 and the beginning of the pandemic, and the record-breaking 17.9% youth unemployment rate recorded in July evinces no change to this downward trend. Attitudes, though, can be slower to change than economic realities, and a distinct generational gap has opened between the Deng cohort, who maintain a sunny and increasingly obsolescent optimism that comes only with decades of double-digit GDP growth, and their children, who are now faced with a job market decimated by outsourcing, automation, and cutthroat competition. In response to this future of secular stagnation, Gen Z has rejected en masse the chipper self-help morality of China’s boom years.

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In the absence of civil society — and in the face of continued state-sponsored optimism campaigns — China’s youth has vented its dissatisfaction in the only direction available: inwards. The ethnographer Dino Ge Zhang has coined the term “Sinopessimism” to characterize the private world conjured up by the slang of Chinese Zoomers. They describe their time in higher education and the workforce with the term 内卷 (“involution)”, or “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless”. The natural reaction to an involuted society is 躺平 (“lying flat”): in other words rejecting expectations of upward mobility and career advancement in favor of alternative lifestyles.

However, Gen Z’s most distinctive neologism must be 历史的垃圾时间, or “garbage time of history”. The term, coined by Hu Wenhui, a newspaper editor in Guangzhou, borrows its meaning from “garbage time” in sports, referring to the final portion of a match so lopsided that its outcome is already a foregone conclusion. Hu, in a 2023 WeChat post shared millions of times, extends this to cultural critique: those living in the “garbage time of history” are stuck in an agonizing interim period when nothing seems to work, when decaying, outmoded social structures refuse to collapse, and when individuals feel powerless to respond. Though Hu limits his examples to the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the fall of the Tang dynasty (while making thinly-veiled allusions to contemporary China throughout), it’s written in the same spirit of global pessimism that moves Western Zoomers to drop the term “late capitalism”, or the Gramsci quote that diagnoses the present as the “time of monsters”.

Nothing expresses the ennui of the Sinopessimism generation better than Chinese dreamcore. Time will tell if it remains a trendy hashtag or develops into a full-fledged artistic movement. But for now, if nothing else, Chinese dreamcore stands as a melancholy corrective to the widely-held assumption that the passing of the globalized era (which counts, as one of its fading triumphs, the Beijing Olympics) also heralds a new epoch of winners and losers: namely the oft-repeated narrative of China’s inevitable rise, and the West’s gradual decline. It seems misguided, to say the least, for Western progressives to spread narratives of Chinamaxxing at a time when the Chinese youth are themselves avoiding their economic present by escaping to the safety of the past. Ultimately, this new epoch of isolationism may consist only of losers and other losers.

If there’s any doubt about the crisis in China’s youth outlook, take a look at the panicky, hectoring responses it has elicited from the establishment. Discussion of “lying flat” is censored online; meanwhile a battalion of mainstream academics have come forth with thinkpieces rebutting the concept, decrying it as a “fraudulent academic concept,” a “logical fallacy,” or, my particular favorite, the “absurd fantasy” of “idiotic literary youths.” And, in direct response to Chinese dreamcore, a recent article published in the Social Sciences Review of Gansu Province warns of the “latent ideological risks stemming from the glorification of ‘negative emotions’”. More than just a case of bad vibes, officials are treating the pervasive pessimism as a serious ideological challenge — the one really obvious lesson from the 20th century being, after all, that keeping around a bunch of nihilistic, directionless, and economically downward young people tends to be really, really bad for political stability.

Still, one comment under a Chinese dreamcore post stood out to me as a corrective to the idea that China’s recent past really was so much brighter. It was from a bewildered Gen-Xer. “The 2000s were a time when I was scared to leave the house at night, back when trash piled in the streets, and my hometown didn’t even have streetlights. I don’t know where exactly the romance is.” So even the golden years of childhood prove no escape. If Western pundits idealize a non-existent future for China, its youth romanticize a non-existent Chinese past. All attempts at escape turn up only dead ends. How, then, can we comfort ourselves amidst this time of monsters? Perhaps there is a slender hope: that one day, with enough distance, our present may also be misremembered as beautiful.

Why, then, is the Trump administration appeasing China on trade, while picking fights with countries like Canada that are friends and allies of the United States? Why is America shaking down allies for cash and risking inflationary pressure at a time when the US economy can hardly afford more of it? The sheer irrationality and refusal to ease up lend President Trump’s trade war with Canada the aspects of a mad compulsion. 

Trade negotiations between Washington and Ottawa have dramatically collapsed in the last week. The industries involved include autos, lumber, plywood, clothing, dairy, and alcohol. There is no reason for the two countries not to be able to reach an accommodation on any of these questions, provided America doesn’t continue to treat friends like enemies.

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The automobile industry is a strategic industry, to be sure, but the issue in the US-Canadian trade diplomacy involves merely the location of supply chains in what is already an integrated North American market. As for the rest, nobody would describe dairy, alcohol, and plywood as sectors essential to American industrial, commercial, and military power.

Meanwhile, by 2023, China’s share of global manufacturing output surged to 28%, up from just 9% in 2004 — making it larger than the combined output of the United States, Japan, and Germany.  

Chinese manufacturing dominance, by the way, isn’t about “plastic trinkets,” free-traders’ shorthand of a generation ago for why we shouldn’t worry about giving up some industry to the Middle Kingdom. Thanks to a relentless and effective state-sponsored industrial- and trade-policy combination, China, once an exporter of low-value-added products like textiles, now leads the world in electronics exports. It enjoys a global market share of 32%, followed by 14% in the case of Taiwan. The American share of global electronic exports? A measly 5%.

China is also now the world’s largest car maker, responsible for a third of global output. And the country’s share of global shipbuilding, another high-tech, strategic-manufacturing industry, is even higher, at a staggering 56%. And while the Chinese lag behind the United States in commercial aviation, they control an estimated 80% to 90% share of global drone manufacturing — an industry with obvious military implications. 

OK, when it comes to the most strategic industries of the 21st century, America should be picking its trade fights with China, not with … Canada. But hey, at least when it comes to plywood, Canada is a bigger player in global markets than China. Oh, wait — China is responsible for more than 54% of global plywood exports and makes up to an estimated 70% of the world’s plywood.

Alcohol? Canada lags behind the leaders in alcohol revenue: the United States, China, and Japan.  Is Canada threatening to engross the world lumber market? Well, at least Canada exports more milk and dairy products (180,000 tons) than China (70,380 tons). And according to 2026 data, Canada exports more lumber than the United States.

America is threatened by a lumber gap!

In all seriousness, there is something perverse afoot here. While cracking down on Canada in trade disputes over non-strategic industries, the second Trump administration has appeased Communist China. The People’s Republic controls 90% of refining in rare earths, essential for advanced technology and manufacturing in many industries, and the Beijing regime hasn’t hesitated to use the leverage it gains from control of this strategic chokepoint. In April 2025, following Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, China imposed export controls on a number of rare-earth minerals on which American and allied civilian and defense industries depend. 

Living up to the motto “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out — the president in May flew to Beijing to a summit with Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping. According to the White House news release, “China will address US concerns regarding supply-chain shortages related to rare earths and other critical minerals, including yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and indium.” 

In return for this vague promise, the Trump administration won commitments from the Chinese regime to buy 200 Boeing aircraft — which will undoubtedly help China obtain technology to build its own rival aircraft industry — and promises to buy more US beef and poultry. America may have lost consumer electronics and drone manufacturing to the Chinese, but take solace: America’s chicken feedlots rule!

Those of us who have followed bad US trade deals for decades recognize the trick used by East Asian mercantilist nations, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China. Knowing the power of America’s farm lobby in Congress, and the political weakness of US manufacturers, the East Asian mercantilists will graciously promise to import more American soybeans, beef, pork, or other agricultural commodities, if Americans agree to stop protesting their state-sponsored, trade-induced deindustrialization of the US economy.

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Team Trump, in short, is doing the exact opposite of what American strategy in the 21st century demands.

Strategy is the art of picking priorities. A rational American trade strategy would focus on a hard decoupling of the United States from market-Leninist China. In addition, to take advantage of economies of scale in manufacturing and increase global market shares, a rational American trade strategy would seek to pool the American manufacturing base with those of allies in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere that share America’s interest in reducing economic and military dependence on China. Even legitimate trade disputes with US trading partners, including Canada, should be kept off the front pages of the news media and subordinated to these two goals of Sino-American decoupling and allied solidarity.

Moreover, in order to work over many years and through changes of party control in Washington, a rational strategic trade policy should be backed by technocratic expertise and should seek to win bipartisan legitimacy. But Trump’s trade policy is personal and whimsical and finally incoherent. 

The worst part: instead of rehabilitating the use of tariffs as a legitimate instrument of American economic statecraft going back to the Founding Fathers, Trump is discrediting them in the eyes of the American people. No wonder the share of the US public that favors global free trade rose to 55% last year, up from 35% percent in 2024, when Trump was re-elected. Even among Republicans, free trade’s popularity rose to 34%, up from 20%, in the same period.

If the Chinese regime had possessed the power to plant a Manchurian Candidate in the White House in 2025, whose goal was to discredit economic nationalism in American public opinion, it could not have chosen a better agent than Donald “Tariff Man” Trump.

The President may not have been serious about the lettuce tariff, but he is serious about tariffs in general. “Tariff,” he once said, “is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” They are the one-size-fits-all economic policy tool of his administration.  

After he menaced Mexican salad, Trump turned his attention to a far more serious parasite — the EU, which he once described as having been created to “rip off America”. Again, he threatened new tariffs, only this time he was not joking. The trigger was a decision by the European Commission to impose two fines on Google totaling $1 billion. The Europeans accused Google of failing to comply with the Digital Markets Act, which forces US tech giants to open up their proprietary ecosystems to competition. Google was prioritizing its own search engine over others. This was not a one-off. The Europeans are messing heavily with the business models of lots of the US tech giants, not just Google. There is another European law, the Digital Services Act, which forces platforms like Facebook and X to moderate their social media content. 

All of this has wound up the American President. In retaliation, Trump wants to impose his new tariff on Europe “at the earliest possible moment”, arguing that the EU is robbing US companies of their legitimate profits. I don’t think this is a bluff. Unlike when he imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs, existing US trade law allows him to do this. It could take up to a year, but this time US law will be on his side.  

When the US Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariff regime in February, the Europeans got a bit overexcited. Some assumed it was a decision against tariffs in general. That was not the case. The Supreme Court declared the legal basis on which Trump had based his Liberation Day tariffs as null and void. But Trump has other legal avenues open to him. 

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Immediately after the ruling, the Trump administration made two decisions. The first was to implement a temporary regime that allowed the President to impose tariffs of up to 15%, no questions asked, for up to 150 days. That meant the old tariffs would continue for a few more months. That deadline has now expired. The second was to launch an investigation under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against practically all countries in the world. The idea was to resurrect the old tariff regime — one for one — under a new legal cloak. 

Section 301 is a formal, tried-and-tested procedure. The actual investigation, however, was absurd. The US accused nearly every other country in the world of failing to match its own human rights standards with respect to imports of goods produced by forced labor. It is quite something to behold the US accusing Norway of not respecting the highest human rights standards. Rarely before has Section 301 been applied so cynically: the human rights accusations were just a front to resurrect the old, defunct tariff structure. 

Still, I believe it will pass the legal test anyway because of the separation of powers under US law. It is not the role of a court to decide whether a foreign trading practice is illegal. The courts decide whether the decision followed due process. 

From now on, Section 301 will be the legal basis for all of Trump’s tariff policies. That means if he wants to impose heavy tariffs on the EU in response to the fines on Google, he could do so — perfectly legally — by early next year. The EU may drag this out a bit, but I would be surprised if the US legal system ended up siding with the EU on this matter.  

When the Supreme Court ruled in February against the Liberation Day tariffs, the average US tariff was about 15%. It has come down a bit since but will now creep up again as the tariff regime hits. In the two-and-a-half years Trump has left in office, I expect average tariffs to rise to above 15%. Trump will always find ways to impose new tariffs, like the one he threatened last week.  

Have the tariffs made world trade any fairer? Have they contributed to a reduction in global trade imbalances? Absolutely not. But they are not without effect. The most important is that they are raising around $200-300 billion per year in revenue for the US Treasury. Tariffs are, formally, a tax on US consumers; but exporters from other countries are paying indirectly. The value of Japanese cars sold in the US fell by 24.7% in May last year, compared to the previous year. Yet the number of Japanese cars sold was down only by 3.9%. So the Japanese car companies took a hit on their profits.  

Companies that refused to cut export prices have seen a fall in sales. Among these are the Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu, both of which specialize in small items that were once exempt from tariffs. They could post their tiny packages to America because of the so-called de minimis rules — a tariff exemption for goods below a certain price. The week after Trump imposed his tariffs, and ended the de minimis exemptions, Shein observed a 23% fall in its US revenue compared with the preceding week. During the course of 2025, the Chinese trade surplus against the US fell by one third. 

So the tariffs did have an effect. But only on the bilateral US-China trade balance. Globally, trade imbalances are still rising. The Chinese have diverted trade from the US to the EU. As a result, the EU’s trade deficit with China increased dramatically. In first six months of this year, it was up by 23.9%.

The EU, in turn, is considering imitating Trump by imposing a tariff to protect European industries from Chinese competition. Remember the European outrage when Trump did this? Trump had a better case back then than the Europeans do now. The US runs a large trade deficit against the rest of the world, whereas the EU runs a persistent surplus. If the EU were to take a tougher stance on trade with China, I would expect China to react by cutting down on European imports and restricting sales to European companies whose supply chains depend on China. Last week, China extended the list of European companies earmarked for export controls to include Rheinmetall, the German defense producer. If we end up with a tit-for-tat trade war, the world will be worse off. 

Macroeconomists have long warned us not to focus on bilateral trade balances, but instead to think globally. Trump cares about nothing other than bilateral trade balances. It suits the dealmaker in him. But if we become like him, and the Chinese keep on doing what they have been doing, it will be a lose-lose game for the world. 

The EU would end up as the biggest loser of all. This is because the EU, like China, runs trade surpluses; as global trade falls, it will hit the surplus countries more than deficit countries. At the same time, the EU is reliant on Chinese imports for its supply chains, for example in the car industry. A trade war would be a double-whammy: tariffs on European products, and supply shortage of badly needed Chinese rare earths and semiconductors.

A year ago, Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, agreed a trade deal at Trump’s golf retreat in Turnberry, Scotland. It was an embarrassing moment for von der Leyen, as the deal was entirely dictated by Trump. The EU agreed to cancel all the tariffs it had previously imposed on the US, including a 10% car tariff, and accepted that the US would impose a blanket 15% tariff on all imports from Europe, and a 50% tariff on steel and aluminum. If Trump ends up slapping a new Section 301 tariff on the EU, even that deal would be off. The tariffs would rise. The EU would retaliate. Everybody would be in a trade war.

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Where’s the economic strategy, Andy?

By Wolfgang Münchau

When one also takes into account the rise in oil prices resulting from Trump’s escalating war against Iran, as well as the rise in public debt throughout the West, it is not hard to imagine a global financial crisis resulting from this mess.   

During the Covid pandemic, Trump suggested that chloroquine phosphate — the anti-parasite medication used for fish tanks — could work against the Covid virus. (I wonder whether he had been watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) The President himself was wise enough not to take it, but others did. At least one man died. Tariffs are the chloroquine phosphate of the economic world, and they too come with serious side effects. 

I expect Trump will get away with it, again. That’s because the US is less integrated into Chinese-sourced supply chains than the EU, and it is better at absorbing shocks. My advice for trade officials, and chemistry buffs: don’t try this at home. Let Trump be Trump.  

Just nearby is the “New Vic” development, another mass of skyscrapers. Like 40% of Manchester new builds, these apartments are raised to house generation rent. They look finished outside, but are still looking for tenants when I walk past. Slogans in the letting-office windows announce that they are “For the enlightened”, “For the adventurous”, “For the curious” — for, in other words, the University of Manchester graduates who want a “curated leisure area” even as they slog all day to pay for it. Despite the obvious fact that the 15,000 new homes announced on the billboard as “coming soon” are not yet finished, passersby are advised to “reserve your home today”.

A bit further along, I see that much of the Angel Square development is also coming soon. A student accommodation building and an abandoned coroners’ court sit nearby, off the fraying city side streets. The whole area looks crumbling, uninviting, not joined up to anything. I turn onto Dantzic Street, which later becomes Collyhurst Road, passing more building sites, and more lonely holes in the ground, until the city fades into light industry and logistics.

All this is Manchester. But it is also Chinese Manchester. Take the New Vic. It’s partly funded by Chinese money, though we don’t know how much because the local council keeps it secret. Or else there are the developments at Dantzic Street. Pinnacle, a UK developer, failed to build a pair of tower blocks there and at Angelsgate. Pinnacle went into administration in 2017, leaving off-plan buyers in Hong Kong, who pay deposits to secure apartments in buildings that are not yet built, short some £31 million. Manchester police and the Serious Fraud Squad were brought in to investigate irregularities, but in the end no charges were laid for lack of evidence. A Hong Kong company — Far Eastern Consortium — then bought the site and plans to develop it. Construction is delayed, and Manchester’s building-site aesthetic endures.

This is how Chinese money lands in Manchester, from Far Eastern Consortium, Beijing Construction Engineering Group International (BCEGI), CR Construction and the rest, aided and abetted by the council. Flush from his victory in Makerfield, we shouldn’t forget that Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” is partly Chinese too, even if this sea of foreign cash churns largely in private. Asia, not China, features in council reports as a major source of capital: for all that real estate is now part of the story Manchester tells itself, locals may not be happy to learn how it’s funded.

The ragged China on the streets of Manchester is at odds with that other China — gleaming, self-confident and widely understood as the coming superpower of our century. That country was most obviously on display during the so-called “golden era” of Anglo-Chinese relations, spanning from 2008 to 2017, when the UK was keen to hitch its sluggish economic wagon to China’s high-speed train, anticipating a fast ride to prosperity.

Billions in Chinese investment flowed into London, Manchester, Liverpool, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rushed to invest capital it couldn’t absorb at home. The UK, for its part, was equally keen to secure investment for under-capitalized utilities, infrastructure and other city-making projects. All the while, warm words and photo ops celebrated the golden era at the highest levels. “Let’s stick together and create a golden decade for both of our countries,” proclaimed Chancellor George Osborne in 2015, as he, Mayor Boris Johnson and Prime Minister David Cameron all toured Beijing throughout the 2010s. Xi Jinping visited the UK in 2015, describing Chinese investment in Britain as an extension of his country’s much-touted Belt and Road initiative.

UK-China relations began deteriorating from 2017. The CCP no longer wanted to offshore capital needed for development at home, especially when a property debt bubble threatened to upend China’s economy. Big Chinese developers building in Britain pulled out of projects without finishing them. Political developments hardly helped. The crushing of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement; controversies around planning permission for the new Chinese super-embassy in London; the steady drip of spy scandals — all these brought diplomatic relationships to a new low. By 2020, China was no longer the wealthy and beneficent investor it had been in the golden era, but a ruthless authoritarian state threatening Britain’s national security.

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Since 2017, cities like Manchester have been living in the debris of the golden era. Because the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) never kept track, we still don’t know how much Chinese money washed through their city, or how it landed on the streets. But what’s clear is that by buying so many tickets for the China Express, Manchester and cities like it are now stuck with the consequences: a shattered urban landscape with empty lots and half-finished buildings, as old developers pull out of projects, and their replacements scale back plans to save money.

Beyond the city center, Manchester Airport City is a good example of what this means in practice. The project began as a joint venture between Manchester Airports Authority and BCEGI, a Chinese state-owned enterprise. But then BCEGI quietly withdrew from the venture, and a more modest development, with a couple of hotels, is now being built instead. That’s a far cry from the major logistics hub and shopping complex advertised on the billboards — and, as usual, locals are left to pick up the pieces.

Even so, my street-level journey offers opportunities for other reflections. High-level political debates on the People’s Republic typically focus on whether and how much the UK should engage with China. Wander down Corporation Street and these questions feel irrelevant: we already live with China on intimate domestic terms. But this China is more ramshackle, improvised and buffeted by circumstances than the country we imagine as an all-powerful global force. This is doubly true when many Chinese developers have fallen foul of new liquidity regulations, passed by the CCP in 2020, requiring higher debt-to-equity ratios. Some 30 major firms have already breached these regulations, leading to investigations and arrest aplenty.

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Diplomatically speaking, anyway, it’s clear that China is not just one thing — not merely the all-conquering threat to Britain’s way of life, nor only the disordered builder. There are many Chinas, and it might be more effective to deal with each of them practically and pragmatically in turn. Diplomatically and politically, certainly, the muddled China that exists on our streets might be a better starting point in improving UK-China relations than the authoritarian monster of think-tank imaginings.

What might that mean in practice? For one thing, the future of British cities and the wellbeing of people who live in them clearly depend on electing more transparent councils, which are, after all, responsible for how global capital can operate locally. If councils were less secretive, council-tax payers would know where redevelopment cash came from. Local authorities pretend this doesn’t matter. But it does: Beijing money operates differently from Dubai money. Not every government controls investments abroad as thoroughly as the CCP, and not every government can force investors to nix foreign projects.

At the same time, greater transparency would force councils to be honest about how much money is invested and how it’ll refashion city neighborhoods. The Manchester combined authority responded to my FOI about Chinese capital by again insisting that it doesn’t collect this kind of information. Perhaps it should. Greater honesty would also mean explaining how developments might change as a result of uncertain funding landscapes; how long construction will take; and what sites might be like to live with in the meantime. Instead of treating people like targets of public relations campaigns, dupes who need to be “sold” the benefits of epic redevelopment, communities could instead be involved in deciding their city’s future for themselves.

There’s a broader problem here too. A shining city of towers is the dominant iconic image of urban life in the 21st century. But towers won’t solve the housing shortage, nor improve the quality of everyday life in Manchester, at least without local intervention to ensure improvements happen. What the GMCA and its mayor — or PM-in-waiting — lack isn’t capital. What they lack is the imagination to craft a viable city for the masses, something no amount of Chinese cash can buy.

***

Caroline Knowles’s Uneasy Streets. How Chinese Money is Remaking Urban Britain (Hurst) is out now.

The star of these Chongqing streams is Long Haotian, an internet celebrity who competed for China in breakdancing at the Youth Olympics. His girlfriend-slash-streaming colleague is Yao Yao; she talks in a squeaky baby voice and emotes like an animated character on a video-game loading screen. The couple has enjoyed a strange TikTok virality in the West in recent weeks, spurring imitations and parodies and racking up millions of views. Many clips taken from their videos on Chinese sites receive tens of thousands of likes; one has half a million, and its comments overflow with baffled enchantment. “Understood nothing but could not stop watching,” says one. “This is so bizarre but I will watch them in full,” says another. “Why do I keep watching these,” asks a third. Over the course of these streams, precisely nothing of note happens. Regardless, China watches. The revenue of tuanbo, meaning “group or team livestreams”, is expected to leap from 15 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) last year to 40 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) this year. And now, we watch too.

The Chongqing dancers aren’t a one-off: whenever tuanbo makes it over to Western TikTok, we are rapt. The format is finely tuned for hyperstimulation: bright colors, catchy music, constant interaction with a hidden viewership. Elsewhere, the livestreaming models are even more overt in their roles as meaningless revenue-generators. In one video, pavements are studded with ringlights, each illuminating a pretty Chinese woman who speaks into her phone, collecting donations from viewers or selling plastic products. In some streams, performers float surfboards on wave machines; viewers spike when they fall off. Some have line-ups of four or five girls in their teens or early twenties, each of whom can be made to perform the same dance again, and again, and again. Occasionally they pass out or cry from exhaustion, fake or otherwise; this in turn keeps viewers watching. Other videos stage high-stakes scenarios, such as nonsensical factory work under the scowling gaze of a hated boss. In many cases, the audience is mesmerized by the satisfying repetition. Often these “livestreams” are in fact recorded loops: viewers rarely notice, so unvarying is the format.

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The appeal is rarely that these streamers are especially sexy, or outrageous, or original — it is that they are absurd and perform on demand. The emptier the logic of the streams, the more engagement they drum up. We are accustomed to Western influencers behaving like miniature celebrities — the principles of authenticity, glamor and charisma are piped in directly from Hollywood — whereas Chinese idol culture is about cohesion. Tuanbo performers make themselves generic and perform robotically, often literally moving like automatons. There is no interest in intimacy or sincerity. Like our baby-voiced Yao Yao, they are stock characters. On the Western internet, the individual is the star; on the Chinese internet, success means operating as a highly efficient whole. And so the two forms of content reflect the philosophies of their alien worlds.

Still, it takes a lot of effort to look that flat. China’s streaming stars are working their asses off to come across as catchphrase-bleating idiots while carrying out meticulous and highly choreographed set-pieces. The finished product more closely resembles a call center or production line than a television show. In this, the streams mirror the country’s industrial and military prowess. There is often something borderline martial in the videos’ regimentation. No other country attracts foreign viewers with the spectacle of men marching in a city square. 

Since the Nineties the West has watched, enthralled and aghast, as China has churned out vast factories, corralled hyperefficient workforces and thrown together cities seemingly overnight. Online, a similar thing is happening to pop culture. If the Californian dream of the internet was about liberating creativity, creating a boundless Eden of artists and independent agents, tuanbo offers an alternative future: content that resembles manufacturing. The livestream host is a worker in a vast attention economy, laboring under the same prerogative for efficiency that transformed the country’s factories into the workshop of the world. The principles of Chinese social media are ruthless visions of the future: hyperrationalism and scale, mass production. We are glued to them as horrified Victorians would be glued to the vision of industrial textile mills. They show us how quickly we become cogs. 

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I’d wager that Chinese streaming culture has more influence on the West than any CCP messaging. The CCP does not control these streams, of course, nor are they propaganda in any normal sense of the word. And yet, indirectly, they are engines for Chinese soft power: overt diplomacy efforts are always boring and suspect, whereas new media forms quickly become part of Western culture without anybody caring. These spectacularly weird livestreams haunt and hypnotize Western viewers just like American AI slop of talking fruits, or quasi-sexual ASMR. The difference is that China’s productions have emerged from a far less permissive social-media culture in which censorship is pervasive and brutal, and major tech firms are expected to align with state priorities.

Aside from merely degrading the quality of pop culture — a lost cause anyway in the age of TikTok — what makes tuanbo so unsettling is that it breaks down our understanding of the role of the internet as an ocean of creators, free individuals operating without limits, replacing it with a homogenized bloc of content producers and consumers who are, by definition, unsubversive. China’s novel model of scaling and optimizing online videos may in the future outcompete the Western model of individual creativity. After all, this is the country that conquered industrialized manufacturing; culture, too, could one day be “made in China”. This, I’m sure, would suit Xi Jinping’s agenda just fine. 

Maybe one day, when Xi’s forces inevitably invade Taiwan, the generation of young people who would have turned out on the streets in protest will instead be preoccupied with their phones, watching a squadron of beauty-filtered men in stacked shoes. “When the bass gets bumpin’ up in the club…”

Some of these spectators give the players and their team manager some really bad advice. They cheered Team EU when they were battling Donald Trump over his trade tariffs. I will never forget the headline in The Economist the week after Trump imposed his tariffs in April last year. Under the tag “Trade Fight Club”, the headline read: “The EU’s response to Donald Trump’s tariffs seems to work.”

What actually happened is that the EU, wisely, chose not to fight. Ursula von der Leyen famously caved in when she signed a humiliating trade deal after making a pilgrimage to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland three months later. The occasion was cringeworthy from start to end, including the obligatory thumbs-up group photo with Trump. But the EU delegation had no choice.

Six months later, the European Parliament briefly contemplated an insurrection, but stopped when it peeked over the cliff. In January, after Trump threatened to invade Greenland, and when the US Supreme Court declared Trump’s tariffs to be illegal, Brussels suspended the ratification of the EU-US trade deal. But after Trump threatened the German car industry with even higher tariffs, the MEPs, too, caved. Last week, they voted it through.

Right now, the EU trying to play a similar game with China, and is getting similarly bad advice.

The Europeans are angry about how China plays. Sabine Weyand, the EU’s outgoing director general for trade, compared the Chinese strategy to putting a stinking fish on the negotiating table. She was referring to new Chinese threats, like export controls on rare earths, or a ban of the sale of semiconductors to the EU. The EU is dependent on both. Whenever the EU tries to impose some retaliatory tariffs on China, that stinking fish returns to the table.

The EU has a point here. China’s economic policies are the biggest source of global economic imbalance right now. China’s exports are booming, but China represses domestic consumption. You can see this in EU-China trade data over recent years. Chinese exports to the EU have been going up, and Chinese imports from the EU are actually falling. And this year, it has all got dramatically worse. From January to April, China’s trade surplus with the EU went up by 26% compared to the same period in 2025. What happened is that US tariffs led China to divert some of its exports from the US to Europe.

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China’s currency, the yuan, does not float freely like the dollar, the euro or the pound. China keeps it steady against the dollar. When the dollar weakened against the euro after Trump came to office, so did the yuan. That means Chinese products are even cheaper than they were before. And European goods are even more expensive.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s often-undiplomatic chief diplomat, likened Europe’s situation with China to that of a patient battling cancer. “If you have a very difficult disease, if you have a cancer, you have two choices. Either increase the morphine or you start chemotherapy.”

Europeans should be careful not to be too sanctimonious. This is essentially a barfight between two mercantilists. The EU has been playing the same game. During the euro crises of the last decade, the EU, too, devalued its currency and started to run large trade surpluses against the rest of the world. The EU’s lament has a certain “I stole it first” quality.

Right now, China is winning this trade war, just as Trump won his own trade war against the EU. The reason is the same in both cases. The EU is too dependent on both of them — on the US for defense, and on China for critical imports. The EU is not in a position to retaliate. This is not due to a lack of policy instruments. Some have never been used, like the “Anti-Coercion Instrument”, which would give the EU discretionary powers to retaliate against China without bureaucratic obstacles.

The reason the EU cannot do this is not just a matter of political division, or weakness, but because of economic dependencies. We caught a glimpse last week, when the EU did the very opposite of what its cheerleaders demanded. Rather than imposing new tariffs on China, it lifted them. As Bloomberg reported, the EU had previously imposed sanctions against Yangzhou Yangjie Electronic Technology, a semiconductor company, but decided to lift them after German car makers warned about supply chain chaos.

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This pattern keeps repeating itself. The Europeans really wanted to stick it to Trump. And to the Chinese too. But they could not do it, because the European car industry employs a reported 13.2 million people in the EU, according to data collected in 2022.

The seeds of this dependence were sown in the 2000s and 2010s. The European car industry, aiming to optimize its supply chains, committed the critical error of making itself reliant on China. As so often, Europe chose short-term gain over long-term resilience.

The first signs of stress became apparent during the pandemic, when the German car industry suffered an acute shortage of semiconductors from China. At the time, everybody was talking about supply chain diversification, but nothing much has happened. After the pandemic, industry returned to business as usual.

China has several other strangleholds in this sector. Car batteries are one example. This is a technology in which China is years ahead of the Europeans. China has an almost total monopoly for rare earth magnets, which are critical ingredients for all electric engines. Your windshield wipers would not work without them, nor would your F-35 fighter plane. Solar panels are another market that China has cornered.

The way many people think about globalization is antiquated. We no longer live in a world of factories that build goods from scratch, and from local products. Rather, modern trading relationships are a complex network. European-made cars are full of Chinese components. The bilateral trade balance that everybody gets so upset about does not tell you what you need to know. They do not capture these network effects and all their inter-dependencies. The important question is not how much China sells us, but how many Chinese imports are used in our exports to the rest of the world, and whether we have alternative suppliers. Measuring network effects is a technically complex task, as electrical engineers know only too well. The global economy is no less complicated than an electric network, and yet we are measuring it with the equivalent of an abacus.

Even Trump had to compromise over his tariffs against China, for the US was dependent on China for rare earths. Thanks to outsourcing, the US has a much smaller share of industry in its the economy than the EU does. Its industry is also less dependent on China for inputs, but its defense industries need rare earth products from the People’s Republic. The dependency goes both ways. China, too, is dependent on Western markets, of which the US and the EU are the largest.

The EU differs from the US only in that its inter-connection with other economies is stronger, and the cohesiveness among EU countries is weaker. You can have as many international trade economists, think-tankers, and journalists supporting Team EU as you wish. If Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni turn up to a key summit and say no to tariffs, the game is over before it even started.  This is not a matter of political will, but one of economic reality; Merz or Meloni have no other choice.

Instead of hyperventilating about China or Trump, then, the EU would be better off solving its underlying problems of supply-chain dependence. Japan managed to reduce its dependence on China for rare earth, after Beijing imposed an export ban following a 2010 dispute over islands in the East China Sea. Instead of pondering yet another discriminatory trade instrument the EU will never use, why not chart out a binding 10-year plan to reduce supply dependencies?

The EU thought about this too, and came up with the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2024. In a report published last month, the European Court of Auditors said the regulation is well intended, but the implementation is lacking. Its devastating verdict was: “The targets established in the Act set the course for member states and for industry, but are non-binding, only cover strategic raw materials and lack justification.”

My advice would be to solve the problem, adopt strategic patience and ignore the hyperventilating fans. The football equivalent of a trade war for which you haven’t prepared is an offside trap gone wrong: all the players push forward, except for one who has second thoughts and suddenly stops.

Some people like to think that in football, the best team wins. We all know this not to be true. The winning team, rather, is the one that keeps their nerve under pressure.

To Taiwan’s leaders, that sounds ominous. Did Trump just receive a thorough schooling in Xi’s view of his near neighbor, making it less likely that Trump might — in his own words — “travel 9,500 miles to fight a war”?

At stake is not just whether this US administration, or a future one fashioned in its image, would defend Taiwan if attacked; Trump is also currently mulling the approval of $14 billion worth of weapons sales to East Asia’s most embattled island. 

The uncertain politics of weapons supplies renders all the more important a controversial decision made in Japan last month. It is moving to abolish long-standing restrictions that limit military equipment transfers to five nonlethal categories: rescue, transport, warning, surveillance and mine-sweeping.

In future, countries with which Japan has a defense equipment and technology transfer agreement — a roster of 17 nations that includes the US, UK and Australia (but not Taiwan) — will be able to avail themselves of Japanese-made missiles, rockets, drones, jets, frigates and eventually electromagnetic railguns and laser weapons, both currently in development. Lasers, of the type tested in recent weeks aboard the experimental vessel Asuka, are seen as the holy grail of cost-efficient defense against swarms of cheap drones.  

Japan’s move has been widely described as historic. The country has been a beacon to pacifists for more than 80 years. Atomic devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 forced the world to face the possibility that any future war might be humanity’s last. Leaders and citizens in those two cities have, as a consequence, long embraced a role as the moral conscience of anti-nuclear activism. Japan is celebrated as an example of a society that flourished after renouncing war — which it did at the behest of the United States, author of Japan’s postwar constitution during a transformative seven-year Allied occupation.   

Yet advocates of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s more assertive security stance argue that Japan’s postwar comeback had less to do with pacifism and more to do with the country’s strategic value to the United States during the Cold War. Japan allowed US bases and forces on its soil, turning the archipelago into a giant aircraft carrier. In return, the US allowed Japan to shelter under its nuclear umbrella while devoting its industrial expertise to cars and consumer electronics rather than costly defense. 

Increasing numbers of Japanese now accept that those days are over. The new world of the 2020s is all about countries fending for themselves, as America becomes a less stable global guarantor, and international institutions like Nato, the EU and especially the UN struggle to maintain relevance. With China pressing its regional interests, and North Korea refining its nuclear weapons technology, Japan must do more than simply cross its fingers that if push came to shove a future American president would invest potentially scarce political capital in protecting its old Asian ally — especially if they had recently been treated to a late-night history lesson by a charming Chinese president.     

Takaichi has made clear the importance of self-sufficiency in areas like energy, semi-conductors and rare earths. She clearly takes the same view when it comes to self-defense. She is subjecting Japan’s key national security documents to a fast-tracked review and is now seeking to grow her country’s defense sector by expanding its client list beyond Japan’s own Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Ever-greater proportions of Japan’s GDP are being ear-marked for the country’s own defenses. And within weeks, the Prime Minister will receive recommendations on reviewing those key national security documents — including potential revisions to her country’s three non-nuclear principles: never to produce or possess nuclear weapons, or allow them to transit Japanese territory. 

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Developing Japan’s defense sector is a long-term project. Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric have already announced that they will be hiring new people. But such is the gradual pace at which capacity is built, products developed and sales agreed, that Takaichi herself may well not be in office by the time her latest policy change begins to bear fruit.   

Still, the potential market for Japanese weapons is vast. America’s own stocks are perilously low after wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and Asian neighbors including the Philippines appear keen to acquire Japanese hardware. The Philippines’ defense secretary has welcomed Takaichi’s move, and a sale is in the offing of three pre-loved Abukuma-class destroyer escorts, which are soon to leave active service in Japan. 

Further afield, Japan may be able to steal business from the US arms industry, amid growing complaints  about high costs and late deliveries. Added to this is Japan’s perceived ability to make big ideas work where America has given up. The railgun is a prime example. The US spent half a billion dollars over several decades before setting the project aside in 2021. Japan has a working prototype.

Problems loom. China has once again raised the specter of Japanese “remilitarisation”. For now, Takaichi may be able to shrug this off as hypocrisy: China is building up its own military at a far quicker rate, while rising to become the world’s fifth-largest arms exporter — to countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. 

And yet consider how Japan’s latest move looks if you’re sitting in Beijing. Japan has long been building links with countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia, in an attempt to counter Chinese economic and military power. If you then start to see hi-tech Japanese weapons arriving at military bases in these countries, you might conclude that a line is being crossed from friendly ties into coalition-building.

Then there is the question of the past. Memories remain vivid in East and Southeast Asia of the swaggering entitlement and resulting cruelties — murder, rape, starvation — that characterized a militarily-dominant Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Part of the problem is Japan’s perceived lack of contrition, thanks to the absence of political and public stock-taking comparable to that seen in postwar Germany. The question asked by those in Asia who genuinely worry about remilitarisation is whether, in 1945, Japan entered a period of deep change or was simply deprived by the Allies of the ability to behave as it previously had. For some, this is about a putative Japanese psyche, which blends civility with a propensity towards unrestrained violence. It is an old notion, dating back in the Western imagination to Catholic missionaries’ shock at the ease with which lives were taken by warriors during Japan’s 16th-century civil war. 

We ought to resist such arguments, which in their modern form are rooted in wartime Allied propaganda. The Imperial Japanese Army did not start out as an evil organization, a mere vehicle for Japanese bloodlust. It degenerated, under specific historical conditions in the Thirties and Forties, into an institution defined by brutality, poor discipline and a racist disregard for the value of non-Japanese life. 

Those concerned about Takaichi’s latest move ought to worry less about unreconstructed samurai toting laser weapons and take an interest instead in how it was that Japanese civil society eroded. One of the most important forces launching Japan down the road to true militarism back then was a perceived threat from abroad — the US, China, the Soviet Union — combined with the dominance of the country’s politics by industrialists, military men, an unaccountable police force and a partially corrupt judiciary. Critical newspaper coverage was met with bullying, fines, imprisonment and eventually the shutting down of publications. Radio remained under strict government control. Parliamentarians, already given precious little real power under Japan’s constitution, were progressively silenced. Bit by bit, and under the rhetorical cover of doing what had to be done to save their country, a ruling clique squeezed the life out of Japan’s fledgling democracy.

Now look at how Prime Minister Takaichi has instituted her new policy on lethal weapons. It was not in her manifesto; nor was it put before parliament. Instead it was decided at cabinet level — albeit flagged back in 2025 as something Takaichi wanted to do. The question for the next few years is probably not going to be whether Japan ought to build up its military-industrial base and give its armed forces greater legal leeway. It will likely do both — the strategic climate, sadly, seems to require it. The question is whether Japan’s democracy, and the civil society on which it rests, remain healthy enough to manage these changes in a way that people, both in Japan and around Asia, can trust.   

In 2013, when Takaichi’s mentor Shinzō Abe was seeking to develop his policy of “proactive pacifism”, he got a State Secrecy Law through parliament. Now a government can, with no external or judicial checks, deem anything it likes to be a secret — thereby preventing its disclosure. Meanwhile, the people who collect and weigh the nation’s secrets are subject to little oversight.

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What does Sanae Takaichi want?

By Chris Harding

This matters because Takaichi’s far-reaching reassessment of Japan’s national security includes the creation of a new national intelligence bureau, to replace Japan’s existing and fragmented system. She also plans to launch what some are calling a “Japanese CIA”: a foreign intelligence service and training school. Critics charge that these organizations, together with new cybersecurity initiatives, are developing faster than the sorts of checks and balances needed to uphold constitutional rights including the right to privacy. Add to this mix the building of a lucrative defense industry heavily reliant on export contracts, and you risk a return to foreign policy being shaped by cliques working in murky semi-darkness. 

Back in the Sixties, some of the staunchest defenders of constitutional freedoms were communists, socialists and university students. Mass protests in 1959-60 against renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the US became serious enough that Japan’s democracy was briefly threatened: there was violence inside and outside parliament, and a decision was nearly taken to cross the Rubicon and call in the Self-Defense Forces to put down the protests.

A protest tradition has remained alive and well in Japan ever since: seen in student protests during the late Sixties; a struggle over government attempts to seize farmland to build Narita Airport; opposition to the presence of American forces in Okinawa; and anger, in the aftermath of the triple disasters of 2011, at the mismanagement of Japan’s nuclear power infrastructure.  

Takaichi has faced protests of her own in recent weeks, including over the prospect of Japan sending military equipment to the Gulf. Developing more robust forms of self-defense and even deterrence is one thing: people in Japan are not naïve about the threat posed by China and North Korea, and their warm relations with Taiwan continue to be a thorny issue in Sino-Japanese diplomacy. But setting out to make money from the prosecution of wars around the world is a very different proposition. Becoming a “merchant of death” far more obviously offends against the history and morality of postwar Japanese pacifism.

It may also be bad for businesses, in particular those whose profits depend on Japan’s global reputation as a peaceful and civilized place — from tech and games companies to the country’s burgeoning tourist industry. They may become part of a new post-pacifist coalition, which accepts that those sunny postwar decades are not coming back but seeks to carry their best peace-loving qualities into the future — not as rhetorical cover for something darker, but as meaningful “Japanese” values. 

Japan is already home to a large number of well-networked NGOs, which campaign on a range of civil society issues. These include holding the police and judicial system to account over the importance of their independence from politics together with the questionable methods used to secure Japan’s famously high conviction rate of over 99%. Nihon Hidankyō, an organization which campaigns for nuclear abolition, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024. 

The activities of these civil society groups, in shaping the thinking of the electorate while holding power meaningfully to account, will be essential over the years to come. If Japan’s role as a beacon of pacifism is indeed coming to an end, its new purpose could be almost as valuable: showing the world’s democracies how a country can rearm without losing its conscience.

Beijing has a clear theory of victory for the summit: it wants the international press to report that Trump is selling out Taiwan. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told American interlocutors directly that Taiwan is the “most important issue” in the US-China relationship. His goal for this summit, and for the next one in Washington later this year, will be to persuade Trump to move towards a broader accommodation on the Taiwan issue. But even if Trump refuses to budge, Xi wants to create a narrative that his US counterpart is giving way on Taiwan. If that narrative gains steam, even if it isn’t true, it could drive Taiwan to the negotiating table out of desperation.

Xi’s first request is reportedly tiny and inconsequential. He wants Trump to say that America “opposes” Taiwanese independence, not just that it “does not support” it — a line the US has taken since the Clinton administration. Practically, there is no difference between these two positions. The essence of the longstanding American position is that both Beijing and Taipei must be deterred from changing the status quo unilaterally. The United States has never had any interest in declaring support for Taiwan’s independence. But if Trump is seen as tweaking his communication of the One China Policy under duress — even slightly — Xi hopes to make it seem that more substantial concessions are coming down the road. 

Xi has his eye on Taiwan’s January 2028 presidential election, when he hopes that a candidate more interested in dialog with Beijing will come to power. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is hoping for a fourth consecutive term. Xi, though, is seeking to engineer a restoration of the Kuomintang (KMT), which agrees in principle (with its own interpretation) that Taiwan is part of “One China”. Xi can do business with the KMT. He will not negotiate with the DPP. His goal: erode Taiwanese voters’ faith in the United States, so that they turn away from the DPP. 

The broader point is that Xi’s main vector of coercion right now is political, not military. The West has long envisioned a Taiwan crisis as a 2027 amphibious invasion. This risk remains real, as China acquires new military capabilities. But an invasion would be challenging and fraught with danger, especially given the turmoil in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leadership. Xi would rather take Taiwan for free, if he can get it. 

In case Trump refuses to give Xi what he wants, China is preparing options short of war to assert control over Taiwan. The most concerning scenario is known as the “quarantine”, or indirect control option. This would not be a blockade. It would not seek to force Taiwan’s immediate surrender, or to stop the flow of goods in and out of the island. Instead, Xi would assert that, as a matter of law, People’s Republic of China (PRC) customs authorities should be able to control who and what comes and goes to “Taiwan province”. He could move towards this outcome incrementally, for instance by asking that airlines entering and leaving Taiwan submit passenger manifests for approval, or that cargo ships entering and leaving submit to spot inspections. The goal would be to undermine Taiwan’s economic autonomy while persuading private companies and the United States to accept this as a new normal. In time, if Taiwan still refused to negotiate, he could use these new tools to apply targeted economic pressure. If Taiwan capitulated, Xi would then gain effective control of the island’s semiconductor manufacturing base. The United States could in principle destroy those facilities, of course — but not without paying an enormous economic price itself. 

Trump’s public communications do not suggest that he understands why a quarantine would be dangerous. He is also preoccupied with other issues. He is negotiating against the backdrop of the Iran war. Thanks in part to quiet backing from Beijing, Iran has chosen to drag out negotiations rather than make a deal. Its chokepoint coercion play in the Strait of Hormuz is working: the US Navy was unable to prevent Iran’s closure of the Strait; the insurance market has not recovered; oil futures still carry a war premium; strategic petroleum reserves are running low. Trump needs a deal to reopen the Strait and stop the energy crisis from crushing the US economy. He may also think he needs Xi’s help to solve the Iran problem. 

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To be sure, Trump will go to Beijing strong in significant ways. The artificial intelligence boom continues, with US labs decisively in the lead. Beijing was surely in of awe many aspects of the US military campaign against Iran: the special forces operations, the impeccable air-to-air refueling campaign, the use of AI for intelligence collection and targeting. China’s leaders are keenly aware that the United States retains structural, qualitative advantages in the military domain that their country has not yet matched. They also recognize that the core of the American state, including many of Trump’s senior advisors, see the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the primary adversary. And they expect that US opposition to China’s rise is structural, and that Washington will adopt increasingly extreme tactics as China continues to rise. Xi does not want a confrontation with America now; if he did, he would not have invited Trump to Beijing in the first place. 

Xi does not seem to be in a rush. The National Party Congress is approaching next autumn, when he will need to reshuffle key leadership posts and secure a smooth transition to a fourth term. A stable relationship with the United States works for him, at least for now. But this may change in early 2028, when Taiwan holds its election. Then, if Xi senses weakness in Washington, he may feel empowered to push — with a quarantine, if necessary. 

It is not too late for Trump to salvage the summit. Xi is deterrable, and a well-planned summit could signal that the United States is resolved and prepared to resist him without provoking him. But this will require exceptional discipline from the American president. The quarantine is preventable, but it cannot be deterred by military hardware alone, nor by speeches about democracy. The United States must show that it has an integrated counter-strategy that combines military readiness, economic leverage, and allied coordination. 

As Thomas Kuhn reminds us, paradigm shifts are a funny thing. The transition from one to the next is a topsy-turvy affair. Often, it’s unclear for decades or even centuries what the new paradigm will look like. It’ll likely take years for that reality to fully set in for Western allies. But when the German government starts requiring all men under 45 to notify authorities for even three-month stays abroad — in case they’re needed for emergency military service — something big is afoot. You could say the same about how the British government had to release statements saying it wouldn’t let the US — its colonial kin and closest ally — use its bases for anything other than “defensive” bombings.

These are not isolated incidents, but clear indicators that America’s allies are beginning to hedge against it. Regardless of whether President Trump fully backs down from the ledge, or ultimately makes good on his threats to unleash “hell” upon the Islamic Republic of Iran, confidence in US legitimacy cannot recover when the leader of the supposed “free world” enters into yet another war of choice, then openly threatens that “a civilization will die tonight.” All of which occurred less than 24 hours after the country’s democratically elected chief executive released an expletive-filled social media post mocking the Islamic faith and childishly toying with the idea of a holy war between Christianity and Islam. What could go wrong? 

It’s true that the sensitivity movement is full of word-mongering ninnies, but words, especially from world leaders, still matter. Not since 1945 has a Western head of state been so reckless in his public rhetoric regarding matters of war — nor so rash in his threats of mass death of civilian populations. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of Trump’s outlandish behavior, America and Israel’s war of choice has become a peace of necessity for others, not only for the US’s Gulf allies but the entire global economy. 

Others now have no choice but to fix what Washington has broken. After all, the world remains totally dependent on a steady stream of not just fossil fuels, but also the pretense that its North American hegemon deserves to lead for one simple reason: it, more than any other global empire before, has pursued the interests of “peace,” “democracy,” and “self-government.” So much for that fable.

One great irony of Trump and his MAGA movement is that they worship institutions and US-centric economic dynamics they don’t remotely understand — and therefore smash at will. MAGA worships American supremacy but operates with only a comic-book understanding of its origin and function. They know the American myths, but from the IMF to the World Bank to the dollar-backed power of Wall Street, they seem utterly indifferent to how their country projects strength in the real world. 

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War is being hypernormalised

By B. Duncan Moench

More than that, they don’t seem to grasp that American hard power has always been shadowed by soft. It’s certainly true that the US has always pursued its self-interest above all else. But it also put forward things like the Marshall Plan, greatly aiding the recovery of Western allies in their time of need. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt famously barred bankers from participating in the Bretton Woods negotiations, establishing the financial system that not only guaranteed American financial hegemony — but also secured middle-class prosperity not just in America but across much of the Western world. Fast forward and the NGOs that Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel all loathe actually play a key role in securing American interests abroad. Say what you like about the Clintons, Obamas, and Blairs of the world. At least they understood how the global liberal order worked and were responsible enough stewards not to risk its annihilation merely to protect their egos. 

If, however, you’re a billionaire and all your friends are billionaires who see the world as a plaything, full of pawns who owe you merely for gracing the world with your one-of-a-kind contribution, then what’s come before doesn’t seem like anything more than a workaround, and which a dozen Stanford grads can fix in a few days. That system, though, was not built on raw force alone, but on the classical liberal values of the balance of power, restraint, and civic legitimacy. These are the very elements Trump and his cronies now set aside with ease. 

For this crowd, though, society, let alone the carefully constructed global economic order, are things you can tweak in your spare time, between sending rockets to Mars or playing 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago. That position, it hardly needs saying, is anything but conservative. As Joseph De Maistre argued, a nation is something “no more of its own creation than a language.” This collectivist vision of nationalism couldn’t be further from Trump’s. The President’s view is that of a man who believes “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Or else there’s Pete Hegseth, Trump’s “Secretary of War”, who openly boasts that the US is ready to “negotiate with bombs” until Iran makes the deal the White House wants. 

There’s no coming back from this; there will be no Obama redux. We’re living through the greatest military predicament and civilizational-level turning point since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis. A zero hour that, no matter what, will not end well for either the United States or the liberal economic order as a whole. I don’t just mean reputationally. Grown fat off the US providing their military security for some eight decades, Europe and the EU are not remotely ready to take up the mantle of Western leadership in America’s stead. They’re still coming to grips with the reality that their entire social democratic structure has been funded in large part by the US providing free military protection. What comes next will be messy, and no one in the West is ready to manage it.

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China will win the Iran War

By Aaron Bastani

In tangible terms, it turns out that pretending to care is indeed a form of caring. One can recognize that “international law” is indeed mostly fiction. But it — like the country’s immaculately conceived constitution — is a mythological fiction that allows the liberal order to exist. Trump, though, does not understand this kind of nuance, seeing all constraints on American supremacy as unnecessary liberal niceties. In truth, though, these aren’t merely the pretenses of liberalism, or even progressive neoliberalism, but rather the entire pretense of the American liberal-democratic order — including the “conservative” ancien régime of William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt that Trump apes for cheap plaudits from his MAGA devotees.

That brings me to another great irony. Trump was elected to stop China — and yet he has delivered the perfect situation for Beijing to prove the superiority of its governance model. As opposed to its so-called liberal, so-called free market opponents, poised to crumble in a matter of weeks without a constant supply of cheap oil, China’s mercantilist synthesis has proved incredibly robust. Despite pundits proclaiming for 20 years that China will soon turn the corner and their model will collapse, the complete opposite has proven true. 

China appears to be the only major world power equipped to handle an economic storm like the one caused by Iran capturing the Strait of Hormuz. This war also illustrates that the CCP, not the US, is at the forefront of military strength, which it correctly anticipated would be defined not by $15-million interceptor missiles and $14-billion aircraft carriers, but by $20,000 drones, which China just so happens to specialize in.

As we transition to the Chinese century, Beijing also will not have to live with the shame of having a crazed chief executive bomb civilian electrical plants, water facilities, bridges, and train tracks. As Michael Lind recently argued in these pages, both long and medium term, this war only plays directly into China’s hands. Trump, though, has done it — he’s killed the neoliberal globalism just as his base wanted. The collateral damage is only beginning to reveal itself. 

At the global level, Cold War II is a struggle between the incumbent superpower, the United States, and a rising challenger, China. And unless Washington adopts a less ambitious global strategy, the United States is doomed to lose Cold War II.

The reason is simple: America’s strategic objective — perpetual US military hegemony in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East — is far too costly to achieve. In contrast, the goal shared by China and Russia — a multipolar world of great-power spheres of influence — is not only possible but probably inevitable. The Chinese dragon and the Russian bear can patiently wait until Uncle Sam exhausts himself from overextension and then goes home, just as he did when he abandoned Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And the major beneficiary of America’s military overextension is likely to be its greatest rival — Beijing.

The sharpest figures in the Trump orbit appreciate this, and see the linkages between the various flashpoints. But the administration as a whole can’t resist the strategic hubris and haphazardness that have characterized many post-Cold War American governments — indeed, with the new Iran War, the Trumpians have displayed this tendency on overdrive. 

At last month’s Munich Security Conference, for example, America’s envoy to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, observed: “China could call Vladimir Putin and end this [Ukraine] war tomorrow and cut off his dual-purpose technologies that they’re selling.… You know, this war is being completely enabled by China.”

Whitaker was right. The People’s Republic has allowed both Russia and Iran to evade American and European sanctions by buying their oil, with the help of “shadow fleets” and transactions denominated in China’s currency, the yuan. In addition, Beijing has supplied the Islamic Republic with components used in its devastatingly effective (and remarkably cheap) Shahed drones. The Chinese are reportedly negotiating to provide Iran with antiship missiles and have likewise transferred dual-use technology, which can be used for both military and civilian purposes, to the Russian defense industry.

More: the Chinese regime has helped Iran to use its Beijing’s encrypted Beidou-3 global satellite navigation system and provided the Islamic Republic with stealth radar systems. For its part, the Kremlin has supplied Tehran with satellite intelligence showing the location of US naval ships and aircraft in the Persian Gulf. The backscratching is mutual. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of drones used in Ukraine.

In one telling, America’s new war against Iran helps advance its position in Cold War II, by taking out the weakest of the three pillars that uphold the adversary’s Eurasian power. Yet this is a comforting after-the-fact narrative, typically offered by academics and magazine writers. They do it to console Western audiences dismayed by the war’s aimlessness and potentially devastating consequences for American prestige as the Iranian mullahs appear to hold on and even squeeze Washington. 

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In reality, China and its ally Russia benefit from Trump’s foolish diversion of American military resources to the Persian Gulf. To sustain the operation, the United States has stripped South Korea of missile defense systems and dispatched them to the Middle East and has diverted two guided-missile destroyers based in Japan to the Persian Gulf area. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a war with China over Taiwan, the United States would run out of missiles in less than a week.

The Iran war benefits the Sino-Russian entente in other ways. It has divided NATO, with President Trump denouncing America’s European allies as “cowards” and then calling on them for aid. Having stumbled into a trap, Trump has humiliated himself and the nation by begging Beijing to help in the Persian Gulf. On March 14, in a Truth Social post, Trump desperately called on China along with other countries to send “War Ships, along with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe.” China declined the invitation. 

What incentive does Beijing have to rein in its proxies Russia or Iran? While watching Uncle Sam struggle in the steel traps of Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, China’s leaders can focus on capturing one global industry after another and increasing the dependence on China of other nations — including America’s own allies.

Long ago, Chinese leaders viewed American over-extension abroad as a means for diminishing US power. In a 1958 speech, Mao Zedong told his fellow Chinese Communists that US military bases in Taiwan, Lebanon, and elsewhere were “nooses”: “The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses around their own necks…. The longer the US aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.” Then as now, China benefits when the United States wastes its resources on wars in peripheral countries. 

The military realm is not the only area in which Washington is losing Cold War II. Whether in the form of hot wars or cold wars, modern great power struggles ultimately are wars of economic attrition. As in the two World Wars and the first Cold War, the side with superior industrial resources tends to prevail. It matters, therefore, that in the words of economist Richard Baldwin, China is “the world’s sole manufacturing superpower.”

In 2025, China manufactured more goods than the next eight largest manufacturing countries combined. In addition to being the workshop of the world, the Middle Kingdom dominates global trade. Today, only 30% of the world’s countries trade more with the United States than with China, down from 80% at the turn of the millennium.

During the first Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for global influence in part by competing to finance projects like Egypt’s Aswan Dam. In today’s Cold War II, China has far outpaced America as the world’s leading source of development finance, providing $68 billion to developing countries, compared to only $39 billion from the United States in the first two decades of the 21st century. Indeed, the United States spent a paltry $76 billion on infrastructure in other countries over the past decade or so, compared to China’s $679 billion.

With the help of unpatriotic American corporations and investors, moreover, China has made the US defense and civilian economies dependent on Chinese factories. In 2023, China was the largest supplier in critical US military supply chains — ahead of Britain, India, and Japan.

China controls 80% percent of global graphite, necessary for batteries, 62% of fluorspar used in nuclear fuel and semiconductors, and a majority of the world’s magnesium, necessary for aircraft and missiles. Raytheon, a major US defense contractor, has declared that it is so dependent on Chinese suppliers that decoupling its supply chains from China is impossible. And while the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to boost US rare earth mining and processing, the American military may be dependent on China for at least a decade.

But surely America is far ahead in tech research? Wrong. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China leads global research in 90 critical technologies, the United States in 74. In quantum computing, a frontier technology, China is ahead of the United States, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

What, then, is America’s comparative advantage over China as a great power? China has surpassed us in manufacturing, but we Americans lead the world in militarism — in lashing out here and there without a sense of deep strategic purpose or an appreciation for the problems associated with scarcity.

Since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, the United States has bombed governments or nonstate actors in seven countries — Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. The Trump administration has illegally engaged in the extrajudicial murder of around 100 alleged drug smugglers on the high seas in the Caribbean and Pacific, even though drug smuggling doesn’t carry the death penalty in the United States. Likewise, the United States has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and allowed Israel to assassinate most of Iran’s leadership in a Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack, before unleashing an American military campaign of massive bombing of Iran with no evident plan to counter Iran’s violent response — or even a cogent definition of victory.

In the same period, China, while quietly enabling its Russian and Iranian proxies, hasn’t bombed any countries or killed any foreign nationals. Indeed, while the United States for decades has been almost constantly killing suspected terrorists, bombing and invading multiple countries, and piling up foreign civilian corpses all over the world, China has grown rich and influential without firing a shot.

Since 1979, when it fought a brief war with Vietnam, China hasn’t fought any wars, although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India and has bullied other countries with shows of force in the South China Sea. By avoiding military quagmires and concentrating on internal development and strategic trade, China in the last three decades has become the dominant manufacturing power on earth. 

And here is the absurd result. Even though the United States gets less than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, American soldiers must die or be maimed for life and American taxpayers must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran, whose largest customer is China, from blocking oil shipments to China by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — all of whose largest trading partner is also China.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers must also spend money on European bases and fund the war in Ukraine to protect the European Union, which imports one and a half times as much from China as it does from the United States, from a hypothetical invasion by Russia, whose largest trading partner is… also China. In East Asia, Washington spends a fortune to defend Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all of which trade more with China than with America — from a hypothetical attack by China. Why China would want to attack its trading partners is never made clear.

In short, America’s global grand strategy consists of using the US military, reliant for weapons on Chinese supply chains, to protect China’s trading partners from China or other Chinese trading partners, at the expense of American soldiers and American taxpayers.

Cold War II is also fought in the arena of legitimacy or “soft power.” Does the claim that America fights other people’s wars for them so they don’t have to defend themselves result in gratitude to the United States? According to a poll this month, citizens of Canada, Britain, Germany, and France now regard China as a more reliable partner than America. In the United States itself, according to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, public opinion has shifted under Trump, away from confrontation with China to “friendly cooperation and engagement with China,” rising to 53% of respondents last year, up from 40% percent in 2024.

Why wouldn’t people in nations all over the world have a more favorable view of a repressive but unwarlike state like China, which makes first-rate consumer products and offers trade and investment opportunities, than they would of the United States, which, under any president of any party at any given time tends to be killing people in multiple foreign countries while boasting that it is the greatest country ever?

While the People’s Republic has risen to global industrial and commercial supremacy by following former Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s slogan “peaceful rise,” the arc of the United States since the 1990s can be described as “violent decline.” Post-Cold War America has repeated the strategic mistake of leaders in London in the three decades after 1945, when Britain imagined that it was still a major power because its troops were still machine-gunning natives in places like Kenya and Oman, even as it lost its manufacturing leadership to Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; Uncle Sam is the new Colonel Blimp. 

America’s bungling militarists in both parties can’t even tell us what they imagine a US “victory” in Cold War II would look like. In the world wars, the strategic goal was stripping Germany and Japan of their foreign empires, without which they would be nothing more than medium powers. In the Cold War, the similar goal of the United States and its allies was achieved when the Soviet Union gave up its essential Eastern European empire, even before the USSR disintegrated along lines of nationality, leaving the Russian core smaller than it has been in centuries.

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But China’s power, like that of the United States, is based on its own internal population, workforce, and markets, augmented by peaceful, civilian trade and investment. Outside of Tibet and Xinjiang, China is an empire of commerce, not conquest. Absent total collapse, China is likely to be a superpower, and Russia a regional great power, for centuries or millennia, under regimes of any kind. If it survives the current American-Israeli onslaught, which is likely, Iran will likewise endure as a civilizational state, albeit as a client of Moscow and Beijing rather than a fully coequal partner in their Eurasian bloc.

China, especially, is well-poised to inherit the outcome of Cold War II. If East Asia is defined as China, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, then China accounts for around 90% of the East Asian population. If Germany had made up 90% of the population of Europe in 1914 or 1939, it would have been the European hegemon without any need to augment its strength by conquering its neighbors. 

Even if China and Russia were to adopt multiparty liberal democracy tomorrow, national pride, expressed through free and fair elections, would prevent their new democratic leaders from accepting humiliating, permanent subordination to US military power in their own neighborhoods. The same would be true of a proud and patriotic Iranian democracy freed of the mullahs. Somehow, the Trump administration, which promotes nationalism and sovereigntism for the United States, hasn’t figured out that other nations may feel strongly about their sovereignty, too, and be willing to die for it.

Sadly, we know how today’s Cold War II will end: in the eventual abandonment by the United States of its attempt at permanent US global hegemony, and the adoption by default of the Chinese and Russian alternative, a multipolar world characterized by spheres of military influence and trade blocs based on a handful of regional great powers. One need not have any sympathy for Putin’s gangster regime or China’s Communist dictatorship to recognize that their vision of world order is likely to be achieved, while the delusory post-1989 goal of American global hegemony can never be realized.

A multipolar world order is inevitable, because American voters since the fall of the Berlin Wall have never been willing to pay the costs, in American taxes and American blood, that would be required for the United States to be “the sole superpower” in every region on Earth for generations or centuries to come. American voters thought they were getting less unnecessary foreign military intervention in 2008 with Obama, who then launched new wars of regime change in Libya and Syria, and in 2016 with Trump, who has now begun an unnecessary and disastrous third Persian Gulf War. But sooner or later, the war-weariness of the American people will bring an end to the fantasy of a global Pax Americana built on drones and bombs. Perhaps we Americans in the 2030s or 2040s will finally get the kind of patriotic statesman we did not get after the Cold War — an American de Gaulle, who will liquidate too-costly overseas commitments and focus, at long last, on nation-building at home.

Given the breadth and depth of this relationship, it is astonishing that India not only did not express disapproval of the bombing of Iran. For a considerable time, it refused even to acknowledge it. Nor did it make a sound when the head of a friendly sovereign state was murdered along with his family. India remained silent, too, when a children’s hospital named after Mahatma Gandhi, and located on a street bearing his name, was blown up. This puzzling muteness wasn’t just a departure from India’s long tradition of solidarity with the developing world. It was also an abdication of the de facto leadership of a large segment of the non-Western world thrust upon India by its presidency of BRICS. Every other founding member — Russia, China and Brazil — quickly denounced the war. India alone seemed to be condoning it with silence.

Then, on 4 March, an unarmed Iranian frigate sailing home after participating in a maritime exercise convened by the President of India was torpedoed by the Americans in the Indian Ocean — an area to which India claims to provide security. Yet India couldn’t muster the nerve to say a word in response. It was tiny Sri Lanka, one-50th India’s size, that activated its navy to rescue the Iranian vessel’s stricken sailors. By then, more than 80 had been killed. Colombo withstood intense American pressure to preserve and repatriate the bodies of the dead. Veterans of the Indian Navy were appalled.

When Narendra Modi — who had concluded a visit to Israel hours before the first bombs were dropped on Iran — did come around to speaking about the sanctity of sovereignty, it was in relation to the Gulf monarchies. About Iran’s trampled sovereignty, he again said nothing. The upshot was a public outcry in India at what looked like a squalid surrender to the US and Israel by a country with a long record of standing up for its interests and professed beliefs. Ordinary Indians flooded the Iranian embassy to sign the condolence book for Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Iranian mission was compelled to open a bank account to receive charitable donations from the public.

It is the sight of this outpouring of grief and comradeship that prompted Modi eventually to dispatch a senior bureaucrat to the Iranian embassy to record India’s condolences. But by then the Iranians had clearly had enough. While Tehran took great pains to display its gratitude to India and Indians, it refused to make any special concessions to Modi. When the Indian premier finally opened channels of communication with the Iranian leadership, Tehran allowed the passage of two Indian-flagged ships carrying LNG — a fraction of India’s daily needs. The message to Modi was clear: no privileges would be granted to India. New Delhi would have to negotiate the passage of every single vessel, and Iran would decide on a case-by-case basis. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, received public assurances of support from the Islamic Republic.

To liken Modi’s behavior to India’s refusal to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine is to overlook the fact that New Delhi formally recognized the gravity of that conflict. Modi even traveled to Ukraine, and issued a public warning to Putin about the perils of making this an “era of war”. His silence on Iran is singular, and there are two reasons for it.

The first is Modi himself.

His failure to oppose the war is self-serving. Over the past decade, Modi has erected the most formidable cult of personality in the democratic world. He is the only living leader with a stadium named for him; in 2021, India’s space agency catapulted a satellite carrying his photo into space; children in state schools are forced to celebrate his birthday; villages are obliged to endure his radio broadcasts.

India’s former vice president once introduced a resolution in parliament proclaiming Modi “god’s gift to India”. Another minister hailed the “Modi Era” as the consummation of a 450-year-old prophecy.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s digital warriors, meanwhile, have toiled for years circulating fake photos of Modi surrounded by world leaders seeking his counsel or watching his speeches. They have gulled voters with absurd lies, such as the one claiming Modi was adjudged the “best prime minister” on Earth by UNESCO. The government has burned billions of rupees on public jamborees wherever Modi has gone — from Wembley Stadium to Madison Square Garden. And virtually every major news organization in India has amplified the claim that Modi is Vishwaguru: teacher to the world. The falsehoods of his sycophants have had a crazed effect on Modi himself. Last year, he told a worshipful journalist that his birth was not a “biological” event. He was supposedly sent down by some celestial force.

Nothing would threaten Modi’s meticulously crafted self-image — the globally admired messiah dispatched by god to save India from its “anti-national” Anglophone elites — more than a glib putdown from Trump. A direct insult would make Modi, a strongman, the object of derision at home. Fearing this, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid his American counterpart over the past year. Last October, he even stayed away from the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, an otherwise important event, so as not to run into Trump there. Trump, not to put too fine a point on it, terrifies Modi.

This turn of events was unexpected. In Trump’s first term, Modi expended tremendous energy cultivating the American President. Modi called him “Doland, my friend”; hugged him ebulliently; and even held a rally with him, before adoring Indian-Americans, in which he effectively endorsed Trump’s re-election. There was nothing he would not do for his dear Doland. During Covid-19, Modi agreed to give away precious stocks of essential Indian medicine to the US after a phone call from Trump. He mounted an extravagant spectacle for Trump in his home state of Gujarat, and, ignoring deadly religious riots in Delhi, hosted a lavish banquet for his American guest in the Indian capital.

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, pro-Modi Indian televangelists erupted with triumphalism and schadenfreude. They declared that with Modi’s friend back in the White House, India’s adversaries were on notice and rhapsodized about the “electric” chemistry between the two men. Modi’s supporters were encouraged to believe that Trump would squeeze New Delhi’s enemies and accelerate India’s rise.

He did the opposite. Last year, when India went to war with Pakistan, Trump inserted himself into the conflict on the side of Pakistan — heralding himself as the peacemaker and demanding a Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishment. The ceasefire, according to New Delhi, happened because Pakistan, whose military runways were cratered by India’s bombing campaign, implored its rival to stop. India’s military establishment therefore found the suggestion that Trump brokered the truce offensive, but the country’s political leadership was too timid to push back.

Trump has since repeated dozens of times the claim that he forced India and Pakistan to halt the war by threatening them with tariffs. Impatient to secure a trade deal that would grant Washington access to the most protected areas of India’s economy, he then proceeded to pronounce India’s economy “dead” and slap a 50% tariff on its exports to the United States. The levy devastated parts of the Indian economy, but Modi still didn’t react. Since India is governed by a cult, the government’s priority is to protect the cult’s master. India’s interests are secondary. Now, Trump wants demonstrations of obedience, and Modi is willing to perform national seppuku to propitiate him.

The second, supposedly respectable, reason for Modi’s unwillingness to dissent from Washington, according to his apologists in the Indian establishment anyway, is that India needs the United States to counter China. Modi’s acolytes have convinced themselves that India, aided by Washington, is destined to replace China as America’s preferred manufacturing base. Trump’s emissaries have made it plain that they have no intention of helping India realize this goal. Still, New Delhi persists with the belief that the United States is its indispensable partner. In its equation, there is no future in which India can find a modus vivendi for peaceful coexistence with Beijing. Rather than engage in intense dialogue with its neighbor next door, India’s only option apparently is to become a frontline state in Washington’s effort to contain China’s rise.

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The problem with this argument is that the one party undeterred by this grand partnership is its intended target: China. Six years ago, the People’s Liberation Army seized Indian territory in Ladakh. Modi’s initial response was to go on television and claim that there were no Chinese incursions into Indian territory — even as dozens of Indian soldiers lay dead. Then, in a belated act of retaliation, Delhi introduced curbs on Chinese investments into India. But now, as a direct result of the economic difficulties into which Trump’s tariffs have plunged the country, those barriers have been removed and India is again courting Chinese investment.

In other words, then, India’s subservience to the US is as undignified as it is strategically incoherent. Its most concrete achievement is the decimation of India’s credibility in the non-Western world. Once regarded as a model of autonomy by Africa and Asia, it is now viewed as a poodle of Washington.

That, of course, still leaves unexplained India’s strange deference to Israel.

India’s embrace of Tel Aviv, which began before Modi appeared on the scene, has now become damaging. The wielders of power in New Delhi have concluded that Israel is a reliable exporter of technology and a viable destination for blue-collar workers for whom Modi has been unable to create jobs at home. Beyond this basic calculus, though, the relationship is wholly ideological. It is animated by the Hindu-nationalist reverence for a state that has battled and survived against Muslim nemeses. Israel was quick to intuit Modi’s great weakness — susceptibility to flattery — and exploit it skillfully. The Knesset recently awarded the Indian prime minister a wholly made-up prize.

Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters in India are united more than anything else by a profound hatred of Muslims, and they see in Israel a beau ideal. As the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz once put it, “Relations between Israel and India tend to grow stronger… when India experiences a rightward shift in anti-Muslim public opinion or in leadership”. As Israeli atrocities mounted in Gaza, the IDF’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders outside Israel were to be found in India. Last week, India imposed a roundabout ban on the screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab, an Oscar-nominated docudrama about a Palestinian girl murdered by the IDF that can lawfully be screened in Israel, on the grounds that it would “break up” India-Israel relations.

No decent Israeli can see this as a compliment. And no decent Indian can regard a friendship fueled by bigotry as a worthy cause. Beyond Hindu nationalists, Israel has no real champions in India. Two decades ago, virtually every side in India was willing more or less to work with Israel — some openly, others clandestinely. Today, however, Israel is so completely identified with the BJP that, when Modi is gone, the next government is bound to push it away.

Yet even before a political decoupling can occur, a more visceral detachment is being forced by the burdens imposed by the economic reality. The consequences of the Israeli-American war against Iran have reached India. As a poor, developing country, India is heavily dependent on imports for its most essential energy needs. More than 60% of the liquefied petroleum gas that powers Indian kitchens, as well as nearly 90% of its crude imports, come from the Persian Gulf. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is thus a body blow to India. Airlines have introduced a fuel surcharge, farmers face the prospect of fertilizer shortages just as demand rises ahead of the planting season, while restaurants everywhere are trimming their menus or closing altogether. All the while, the lengthy lines outside gas distribution terminals evoke Ceaușescu’s Romania; at least two men have died so far in the interminable wait to refill their canisters. An exodus from town to village, redolent of the horrifying mass flight in the bleakest days of the pandemic, has begun.

On Monday, more than two weeks after the war commenced, Modi made a statement in parliament in which he told Indians to brace for a Covid-like challenge. It’s a spine-chilling thought. The pandemic was the worst humanitarian catastrophe in republican India’s history: hospitals ran without oxygen, crematoriums ran out of wood to burn the dead, bodies floated in the Ganges. Modi used the horror to solicit tax-deductible donations for an opaque trust established, he said, for the purpose of aiding “the poorest of the poor”. With a brazenness that would have made Papa Doc Duvalier blush, he christened the fund “PM CARES”.

Nearly a billion dollars flowed into it in the first week. But where has all that money gone? That question is impossible to answer because PM CARES, structured as a private trust, cannot be reviewed by the state auditor. The flagrancy of the enterprise catches the breath: while his counterparts abroad panicked and pleaded with their people, Modi cashed out. That the Indian prime minister has again invoked that horror should therefore terrify us all. Certainly, he did not equip India for this crisis: the country has oil reserves for just 10 days. And the lesson of Covid is that the prime minister — who has a habit of disappearing from view in difficult times — will not help.

Given its sheer size and human scale, India may be on its way to becoming the largest single non-hostile casualty of the war in West Asia. For all its preening proclamations of its own rise and importance on the world stage, Modi’s “New India” proved too inconsequential to influence the warmakers — and too weak, craven, and self-woundingly stupid to be spared the war’s effects.

Commentators agree that most of the credit here is due to Takaichi herself, and to those around her, for making a wildly successful gamble on her personal popularity. “Sanamania” gripped the country during the short election campaign as people queued up to buy Takaichi’s trademark black leather handbag and her famous pink pen. While Japan’s humiliated opposition, the Centrist Reform Alliance, picks itself up off the floor, the country’s currency is riding high — suggesting at least modest market confidence in what Takaichi’s reign might bring.

The question now is what Takaichi may do with her mandate. The last time a comparably emphatic victory was won in a Japanese election, back in 2012, it marked the start of Shinzō Abe’s long and decisive premiership. Those hoping for strong leadership on Japan’s domestic challenges — its intertwining demographic and debt crises — and on regional tensions in the Asia-Pacific, will be looking to Takaichi to deliver. She is due in the United States in mid-March to meet Donald Trump; a few weeks later, President Trump is expected to make his highly-anticipated visit to China. A reset in East Asia is on the cards — but what does Takaichi want?

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The Prime Minister’s reputation is that of a China hawk. Last November, she angered China’s leadership by appearing to suggest that Japan’s Self-Defense Forces might be deployed in the event of an armed Chinese attempt on Taiwan. This violated a long-standing Japanese policy — mirroring that of the United States — of strategic ambiguity when it comes to what the country might do in the event of a “Taiwan contingency,” as the standard euphemism goes. The Chinese response was swift: a ban on Japanese seafood imports, the shutting down of Japanese films and music concerts in China and hints dropped about restricting supplies of rare-earth minerals to Japan.

Evidence from the campaign trail, however, suggests that Takaichi’s refusal to apologize for her remarks helped her cause with the Japanese electorate. Public opinion on China is hardening, while long-standing opposition to the Self-Defense Forces — particularly among older Japanese, committed to post-war pacifism — has softened in recent years. This will give Takaichi confidence in continuing the pivot, from defense to active deterrence, that she inherited from her predecessors.

Takaichi has already brought forward a target of spending 2% of Japan’s substantial GDP on defense, from 2027 to March this year. She is lavishing money on south-western Japan, near Taiwan, and on sites around the country’s coastline. Japan is also making heavy investments in aerial, surface and underwater drones, alongside long-range strike capabilities including American Tomahawk missiles. Japan’s comparatively small domestic defense industry is now being developed at pace. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries enjoyed a landmark win last year when it was awarded the contract to build Australia’s next-generation frigate.

For Takaichi, these moves promise a triple benefit. They signal to China that Japan is serious about its defense. They reassure an ever-transactional Donald Trump that, as requested, Japan is doing more towards its own security. And they build Japanese resilience for the day — should it ever arrive — when American interest in the Asia-Pacific region begins to recede.

Even if its interest fluctuates over the years to come, the US will always have to pay careful attention to what is happening across the Pacific. The downgrading of the threat from China in the latest US National Security Strategy no doubt came as a shock in Tokyo, but the basic underlying geographic and strategic realities haven’t changed. Japan remains the most important link in the “First Island Chain”, which runs from the Kuril Islands down to Borneo and constrains Chinese access to the Pacific. The US-Japanese aim remains, for now at least, the cultivation of a coalition that is capable of balancing out Chinese economic and seaborne military power in the Asia-Pacific and maintaining freedom of the seas.

Key to these efforts are the Quad (Japan, the US, India and Australia), ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and a series of bilateral relationships including Japan-Vietnam and Japan-Philippines. Japan has been remarkably successful in cultivating regional relationships in recent years, using Official Development Assistance (ODA) to fund the building of ports, railway systems and more in countries like Vietnam. Japan also has an ODA-funded agreement in place to fund the building of six patrol vessels for the Vietnam Coast Guard. In the Philippines, Japanese finance is contributing toward new roads, new bridges and the Metro Manila Subway Project.

A major question for what may become a historic premiership is what use Takaichi has for the past. Looming over Japan’s relationships with China, Korea and its Southeast Asian neighbors is the grim and ever-contested history of Japan’s 20th-century empire. A regular refrain in postwar Chinese critiques of Japanese defense spending, right up to the present day, has been that it risks awakening a dormant militarism. Those critiques hold less weight now that China is expanding its naval and nuclear capabilities at a rapid rate. But attempts by Japanese governments as recently as the Seventies and Eighties to woo Southeast Asian neighbors with economic assistance foundered on a perception of Japanese self-interest — even, in some quarters, neo-colonialism. Originating with postwar reparations, much of that aid and investment looked suspiciously like an attempt to find profitable outlets for Japanese export goods, helping it to rebuild its war-ravaged industries.

Japan has had a happier history with Southeast Asia in the decades since, but Takaichi’s personal convictions demand that she look backwards as well as forwards. She has declared her desire to revise Japan’s American-authored postwar constitution in order to clarify the role of the Self-Defense Forces. She is a member of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a powerful conservative lobby group dedicated to a traditionalist vision of Japan with the Emperor at its core. And she is now mulling a first visit as prime minister to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine — a lightning-rod issue in East Asia. The shrine’s original purpose was to honor Japan’s war dead from the Boshin War of 1868-9 but it also commemorates those who died in Japan’s mid-20th century wars. Any potential visit pits those in Japan who wish to honor their war dead with those in countries like China and Korea who focus on the fact that among the 2.4 million souls enshrined at Yasukuni are convicted war criminals from World War II.

Relitigating these controversial episodes and cultural consequences — which many in Nippon Kaigi equate with excessive Americanization following Japan’s defeat in 1945 — may well prove counterproductive. If Takaichi wants to revisit that period, she would be better off studying the intensifying perception in Japan, around a century ago, that it was becoming encircled by hostile powers: Soviets, Chinese nationalists, Europe’s Asian colonies and the United States. China may soon find itself in a similar position. It may feel it is surrounded by insufficiently friendly countries just at the point where an aging population and a slowing economy suggest that the window for reorganizing its neighborhood is beginning to close.

A careful reading of the past may also help Takaichi and her administration think through China’s likely long-term intentions. This is a topic on which analysts around the world are deeply divided. There are those, in the United States especially, who believe that Chinese reluctance to pronounce on the internal affairs of other countries is about current capabilities rather than political culture. Once its military is able to project power in the way that the United States can, and European nations once could, then we will begin to see a more interventionist China.

Another way of reading the past and present is that the benefits of territorial or maritime expansion are not what they once were. Power and prosperity in the mid-21st century rest more on economic and commercial leverage than boots on the ground. Taking direct responsibility for other countries’ affairs is both risky and costly, and Takaichi’s conclusion may be that China seeks prestige rather than empire. Rather than replace the US as global policeman, it may simply want to do away with that role, exchanging a postwar international culture of liberal cooperation under American auspices with one defined by national self-interest and multipolarity. But this may happen slowly. China will want to avoid the risk of upsetting its highly globalized economy and meanwhile allow the impression to set in that it is a natural rather than a managed transition.

Perhaps Japan could live with this. It could maintain credible self-defense while continuing an economic partnership with China that is currently valued at around $300 billion per year and involves deep integration of Chinese and Japanese manufacturing. It is worth remembering that for all the appearance of an unassailable position in China’s national life, the principal source of the Chinese Communist Party’s appeal is its ability to raise living standards and restore Chinese pride internationally. Takaichi’s own party dominated Japanese politics for nearly four decades on much the same basis, beginning in the mid-1950s. She knows only too well how quickly public support can drop away once people no longer see the expected returns. There is a limit to how far China and Japan’s political arrangements can usefully be compared. But the CCP’s leadership appreciates that when it comes to getting people to do what they want, even a very high-tech stick requires a little carrot alongside.

For now, then, it is in both Japan and China’s interests to continue their economic co-operation, even while Japan and its partners try to balance out Chinese attempts at gaining economic leverage in parts of Asia, Africa and South America via loans, investments and supply-chain dependency. Japan is already at the forefront, globally, of reducing reliance on China as a supplier of key components and raw materials including rare earths. That leadership role may expand under Takaichi.

There is one last way in which Takaichi might usefully look back in order to forge a path forward. It is not so much a clear-cut lesson as a question: at what point does a relationship between rival nations shift from prioritizing prosperity through economic co-operation to allowing strategic aims or fears to dictate their actions? And what, if anything, can Takaichi do to prevent that shift occurring when it comes to Taiwan? If hers ends up being a lengthy premiership, it is highly likely that the Taiwan question will be “resolved” on her watch.

For all the anger in China when Takaichi made her comments last November about the Self-Defense Forces becoming involved in a conflict over Taiwan, the chances of Japan remaining unaffected by a Chinese attempt on the island are slim. War games consistently emphasize the importance of Japan as a re-supply base for US forces responding to such an attempt and as a source of essential supplies for the Taiwanese population in the event of a Chinese maritime blockade.

There is a chance that China may yet engineer a peaceful takeover of Taiwan. The island’s domestic politics are divided and China is making ongoing efforts to normalize such an outcome both in Taiwan and internationally. This, however, would hardly bring tensions in the region to an end. Japan would face the very dangerous scenario of having the People’s Republic on its doorstep — visible, on a clear day, from the south-western Japanese island of Yonaguni.

This would be worrying enough for Japanese security. But the next question would be whether or not China’s strategic aims end there. From the Chinese point of view, taking Taiwan is a matter of bringing a renegade province to heel rather than expanding its borders. In time, however, that same logic could be used to make and perhaps enforce a claim over some or all of the Okinawan islands — of which Yonaguni is one.

At present, such claims appear periodically in Chinese media and academic writing, rather than in government pronouncements. Still, they are encouraged by China’s leadership at times of tension with Japan, including late last year in the wake of Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan. And for analysts who suggest paying more attention to the balance of military power than to political rhetoric — or indeed to what historians or legal scholars might argue about Okinawa — it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that soon after talk of a “Taiwan contingency” ends, talk of an “Okinawa contingency” might begin.

Even if China had no intention of pursuing a sovereignty claim on the Okinawan islands, the stoking of nationalist sentiment in China would be useful to the CCP while the effects on Japan could be profound: a drop in international investment and a constant sense of threat — after all, if China’s leaders proved willing to act on their Taiwan rhetoric, why wouldn’t they do so on Okinawan rhetoric too?

Takaichi’s political leanings mean that the past is often on her mind, as it was for her mentor Abe. As she sets about reviewing Japan’s National Security Strategy this year — while continuing to woo Donald Trump and perhaps thawing her relationship with Xi Jinping — we must hope for a creative and purposeful approach to Asia’s history. The wrongs and the suffering of the 1930s and 1940s are not to be forgotten. But the stakes are now too high for indulging in the weaponization of those wrongs and that suffering. Rather than refighting the last war, we must focus on preventing the next one.

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.

There are complications of course. Starmer has framed the visit as a careful balancing act, insisting there are “opportunities” for economic benefit, but that this “does not mean compromising on national security”. The third, unstated element in the equation is that any new arrangements with China must not offend Britain’s primary patron, the thin-skinned and capricious President of the United States. Donald Trump recently threatened Canada with swingeing tariffs after its own prime minister, Mark Carney, declared a “strategic partnership” with China. A similar reaction would be unwelcome for Starmer, who unlike Carney has staked his authority on his ability to appease Trump.

The Chinese leadership will no doubt reward Starmer’s deference with a token pledge of investment, perhaps a greater one than the paltry £600 million which Chancellor Rachel Reeves secured on her trip last year. But China neither wants nor needs British goods and services on any meaningful scale. It has two basic goals in Britain, and they are to ensure a growing market for its enormous surplus of manufactured goods, and to leverage its economic power to disrupt the American-led Western alliance system. It is on its way to achieving both aims without needing to offer any special inducements.

A country like Britain can only negotiate with China if it can plausibly threaten to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains and technology. Instead, under successive governments but especially under this one, Britain has shut down its industrial base and pursued policies which have pushed up the cost of living, stoking demand for cheap imports. China cannot prise Britain away from the United States, which is still the guarantor of British security, but it can slowly raise the cost of supporting the US where Chinese interests are at stake, and in a crisis, threaten to cripple the British economy. What is more, Starmer remains idealistically committed to a system of international law which Beijing is slowly bending towards its own ends. Even if Britain is the last nation to abandon America’s old global order, it can become a member of China’s new one long before that. The two are already overlapping.

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None of this means that Starmer is wrong to reboot relations with China. The diplomatic “deep freeze” of recent years was the result of contingent circumstances which the march of history has already left behind. Starting in 2015, David Cameron and George Osborne launched an ill-timed strategy to deepen ties with China, touting the City of London as a putative gateway to the Western financial system. That plan was complicated by Brexit and the realization that Chinese tech posed a threat to critical infrastructure. As American antagonism towards China hardened, Britain’s leaders prioritized fealty to the US. Then came Hong Kong, Covid, and Ukraine. During the Johnson and Sunak years, as the extent of Chinese espionage efforts in Britain became more difficult to ignore, the government’s China policy seemed to be largely dictated by a desire not to appear weak in front of hawkish backbenchers.

The problem is that, despite the British media’s strange habit of equating diplomacy with surrender, the country does not gain anything by keeping these channels closed. None of Britain’s key partners in security and intelligence have cut themselves off from Beijing to the same extent. Not Australia, despite its bitter disputes with China; and not even the US, which, for all the rhetoric of decoupling, remains firmly integrated with the Chinese economy at every level, from major tech companies like Apple and Tesla to the financial managers at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, China continues to assume an increasingly dominant position in the global economy. As Kyle Chan has written, the era when China needed technology transfers from the West is over, and the flow of knowledge is now going into reverse. Western companies are buying access to China’s expertise in everything from electric vehicles and robotics to pharmaceuticals and even artificial intelligence; Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta recently acquired the Chinese AI startup Manus. China maintains a firm grip on the raw materials which underpin advanced technologies, as it demonstrated last year by using its chokehold on critical minerals to repulse Trump’s tariffs. Many British companies manufacture their products in Chinese factories, and the two countries have a strong partnership in scientific research.

Britain’s economic prospects therefore depend on its commercial relations with China as much as with the United States. Indeed, I’ve heard from businesspeople who much prefer working with Chinese counterparts than American ones that the former are more inclined to seek long-term relationships based on mutual benefit, while the latter, much like their property developer President, tend to see business as a zero-sum contest.

The problem, then, is not that Britain is engaging with China, but that it is doing so from a position of weakness and apparent desperation. Bowing to Chinese demands for a strategically located London embassy, and undermining the prosecution of two alleged spies, were the acts of an auditioning vassal rather than a sovereign partner. More importantly, a reliance on Chinese imports is increasingly baked into Britain’s economic model. Whereas most comparable countries are wary of China’s aggressive trade practices, Britain embraces them.

Since 2020, the Chinese leadership has pursued a strategy of dual circulation, meaning that it seeks maximum self-reliance in meeting its domestic needs, while also producing an enormous surplus of goods to export overseas. This is partly an expression of China’s own weaknesses: its society is submerged in debt, its once mighty property sector is bust, and its state does not want to undergo the painful readjustment that is required before its own consumers can grow the economy through spending. So it needs the world to continue buying its products in ever-larger quantities. But this model also serves to enhance China’s political power over other nations. Just as it uses investment and loans to gain influence over poor countries, it uses cheap exports, which are subsidized by the state, to undercut producers in richer ones, leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Labour’s agenda has made Britain a willing accomplice in this strategy. A combination of wage increases and taxes on business has kept inflation high, putting upward pressure on both the cost of living and interest rates. This is a politically toxic situation for the government, and Chinese imports are an obvious solution, as a Bank of England official recently stated. Another Labour priority, Ed Miliband’s rush to bring down British carbon emissions, has similar implications. Not only does it rely on Chinese solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries; it is also accelerating the demise of British industry through high energy costs and regulations. Much of that production will relocate to China. Hence Britain’s imports from China grew by 6% last year; the roads are filling with “Temu Range Rovers” — as the Jaecoo 7 SUV is sometimes called — while Britain’s domestic car production has fallen to its lowest level since the Fifties; and David Lammy has celebrated a British company investing £800 million in a new plastics plant in Zhejiang, even as Britain’s own chemicals industry is collapsing.

Britain may be one of China’s more accommodating trade partners, but the EU, for all its clout on paper, faces a similar dilemma. Visiting China in December, French president Emmanuel Macron said of the trade relationship that “these imbalances are becoming unbearable”. The EU has tried to use tariffs to resist a glut of Chinese electric vehicles entering its market, but China has retaliated by targeting European agriculture and luxury goods, and it still has the ability to withhold critical resources from Europe as it did from the US. Germany is now hemorrhaging industrial capacity to China, and cannot intervene because it also needs access to the Chinese market. As in Britain, European governments presiding over febrile societies will not risk an inflationary shock caused by a disruption of trade with China.

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There is an argument that Britain should simply write off the loss of its remaining industrial base and free itself to gorge on Chinese imports, thereby helping to raise its living standards. In fact, to a large extent this is already happening. But the lesson of China’s rise is that, while such tradeoffs can be beneficial in the short term, they will, in time, become dependencies to be exploited. The much vaunted rules-based order that Trump is now dismantling was not only a framework of American hegemony; it was a scaffolding that China ascended by treating every economic relationship as a vehicle for its political objectives. For the most part, Beijing’s coercive trade tactics have been much more subtle than Trump’s tariff blitzes, but not always. Mongolia, Australia and Lithuania have all suffered naked blackmail from China, due to their stances on the Dalai Lama, the origins of Covid, and Taiwan, respectively. The anti-coercion measures that the EU is now threatening to use against Trump were developed in response to China’s treatment of Lithuania.

The same instrumental approach can be seen in Beijing’s new Global Governance Initiative, announced in September, which advances a Chinese-led world order in the guise of a more democratic and equitable “global community” adhering to international law. This continues a longstanding Chinese campaign to expand its influence over international institutions. It is an unfortunate irony for Britain that Starmer, who would in many ways be at home in the Chinese Communist Party, given his preference for technocratic solutions and skill at operating his party’s machinery against his rivals, does not show the same ruthless nous in the international domain. Instead, he cleaves with an almost touching faith to the sanctity of rules and procedures, apparently blind to the agendas they might serve.

There is a possible future in which some of the nations trapped between the US and China finally make good their fantasies of “strategic autonomy”, radically changing their spending priorities and building up a degree of independence in technology, industry and defense. This would probably be a world where Britain cooperates more closely with its European neighbors, as well as other allies such as Australia and Japan. It is far more likely, however, that Europe’s “middle powers” will become a complicated space where American and Chinese influence mingles and collides. Both superpowers will exercise control over Britain’s infrastructure and economy in different ways, and both will impose their own limits on British sovereignty. If that is the case, an important question for the country’s future will be whether the United States and China can coexist peacefully in contested lands like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

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On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

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Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

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.

How did Europe get in a position where it has no strategic choices left? It is quite a reversal. Machiavelli, an Italian, was one of the early architects of modern strategic thinking. Strategic diplomacy reached a peak with Metternich and Talleyrand, the foreign ministers of Austria and France: each played an instrumental role in the Congress of Vienna. This was the ultimate peace conference, one that provided Europe with stability and security for a century. After the Second World War, the diplomatic giants were mostly Americans such as George Marshall, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

Beside the chess-board type diplomatic strategist, there is another kind: the long-term strategic actor. The most successful modern example is China. China’s transformation began with the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, at which Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms. It took three or four decades until these reforms translated into geopolitical power. During the transformation, uninformed Western opinion held that China was becoming more Western. The genius of the Chinese project was that it led others to underestimate it.

Both types of strategy, chess-playing and long-term scheming, have their place. Modern Europe has neither. We Europeans used to be good at the long-term stuff, like the Chinese today. The early European Economic Community was an example of a focused strategy to defragment Europe’s splintering economies. The single European market in the Eighties and early Nineties was the most important of the EU’s grand strategic projects, but also its last. To devise the single market, around 200,000 experts gathered in 2,300 technical bodies. They spent half a billion to one billion hours on it. That’s strategy. The euro was more ambitious than the single market, but it was not strategic, because the EU never built upon it. The EU could have turned the euro into a challenger to the US dollar, but that would have required different economic policies, like the introduction of a European sovereign bond.

When strategy fades, action turns first into reaction, and eventually into delusion. The Europeans do not have the foggiest idea of how to help Ukraine defeat Putin on the battlefield, and yet they dream of dragging him in front of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Their discourse is about the rule of law. They are prosecutor, jury and judge in their imagined trials. They think of themselves as on the right side of the virtue-signaling spectrum.

I find it personally painful to watch Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, make a fool of herself with variably informed war-mongering discourse that lacks any strategic content. But she is not the only one. I have yet to identify a single official in any national capitals, including London, who has a strategy to end the Ukraine war. There is no one who has done the math of the military capabilities Ukraine would need, on the logistics of how to produce or procure it. There is also no strategy whatsoever on how to finance it.

Take the French contribution, or lack thereof. Emmanuel Macron is one of the loudest cheerleaders for Ukraine. And yet the French government is allocating a mere $120 million for Ukraine aid in its 2026 budget. Italy and Spain, another two large European countries, also spend little. The Germans and the UK are not in a position to bankroll this operation.

Do European leaders believe their meager contributions can deliver a Ukrainian victory? A dead giveaway is the overuse of the passive tense. They don’t say: “We will do whatever it takes to defeat Putin.” They do say: “Putin must be defeated”. In other words: We want Ukrainian soldiers to die and American taxpayers to pay. In a rare moment of candor, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, admitted only last week that the European taxpayer is not going to pay for it. Indeed.

When Trump came to power, he demanded that the Europeans increase their defense spending from just under 2% of GDP to 5%. The Europeans agreed immediately. And they are raising the money through debt.

Faced with Trump’ demands, a strategic approach on the part of the Europeans would have been to identify the precise shortcomings of the continent’s defense, like staffing, technology, and military procurement, and compare them to existing capabilities. The second step would have been to devise a strategy to acquire what is needed and start with the development of new technologies. Then you calculate what it costs under different scenarios and make the corresponding budget allocations. At this point we have to remember that ammunition made in Germany costs five times as much as what the Russian army pays for.

Ultimately, defense spending is called spending for a reason. It is not investment. Trying to fund it through debt is self-defeating. Considering that we are talking about a defense strategy, this approach is monumentally stupid. A strategic thinker asks: What sacrifices do we make so we can match Russia’s military capability? A European military planner asks: how do much do we need to borrow to get ahead in the defense spending league tables? Defense spending targets are what you end up with when you have no strategy.

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When people don’t have strategies, they often seek refuge in procedures — to a point where the procedures take on a life on their own. Since the war began, the EU has passed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions have been an abject failure, but Brussels refuses to acknowledge it. The officials did not think this through. They are shocked to see that China supported Russia, that sanctioned goods flow through Kazakhstan. Some EU countries still buy Russian oil and gas because they are dependent on it. Partly as a result, the Russian economy has massively outperformed that of Europe since the start of the war. Whereas Europeans are drowning in debt, Russia is an example of fiscal strength. Unwilling to make cuts to their bloated welfare spending, the Europeans have identified the frozen Russian assets as the only way to finance the war. Even with that money, they do not have a strategy to end the war, either through victory or peace. The simple goal is to keep the show on the road. That’s what non-strategic procedural thinking does to you.

It also makes you dependent. By outsourcing all strategic thinking, the Europeans have become dependent on the US for defense and trade. Now they get angry with Trump for excluding them from meetings.

Trump, like the Europeans, is not a strategic actor of the kind I describe, but this is for different reasons. Trump’s politics are transactional. He likes peace because war is bad for business. Trump could not care less about whether Putin broke international law. To the European diplomats who huddle in the antechambers of the peace process, Trump’s attitude is disturbing and alienating.

The Germans, with their special business relationships with Russia, used to be more like Trump. German politicians had their own private channels with Russian counterparts, just as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, does today. The Germans used to be the largest crowd in the St Petersburg International Economics Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos. Now I am hearing that the hotels in Moscow and St Petersburg are filled with Americans hoping to strike lucrative deals with Russia. It is an ironic twist of fate, for it was the US that tried to force Germany to abandon the Baltic Sea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Now there is talk of the Americans injecting themselves as the middleman to sell Russian gas to Germany. You could not make this up.

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I expect the Germans will eventually rejoin the Russia-is-open-for-business club. They are distrustful of the French in military affairs, and they don’t have any ambitions for the EU to develop into a global strategic actor. They may want to reconnect with the only vaguely successful independent economic partnership they had this century — with Russia.

There is a lot of literature on the subject of why nations rise and decline. My own favorite is Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations, published in 1982. It explains that Japan and Germany succeeded in the post-war period because the war destroyed political and elite systems. For Olson, decline is preceded by a slowdown in innovation, a focus on redistribution of wealth, and the power of special interest groups. His method perfectly describes not only the rise of Japan and Germany, but also both countries’ subsequent decline. The socio-political factors that Olson describes as the cause of national decline happen to be exactly the same as those that discourage strategic thought and action. Europeans think they can safeguard their welfare and their influence through regulation, procedure, the rule of law, and international institutions. The Europeans dream of a world in which no one acts strategically. This is also a world in which innovation is rare, a world without disruption and creativity.

Like no US president before him, Trump exposes Europe’s delusions, its lack of a strategic thinking and action. This is why the Europeans hate him so much. And to no avail. It promises to be another bad week for Kallas et al.

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.

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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.

Ten years on, Donald Trump has waved aside decades of climate science as a “con job”, recently joining Saudi Arabia in sinking a landmark deal that would cut global shipping emissions. Meanwhile, Europe, bound by the knots of its own climate bureaucracy struggles to execute an ambitious industrial strategy. At COP30, Brussels will speak the language of leadership — but with diluted goals and waning momentum. Washington, turning inward as a newly unapologetic petrostate, may arrive only to heckle from the wings. The climate consensus is fracturing.

China will arrive in Belém with confidence — and control.Over the past decade it has built the world’s most complete clean-energy manufacturing base: it now produces well over 80% of global solar modules, leads the battery supply chain from raw materials to final assembly, and dominates the rare-earth mining and processing vital for EVs, wind turbines and electronics. Clean-energy projects around the world depend on components that pass through its industrial ecosystem. Put simply, Beijing controls the infrastructure of decarbonization.

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As the principal architect of the low-carbon era, China can build what others only promise — but at a price. For some, Beijing remains an indispensable partner in decarbonization, able to mobilize capital, equipment and contractors faster and cheaper than Western institutions. But others are more cynical, regarding China’s strategy as a new form of green colonialism. China’s ascent as the world’s system-builder inspires as much admiration as unease.

With its grip on global supply chains, China has de facto control over certification regimes, pricing structures, and emergent standards for green finance, all of which increasingly govern market access. The electric-vehicle sector offers a glimpse of what is to come: Chinese batteries and EVs may have higher life-cycle emissions than Japanese or Korean rivals, yet cost and scale have allowed Beijing to dictate the terms of competition. Falling emissions are reinforcing China’s claim that state direction delivers results.

But Beijing’s path to decarbonization is riddled with contradictions. China is both the world’s dirtiest industrial behemoth and its leading green architect. In 2024, China broke records for wind and solar installation even as it approved more coal plants than at any point over the last decade. Critics interpret this as “green-washing” or bad faith, but for Beijing, it’s “sequencing” — the belief that industrial might in strategic sectors must come before emission cuts.

It is a transition philosophy without precedent. “The path, method, pace and intensity… must be determined by ourselves,” Xi Jinping has insisted. What has followed is a multi-trillion-dollar experiment: China is attempting to reach its dual carbon goals — peaking CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 — without dismantling the largest industrial base on Earth.

For Beijing, industrial strength is the foundation of geopolitical power. Commanding roughly 35% of global manufacturing, with projections of 45% by 2030, manufacturing is not something China is willing to trade for climate credibility. On the contrary: it believes the world’s low-carbon future can only be built by those who still know how to make it.

In Beijing’s view, whoever builds the clean-energy economy will write the rules of the next world order — just as the United States once did through oil, arms and the dollar. Decarbonization, by this logic, is statecraft, not climate stewardship. Domestically, it doubles as an insurance policy,  securing water, food, and energy on China’s terms before scarcity and climate shocks arrive. This strategy grants Beijing the mandate to plan decades ahead and mobilize entire sectors.

China can also pursue policies that would be unthinkable in pure market economies. While Western governments set climate targets and leave delivery to the market, Beijing intervenes directly. Strategy is directed from the top, and capital is treated not as a market outcome, but as an instrument of national power. Policy banks funnel cheap finance into strategic sectors often years before they are commercially viable. State-owned firms absorb early risk, allowing new technologies such as carbon-neutral steel and advanced battery chemistries to be trialed without needing to turn a profit. Once a technology shows promise, the state withdraws protection and unleashes a brutal survival-of-the-fittest competition: the strongest are rapidly scaled up, the rest are abandoned.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) is a product of this system. A decade ago, China granted subsidies to dozens of battery startups before ruthlessly pruning the sector. Graveyards of failed EV startups now ring the outskirts of Hangzhou and Nanjing. CATL survived the cull, and was quickly scaled up into a “national champion”. Today, its dominance in battery technology anchors China’s lead in the global EV supply chain.

It is not tidy or efficient, but waste and failure are built into the system. Duplication builds capacity; missteps refine technology. Beijing doesn’t care about short-term profitability, instead incubating firms that will dominate the industries of the future.

Foreign expertise has also helped to accelerate industrial innovation. Tesla’s experience in China is a case in point. Lured into Shanghai with tax breaks, land grants and regulatory exemptions, it was welcomed not just as an investor but as a benchmark against which domestic firms would be forced to compete. Silicon Valley might have interpreted this move as market openness for Beijing, though, it was a controlled experiment in technological transfer. Within a year, nearly 90% of Tesla’s Shanghai-made components were sourced locally. The company thrived, but so did the rivals it helped train. Elon Musk laughed off BYD as a joke in 2011; by 2023, it was outselling him. China hosted the world’s most celebrated innovator to train its own, and then scaled beyond his reach.

This dual system — ruthless competition steered by state direction — has already delivered China’s overwhelming manufacturing dominance in solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Now Beijing is applying it to the dirtier, harder-to-abate sectors.

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Greening heavy industry is one of the toughest frontiers in climate action. Steel, cement and aluminum are responsible for a third of China’s emissions and more than half of global output. These sectors are the backbone of the modern economy — and they are almost entirely coal-dependent. Replacing that foundation is  technically daunting and financially risky;blast furnaces burning at over a thousand degrees cannot be wished away. Instead they must be carefully reengineered with new, low-carbon technologies. Those alternatives, including hydrogen-based steelmaking, carbon capture and low-carbon smelting, demand deep pools of capital and years of industrial trial and error. China’s system is built to keep funding the effort until one of them works.

Now, China has an opportunity to experiment with changes to production without disrupting growth. A prolonged slump in the property sector and population decline have lowered demand for carbon-intensive cement and steel, driving a fall in emissions. This slowdown affords Beijing breathing room to trial hydrogen and carbon capture technologies, all while embedding its own certification systems into supply chains.

The stakes are enormous: Beijing is betting that it can decarbonize the world’s largest industrial base and then export the model abroad. Success would not only yield clean factories, but would grant China the power to define what counts as “green” and thus shape the standards of global trade.

Beijing is seizing the opportunity to build a parallel economic order. Through carbon certificates, “zero-carbon” industrial parks, and an expanding taxonomy of green finance, it is embedding Chinese standards into global regulation and capital flows. These mechanisms are fast becoming the plumbing of 21st century commerce: converting carbon footprints into tradable data, and data into passports for goods and investment. In the coming decade, carbon content will likely become a default value — printed on everything from car batteries to shipping containers. Beijing wants to be the one writing the label.

The longer the United States and its allies delay a credible counteroffer, the more likely it becomes that the world’s low-carbon future will be wired, financed, and standardized in Beijing. Western policymakers increasingly recognize the scope of China’s industrial strategy — but their responses remain piecemeal and defensive: tariffs, tax credits, and talking points in place of coordinated vision. As COP30 convenes in Belém, that asymmetry is laid bare. All eyes are on China.