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.

I am talking to members of the ballooning Hong Kong community in sleepy Bradley Stoke — over the din of badminton shuttlecocks being batted back and forth and ceremonial swords whooshing through the air as older residents practise tai chi.

No one dares give their real name. Some even hesitate to give their age, in case it might somehow lead to their identification.

Are they scared of endangering their family back home? “No,” says one man. “It is because of the place you’re interviewing in. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is actually one spy from the Chinese government behind us,” he adds with a nervous laugh. “So we have to be careful what kind of information we’re sharing.” I ask if we should continue outside, to sidestep the amateur agent, but he insists we stay put. “I think 70% of them actually can’t understand English. But they want to show they’re listening.”

In 2020, following a wave of pro-democracy protests, China imposed a draconian new security law on Hong Kong. It made crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison, with the possibility of cases being heard behind closed doors and defendants being spirited away for trials in mainland China. Hundreds of activists and former opposition lawmakers have since been arrested.

Britain said the clampdown broke a guarantee of freedoms it agreed with China in the 1997 handover deal, and ministers responded in February 2021 by providing an escape hatch — a “bespoke visa route” for anyone registered with British National (Overseas), or BNO, status before 1997, along with their partners and dependent relatives. In all, 5.2 million people, or two thirds of the population, are eligible to live, work and study in the UK for up to five years, after which they can settle permanently (and can apply for citizenship 12 months after that).

And so, over the past year, roughly 1,000 Hong Kongers have moved to South Gloucestershire. At the Aerospace Bristol museum in October, local agencies came together with the Chinese Community Wellbeing Society for a welcome event attended by 250 people. And at the Konbini Asian supermarket in nearby Patchway, managers have been buying exotic fruits and vegetables — from shark fin melon to choy sum greens — to cater to them.

The new arrivals say they chose the area around Bristol for its moderate climate, good schools, low crime rates and relatively affordable housing (new-builds are much favoured over what one calls “second-hand properties”). Many have also been attracted by a YouTube influencer, Canaan K, who has amassed 60,000 followers in two years by producing Cantonese videos on everything from UK income tax to Primark sales, while gushing about the wonders of BS32. “They think this is the place to be — according to her,” explains one of Bradley Stoke’s newcomers.

Daniel*, who is in his thirties, says he escaped so he can speak freely and “go everywhere without worries”. The last straw was the smartphone app the Hong Kong government instituted ostensibly because of Covid, but which he says is a “monitoring system so they know everywhere you go”. He had to abandon “my family, my friends, my dogs”. Yet he does not consider himself a refugee. “I think we are liberated,” is how he prefers to put it.

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Liberation, however, has its limits. Everyone here knows about the incident in October when a man believed to be Beijing’s consul general in Manchester ripped down pro-democracy posters, and looked on as one protester was dragged into consulate grounds and beaten so badly he was hospitalised.

“I was shocked,” says Daniel, “but not surprised. From what we’re gathering from the news, the Chinese government even set up police stations in foreign countries. It is effective. If you look at Xinjiang [where more than a million Uyghur Muslims are thought to be detained in “re-education camps”], you know what’s happening.” What are his worst fears? “Just that Hong Kong will become another China.”

The territory is also suffering economically, in part thanks to strict Covid lockdowns. In September, it lost its crown as Asia’s leading financial centre to Singapore in a respected global index. And its population fell by a record 1.6% in the past year, with 113,200 residents emigrating. Only this week, protests flared up again, echoing the anti-lockdown demonstrations that have swept across the mainland.

Candy Choy is the only person I can find who will agree to be named (she also approached more than 30 families on my behalf, but all declined to talk). “I love Hong Kong,” she says. “But unfortunately, Hong Kong didn’t love me.” A pastor and mother of two, who lives in neighbouring Stoke Gifford, she was recruited by the West of England Baptist Network to channel BNOs to the local churches and help them adapt to British life. She says she did not want her children to continue being “brainwashed” and had had enough of “self-checking” every time she ministered. “I was very stressed. But I’m not stressed now.”

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Still, she says many arrivals take precautions — including declining to give their new contact details to loved ones back home. “Sometimes we want to disconnect from them. So we didn’t tell anyone when we left. The police can find some excuse to arrest you. We don’t give our addresses — to protect us, and our families in Hong Kong.”

Choy says she has been savouring her liberty in Britain — googling anything she likes without hesitation and marvelling at the right to lampoon those in the highest offices in the land (her daughter asked in astonishment how the British were allowed to make jokes about the Queen). And she enthuses about the warm welcome she has received. “My neighbours mainly are local people and they invited me to many jubilees, bonfires and Christmas parties.”

No one here has a single racist incident to report. The only complaints anyone can muster are confusion about the council’s recycling system and the strict British penalties for parking and speeding. Oh, and the food. “Honestly?” says one, “it’s just chips and chicken.” Another regrets that she has not been able to find a steak in the area that actually has “a meat taste”. A third looks at me in horror as he describes what sounds like an almost mythical dish he is yet to encounter: “The London eel.”

I meet Helen*, a wary mother of three, at a pub in Bradley Stoke. “I think I escaped from a monster’s claw — because of the kindness of the English government,” she says. The 44-year-old accepts that the Hong Kong she knew and loved is no more. “It was very beautiful,” she recalls wistfully. “It was wonderful, it was energetic. It was full of freedom and mass media. Now they only take dictation.” In June last year, Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy paper, announced its closure after 26 years following police raids. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, is in jail.

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Does she not find the small-town life of Bradley Stoke humdrum compared with the bustle of Hong Kong’s metropolis? In fact, she insists, she loves all the trees and the wide, open space. Plus, she says: “I’m too busy to be bored.” Helen is renting, in an area with rising prices, in part thanks to this wave of immigration. It means she works one full-time job, plus one or two part-time jobs each day, and is still not making ends meet — using her dwindling savings to make up the shortfall. “If the news reporters always focus on the majority, of the wealthy who have left Hong Kong, they will ignore the minority — people who are poor, who are struggling.”

Even those with capital from selling their expensive properties have had to adjust their career expectations in Bradley Stoke. Professors have found themselves working in Tesco warehouses. One woman from mainland China tells me how impressed she was with the Hong Kongers who arrived to work with her at a food factory — doing 12-hour shifts cooking up English soups and sauces. “They don’t want any benefits. They say: ‘We appreciate that the UK, during a difficult time, invites us to come. We want to do something for the society.’ I like their spirit.” But she is also aware of the suspicion they have for mainlanders like her. Some recoil even at the sight of Simplified Chinese characters, which they associate with the Beijing regime.

Helen joined the “Umbrella Revolution” protests in 2014 and demonstrations against a proposed extradition treaty to the mainland in 2019 — when dissent was still legal — dressing in black and singing the movement’s two protest songs, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables and the Cantonese anthem “Glory to Hong Kong”. She is wary of other Hong Kongers in Bradley Stoke unless she is sure they were fellow protesters like her. “I keep a very, very careful eye on them,” she says, explaining she will look out to see if they have a yellow umbrella symbol “on their cup or on their keyring”. She is terrified someone will report her to the Chinese authorities, who would ban her from ever returning home to see her parents.

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Rachel*, another Bradley Stoke BNO, says she is “very blessed” compared with those who failed to make it out. They were stopped at the airport, she says, “and then they disappeared. My friends — key persons who organised all protests — their mobile phones always are switched off. After 2019, some teenagers disappeared and their parents also found them disconnected. These are the facts.”

According to the older émigrés, there is still a strong bond with Britain, which first occupied the region in 1841. Helen says they “love Pang Ding-hong”, the Cantonese name for Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong. But Daniel says the sentiment is disappearing fast from the territory itself. “Those who have affection for Britain, underneath, they still love it. But now you just don’t say anything because the majority of those who feel the same have already moved to the UK.”

Many Brits feel our government has done precious little over the years to safeguard democracy in Hong Kong. Even Lord Patten says: “We should have delivered more explicitly on what was promised.” But the exiles in Bradley Stoke are pragmatic — and sanguine. “It is not just that China is too powerful,” says Daniel. “They’re brutal and barbaric.” Helen adds: “We just think no one can help us. But the UK government is one of the solutions. She will not very strongly make conflict with China, but now she gives us a gate to escape. And, for me, that’s enough.”

* Names and other details have been changed to protect identities.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the premise of EM Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops. Like all good sci-fi, the story can be read in multiple ways. But for me the key thing is what happens when the machine begins, slowly but ineluctably, to break down. Trivially to begin with — strange noises, the wrong music, smelly bath water — but then things begin to get more serious when the food starts to go off, and eventually the machine collapses and everyone is killed.

Yet until it’s too late, these flaws do not make people challenge the machine or wonder whether they might in fact be better off living on the surface of the earth. Although each flaw is resented at first, people just get used to them and begin to think them normal. “Time passed,” Forster wrote, “and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine”.

I confess to not having given the story much thought since I studied it back in school, decades ago. But it has clearly been lurking somewhere deep in my memory — because all it took for it to leap out from the subconscious was the right cue.

It turned out that the right cue was Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee. Professor Chan is Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health, with responsibility for many of its Covid restrictions, and so for those of us living here she is a figure of some import. She is firmly of the Safety First, Can’t Be Too Careful school of thought, to the point where she makes Chris Whitty look like an especially rabid anti-vaxxer.

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This approach served Hong Kong well in the early days of the pandemic. Moving swiftly, and encouraged by most of the population who often urged the Government to take more drastic action, Hong Kong has managed to avoid both mass outbreaks and any large-scale full lockdowns of the sort seen in the UK. The Covid death toll here stands at just 213 — fewer than died from SARS — and there now hasn’t been a locally transmitted case for over a month.

Faced with the choice between remaining Asia’s World City or prioritising Our Friends in the North, it has now chosen the latter, aiming for a zero Covid policy and hoping that the border with the mainland will open again soon. This has resulted in some of the tightest travel restrictions in the world – 21 days in a quarantine hotel for someone from the UK, for example, even if fully vaccinated. In turn, this has had a disastrous impact on the vaccination programme. Vaccines are freely and easily available, but uptake has been slow, with the most vulnerable being the least likely to have been jabbed. The figure for the over-80s vaccinated is still below 20%: when you’ve got zero Covid, and if you don’t want to travel anywhere, why bother?

Yet however frustrating some of this might be — and however much we might wonder if this is sustainable — these are all legitimate policy choices. Given the mainland’s own zero Covid policy, and the importance of cross-border traffic, it’s difficult to see what Hong Kong could really do. Plus, however much pain this causes many foreigners and others with relatives overseas, there’s little doubt that it is popular within the wider population.

All this I can cope with, just about. But last month, Professor Chan claimed that in Hong Kong there is now “local normalcy” — and it was this that provoked my Forster flashback.

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She was trying to argue that however grim the quarantine rules might be, life once here is fine and dandy. This might strike you as a bit “apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, but you can at least see her point: if they allow normal life to continue, maybe it’s possible to justify very strict travel restrictions.

Yet life is clearly not normal in Hong Kong, even if we just confine ourselves to the restrictions brought about by Covid. Rather, Chan’s claim is one of the best examples of the ratchet effect in public policy I’ve seen for ages.

Let’s just take just the things that affect me on an almost daily basis. Mask wearing is compulsory in public, for everyone, even when outdoors. There are limits on group gatherings, with still no more than four people allowed to gather outdoors (although unlike in the UK, say, there has never been any limits on private gatherings). Table sittings in restaurants are also restricted, usually to four, although some places are allowed to go really wild up to six, depending on the extent of staff vaccinations. Tracking entry and exit via an app into any public building or restaurant is compulsory.

Most schools are still not back to full-day provision, even though pupils are now in their sixth term of disrupted schooling, and even when at school there are innumerable restrictions on what they can do. Meanwhile, at home, there is routine compulsory testing of areas or groups. These can involve locking down whole blocks with no warning — so-called “ambushes” — even with the possibility of breaking into your home if you don’t answer the door.

And hovering above it all is the ever-present threat of being carted off to a government quarantine centre. Should one of your close contacts tests positive, there’s none of the would-you-mind-awfully-staying-at-home-please attitude here. Instead, you get picked up, with almost no notice, and chucked in a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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If you actually have Covid, you are taken into hospital. There is little care for family separation, as with the children taken away from their parents — or the breastfeeding mother separated from her four month old baby, despite the child being unable to take formula milk. (That one was solved only because women donated spare pumped breast milk).

It is common to see praise in the West for how countries like Hong Kong have managed track, trace, and isolate programmes, without being aware of what the reality of the isolate bit often means. We have a bag ready, by the front door, packed with emergency provisions, just in case the guys and gals in Hazmat suits come knocking.

These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive. Everyone in Hong Kong could list others. And remember: these are the restrictions currently in place with the Covid stats down to zero.

Just as when Forster’s machine starts to break down, some of this might be considered fairly trivial, but some of it is not. Some of it may even be justified in the short or medium term. But none of it is normal, and we should not let politicians — in Hong Kong or elsewhere — ever tell us otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much political opportunism all over the world in response to the pandemic. In Hong Kong, though, the prioritisation of politics over medicine has been breathtaking. From the earliest stages of the outbreak, the government here, reeling and battered after the surge of unprecedented pro-democracy protests in 2019, seized upon the spread of Covid as a major tool for quelling dissent. In February 2020, a secret report sent by the Hong Kong government to its bosses in Beijing was leaked. It allegedly contained statements by Lam describing the outbreak of the coronavirus as a “rare opportunity to reverse the situation”, her administration having been “attacked on all fronts” during the protests. She added that with the central government’s help the pandemic could be the means of ending the unrest.

The affairs of the two governments are generally conducted inside a black box that reliably emits denials of unauthorised reports. But the Hong Kong administration did not deny this story. At the time, I was writing a book about the protests and wanted to know more. Generally those close to the heart of government are loath to criticise but, astonishingly, two people who had been involved at the highest level in discussions about combating the virus volunteered to tell me how disgusted they were with the leadership’s cynicism in using it as an opportunity to clear the streets of protestors.

While the government had been very slow off the mark in securing personal protective equipment, it had been very quick to introduce social distancing measures that effectively banned public assembly. Given that the virus was primarily spreading from the Mainland, it seemed rather obvious that the border should be closed.But the government resolutely refused to do so. That February, medical staff went on strike, demanding border closure — and were castigated by Lam and others for “politicising” the pandemic.Within days of the strike, the government was forced to backtrack as new infections were unambiguously linked to arrivals from the Mainland. But those who took part in the industrial action continue to be harassed and punished.

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Meanwhile, on the Mainland, President Xi Jinping proclaimed an ongoing “people’s war” against Covid-19. Last March, he made a triumphal visit to Wuhan and strongly suggested that the battle had been won. Still, China’s international reputation was getting a battering as criticism mounted over its lack of transparency, with dire consequences regarding the spread of the virus. Hong Kong government officials, who are now highly proficient in mimicking the revived Mao-era speech of officials in Beijing, joined in the national effort of decrying international criticism, while stressing China’s enormous achievements in getting things under control. What terrified the local administration was any hint that it could be seen to be criticising Beijing.

And so, while other jurisdictions were busy evacuating their citizens from Wuhan, the Hong Kong government sat on its hands. It waited until March 2020 before starting an evacuation programme, after most other jurisdictions had got their people out. They claimed that logistical problems were the cause of the delay — a strange assertion, given other places managed to rapidly overcome such problems, despite being much further away from China. But during the pandemic, as always, local officials have spent more time looking over their shoulders trying to gauge the response of their masters in Beijing than paying attention to what people at home are saying.

In fact, it was the people who got down to the serious of business of keeping the virus at bay. They turned out in their millions to protest against the government before the start of the pandemic, and in doing so learned to be self-reliant. Local initiatives secured face mask supplies; while officials were mainly focusing on using social distancing to prevent protest gatherings, members of the public proactively made social distancing part of their daily lives. People kept away from crowded areas; retailers and restaurateurs installed safer service methods. Many remembered the 2003/4 SARS outbreak, which inflicted a far heavier death toll than Covid-19 in Hong Kong and provided an unforgettable lesson in what is necessary to contain the spread of a disease.

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But Covid-19 is refusing to go away. In February this year, when Lam delivered her annual work report to President Xi by video link, he responded by implicitly criticising Hong Kong for a lack of vigour in combating the outbreak. On the Mainland, people had been herded into quarantine centres and large lockdowns were meticulously enforced. Measures were taken at great speed, while Beijing proclaimed the virtues of authoritarian government, which tolerates no discussion and gets rapid results.

Clearly, Lam was shaken. Days after her encounter with the President, she ordered officials to copy the way things were done across the border. The government launched dusk guerrilla raids for the first time on (mainly poor) districts, which involved hundreds of policemen running around in front of television cameras, ejecting people from buildings to take tests, forcing businesses to close with immediate effect and trapping overnight anyone unfortunate enough to be living in these areas or to have wandered in there at the time. All this activity made for some very dramatic video footage, but the net result was to unearth practically no one with the virus.

Meanwhile, the quarantine regime — already in place for incoming travellers, who were sent directly from the airport to quarantine hotels, long before places like Britain cottoned on to this obvious plan — was stepped up. Anyone who had been in contact with someone who’d tested positive for the virus, no matter how slight the level of contact, was detained.

Lamentably, I have first-hand experience of this measure. After a television hairstylist with whom I’d had two minutes of contact tested positive, I was issued with a court order to check into a mass quarantine centre with all the charm of a wannabe gulag. The words hairspray were mentioned as likely to have provoked contagion. For the record, neither I nor the 20 or so other people who had been in the make-up room were infected. But we were promptly relocated for 14 days.

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Conditions inside were dire. All meals consisted of tepid food served in either brown or beige slush. The rooms, with barely a sliver of natural light, offered inmates a choice of gloom or harsh fluorescent lighting. But comfort was not expected. More startling was the extraordinary regime of regulations, which kept inmates confined to their rooms 24 hours a day, and a myriad of obstacles that made it very hard to receive anything from the outside.

Still, the government is very proud of this 3,500-room centre, in a remote location, next to a failing (and, by the by, nationalised) Disneyland. The centre opened in July, officials praising its construction in “a race against time”. It was gradually expanded, providing a palpable demonstration of official vigour, likely to play well with masters in Beijing.

Much less speedy has been Hong Kong’s vaccine roll-out. It belatedly got going last month, the delay largely explained by the fact that politics had, yet again, taken precedence over science. Hong Kong’s leaders were determined to demonstrate their patriotism by ensuring that a Chinese vaccine had priority. Others had been sourced, but they could not be administered until the Sinovac programme was underway. Even now, the supply of non-Chinese vaccines is very limited.

The Sinovac deployment had been postponed following repeated failures to complete the third phase trials. But, by the end of last month, the delay was starting to get embarrassing, so the vaccine was shipped in despite not having completed the verification process. Sinovac has the lowest efficacy rate of any vaccine in use, ranging from around 50 to 60%. Nevertheless, the arrival of the Chinese vaccine made it possible for Ms Lam to sit before the cameras to have the first jab. She took the opportunity to castigate critics for ‘politicising’ the vaccination programme. She does not do irony.

But far less known is the brutal, and intensifying, repression of China’s Christians. For while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has always repressed religion in general, Christianity has always been its biggest target. This is partly a result of the Party’s promotion of atheism, as well its nervousness towards any gathering of people that it does not control. But it is also rooted in its fear that Christianity represents a “foreign” threat to its way of life, albeit one that the CCP hasn’t quite worked out how to deal with.

Under Mao Zedong, the Party attempted to eliminate Christianity altogether, though it succeeded only in driving the church underground. Indeed, as Deng Xiaoping started to open up the economy in the 1980s, the regime realised that the Church could not be eradicated so sought to control it instead; re-establishing state-approved church institutions for Catholics and Protestants that had been shut during the Cultural Revolution, while continuing to persecute underground congregations.

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There then followed a period of varied relaxation in which, while there was never religious freedom, the situation for some Christians did improve, depending on the attitudes of provincial authorities. Some local leaders turned a blind-eye to gatherings of unregistered churches, as long as they did not directly challenge the CCP. In other places, even large unregistered “mega churches” were permitted; Beijing’s Zion Church operated for years with hundreds of worshippers, while the Golden Lampstand Church in Shanxi province attracted a staggering 50,000 members.

But now China is in a fourth era — one of severe repression, propaganda and central control. Since he became President in 2013, Xi Jinping has taken an active interest in policy on religion, and initiated several national-level conferences dedicated to its “Sinicisation”. They culminated in the introduction of new regulations in 2018; today, even churches within the state-controlled institutions face new restrictions. Officially, the regime estimates that there are 50 million Christians in China today, though the real figure is believed to be at least double that number.

Every church is now forced to demonstrate its loyalty to the CCP by displaying portraits of Xi Jinping and party propaganda banners alongside, or even instead of, religious images. Surveillance cameras are installed at the altar, recording all who attend, while under-18s are prohibited from going into places of worship at all. Meanwhile, Christians on low incomes have been pressured by officials to give up their faith, with threats that their state support could be withheld.

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Most dramatically, thousands of crosses have been torn down and some churches have not only been closed, but demolished. In 2018 alone, the Golden Lampstand Church was dynamited, Zion Church was forced to close and the Home of Christ Church in Shantou, Guangdong province, was shut after the authorities called it an “illegal religious organisation”.

Christmas and the Bible are now in the regime’s sights, too. In 2019, the CCP announced its intention to produce a new translation of the Bible, which would bring it into line with the party’s “thought” by reinterpreting key passages. Last Christmas, they banned all festive activities, with the exception of attending government-sanctioned churches and family gatherings at home. Even so, groups of so-called “Pro-Mao” citizens reportedly marched through the streets in subsequent days, proclaiming anti-Christian messages. Some universities prohibited students from celebrating the holiday and banned them from attending off-campus events.

But in many ways, the CCP regards Christianity as an external threat — as a “foreign” force intent on undermining the country’s way of life. We can see this in the publication last November of a new draft document on regulations for foreigners’ involvement in religious activities. In effect, the new measures prohibit Chinese religious adherents from participating in activities organised by foreigners in China, and criminalise proselytisation — or even religious education and training — completely.

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This wariness towards Christianity’s “foreign” elements partly explains why in Hong Kong, where the rule of law is being dismantled by the CCP, religious freedom is particularly under pressure. Consider the case of pastor Roy Chan, whose Good Neighbour North District Church was raided by police last year, an act of retaliation for Chan’s decision to support young pro-democracy protestors. “Beat me, not the kids,” Chan said at the time. And he was beaten — not just by the police but by HSBC which, under pressure from the authorities, have frozen the assets of the church, pastor Chan, and his family.

But while some religious leaders in in the city continue to speak out against this crackdown, others, including Hong Kong’s current Apostolic Administrator, Cardinal John Tong, are not showing similar courage. When the President of the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences Cardinal Charles Bo tried to mobilise a prayer campaign for Hong Kong last year, the diocese actively discouraged it. A few weeks later, Cardinal Tong issued an instruction to clergy to “watch your language” in homilies, and the diocese has since published religious textbooks with guidance on how Hong Kong students can “contribute to their nation” — a clear pro-Beijing slant. Whether it wants to or not, the diocese is undoubtedly feeling — or at least anticipating — the CCP’s pressure.

Yet none of this dissuaded the Vatican from renewing its two-year-old agreement with the regime in China over the appointment of bishops in September 2020. First negotiated in 2018, the text of the agreement remains secret but it essentially allows the Chinese Communist Party to nominate bishops, for final approval by the Pope. In the Vatican’s mind, the aim was to better protect Catholics in China and bring the state-approved and underground churches together, but it has had the opposite effect.

Even when it was first mooted, a precondition for the deal should have been the release of all imprisoned Catholic clergy, at a minimum. Instead, not only was that not secured, but several brave underground Catholic bishops who had stayed loyal to Rome for decades, who had been in and out of prison or risked arrest many times, were forced by Rome to stand aside in favour of Beijing’s preferred bishops.

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Only two months after the deal was announced, bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou, was arrested for the fifth time in two years. He was released, but continues to face harassment. Meanwhile, in January last year, Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin of Mindong, Fujian Province, who had already been demoted to the position of auxiliary bishop to make way for a Beijing-appointed prelate, was forced by the authorities to leave his residence, which was then shut down. The 61-year-old cleric ended up sleeping in the doorway of his church office and only after an international outcry was he permitted to return to his apartment, albeit with the utilities cut off. Then in June 2020, 70-year-old Augustine Cui Tai, coadjutor bishop of the underground church in Xuanhua, was arrested again — having already endured 13 years in detention. Since then, there have been countless others like him.

And so as the world rightly focuses more on China, on accusations of genocide against the Uighurs and breaches of an international treaty in Hong Kong, we must not forget the images of dynamited churches, destroyed crosses, Communist propaganda in holy sanctuaries and jailed priests.

Wang Yi, the pastor of Early Rain Church in Chengdu, warned over two years ago that the regime had launched “a war against the soul”. A year later he was sentenced to nine years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power”. But as Pastor Wang made clear in his one of his offending sermons: the CCP has “established for themselves an enemy that can never be detained, can never be destroyed, will never capitulate nor be conquered: the soul of man.”

On the one side, the Chinese regime is a dystopian model of high-tech authoritarianism, which has forced tens of thousands of its Uighur subjects into concentration camps as part of a campaign of forced ethnic displacement, and which controls the political choices of its citizens to a degree intolerable to our professed values.

Openly siding with China is not a desirable option then, even if our status as an American client state permitted it. Indeed China’s penetration of our industry and infrastructure, including that central to our own national security, is a scandalous and catastrophic succession of errors carried out by notionally conservative governments.

China’s breach of the terms by which we relinquished Hong Kong humiliates the United Kingdom, though, in reality, there is nothing we can do to prevent it. And when the state-run newspaper China Daily threatens us that, in limiting Huawei’s access to our infrastructure we should expect a “retaliatory responses from Beijing”, it is a signal we must undo as urgently as possible a dependence on China which should never have been permitted in the first place.

Yet we must remember how we got here. Driven by self-interest and idealism alike, America dismantled the last great European empires, those of Britain and France, and took them for its own, ensuring our strategic decline just as it had by dismantling and acquiring Spain’s empire at the beginning of its ascent. While France took from Suez the lesson it would need to preserve its autonomy from the Atlantic superpower, we took the opposing point of view, that it was only by adhering close to the United States we could advance Britain’s interests in the world.

As the scholar of liberal imperialism Patrick Porter notes, as a result of “the United States’ dismantling of the economic order of imperial preference and the sterling bloc”, and the Suez crisis revealing “Britain’s vulnerability to U.S. coercion”, British governments repackaged our decline as necessary modernisation for domestic audiences. In doing so it “redefined Britain’s status around alliances and nuclear weapons, presenting retreat from empire as a graceful management of change”.

Yet arguably, in a Europe shattered by war and threatened with Soviet invasion, we had no choice. American largesse rebuilt continental Europe, turning Germany into an industrial superpower once again, even as we frittered away our ruinously expensive war loans, only paid off in 2006, on propping up the dwindling empire.

Vastly more powerful than today, though far from equal, Britain was throughout the 40-year military standoff with the Soviet bloc in the German countryside a far less subordinate partner than eventual victory would make us. After the fall of communism, we, along with our EU allies, cashed in the peace dividend to splurge on our consumerist dreams, eviscerating our armed forces and increasing our dependence on our transatlantic patron.

The Warsaw Pact was dissolved, yet NATO remained and expanded. What was once an alliance for Western Europe’s defence mutated into first a pan-continental empire, and then a coalition to export liberalism to unwilling or uninterested peoples across the world.

Yet while our European neighbours managed, for the most part, to politely decline Washington’s invitations to remodel the world according to the grandiose dreams of American ideologues, the United Kingdom rushed headlong into America’s failed and bloody adventures in the Islamic world. Swept along in these liberal crusades by prime ministers devoted to their American patron and vainly hungry for a place in history, the Britain of the neoliberal era thus helped bring about the age of populist anger threatening to tear it apart.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinous

Like a cuckold convincing himself his misfortune is a lifestyle choice, we exulted in our strategic fealty to the United States, even as our household fell apart around us. Successive British governments convinced themselves they could moderate the superpower’s excesses. This delusion ought to have bled out in the dust of Helmand or Basra, but staggers on in the myth of the special relationship with which successive British premiers console themselves.

America’s catastrophic act of self-sabotage is a historical drama which will be pored over and debated for centuries; the idea we should follow its architects into a far more gruelling contest is highly unconvincing, simply as a matter of self-preservation.

The tragedy for us was not that the US failed to remake the world in its own image after the Cold War, but that in our own country, it succeeded. America’s ferocious culture war, which suffuses all aspects of life, is now the superpower’s most successful soft power export, and its baneful effects have poisoned our politics, perhaps beyond repair. While Chinese culture and its attendant political malignancies are of only marginal appeal in Europe, whatever strange new fixation captures Americans is soon transmitted to us, entering our political bloodstream, and debilitating our body politic.

When we see British Black Lives Matter activists chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” at bemused and unarmed British policemen, or Katie Hopkins tweeting about non-existent London No-Go-Zones for the largesse of their American patrons, or Emily Maitlis channelling Rachel Maddow’s moralising sermons for bluecheck approbation, we sadly apprehend our subordinate place in the global system.

If the Brexit vote had not corresponded so closely in time with the American presidential election, and if our journalist class were not so slavishly in hock to their more glamorous American counterparts, perhaps we could have escaped from the past four years with a healthier politics, but we did not. We imported not just the content of the American culture war, but even the form in its entirety, with the same elaborate conspiracy theories of Russian meddling, the same cast of grifters and demagogues, rogue bureaucratic Twitter accounts and #Resistance judges.

Like backwoods Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets, our elites have adopted the fashions of the imperial metropolis wholesale as a mark of distinction.

As proved in London at the weekend, the political disturbances of the metropole soon make their way to our distant province. In the very definition of subject status, events we have no power to influence roil our politics, and threaten our social order.

Just as we began to quell Europe’s worst outbreak of the virus from our East, the more insidious virus coming from our West may well now send our infection and death rates soaring once again. It is in these questions of life and death, for whom one is prepared to kill or die, that national identity is determined. The lives of unknown Americans are demonstrably more real and valuable to many of our citizens than those of fellow Britons, or even their own families. Far too late, with no cultural antibodies to protect us, we realise our exposure to the virulent American strain of politics.

It is worth turning our gaze from the turmoil on America’s streets to the more rational calculations in European capitals for clues as to how the new Cold War will play out on our continent. When major think tanks such as the European Council for Foreign Relations note that it is impossible to align European foreign policy with America’s, for the simple reason that America’s will be violently overturned with every electoral cycle, and the country is therefore too unstable and divided to even possess a coherent foreign policy, we see the greatest challenge facing the United States in a new Cold War: only those allies most severely threatened by its rivals, like Taiwan by China, or the Baltic states by Russia, will take its side. For everyone else, the safest option by far is staying neutral.

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What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinous

In a speech to Germany’s leading diplomats last week, the European Union’s Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles made the stakes clear. “Analysts have long talked about the end of an American-led system and the arrival of an Asian century,” he observed: “This is now happening in front of our eyes.”

Borrell also made clear that the continental bloc will choose neutrality, stating that “the pressure to choose sides is growing. As the EU, we should follow our own interests and values and avoid being instrumentalised by one or the other.” Merkel last week emphasised that Europe has a “great strategic interest” in maintaining its relationship with China, and warned that “we Europeans will need to recognise the decisiveness with which China will claim a leading position in the existing structures of the international architecture”.

France, too, will safeguard its own national interests rather than those of the disordered hegemon. Its Foreign Minister, Yves Le Drian, reassured the French Senate last week that ”regarding China, I do not think we should be locked into a logic of confrontation bipolar world. To not start a second Cold War we must affirm Europe’s autonomy.”

In a Chinese readout of a conversation between Macron’s chief diplomatic advisor Emmanuelle Bonne and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Bonne is stated as affirming “France’s readiness to step up strategic communication with China, strengthen mutual trust and maintain coordination in the multilateral arena,” and assuring China that “France respects China’s sovereignty, appreciates the sensitivity of Hong Kong-related issues, and has no intention of interfering in Hong Kong affairs.”

While this may be a popular tactic with European voters — a recent ECFR poll across EU countries shows that the vast majority support neutrality in a conflict between China and the United States — history has a habit of forcing itself on even the least willing protagonists, highlighting the potential fractures within Europe.

While the Baltic states and Poland depend on America for security from Russia, and will likely remain faithful allies, the EU’s Western liberal democracies are ironically more likely to incline towards China, or at least adopt a pose of studied neutrality.

While Germany’s Atlanticist thinktank class is committed to the American alliance with an emotional passion not seen elsewhere in Europe, the country’s powerful business lobbies are drawn towards China as the growing economic engine of the world, creating an unresolvable tension within the country’s foreign policy.

Merkel may view the European Union as little more than the geopolitical wing of the German car industry, but Macron’s France likely sees the coming great power confrontation as a means to accelerate European autonomy, attempt to incorporate Russia as a security partner, and by weakening both superpowers afford more space to extract rewards for cooperation by playing both rivals against each other.

China’s soft power efforts have played well in Italy: despite being the source of the virus, and doing much to exacerbate its lethal spread, it has manouevred itself into a position of most trusted ally, eclipsing the EU itself, and creating a dangerous moment for European unity. The Channel will only keep growing wider then, as America’s internal political conflict drags us deeper into its chaos, and the eastward shift of economic gravity pulls our closest neighbours towards Beijing’s new order.

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America is the greatest story ever told

By Tom Holland

In Europe’s east, China has invested in infrastructural projects like the highspeed rail link from Greece, where it has bought the busy port of Piraeus, to Budapest, linking the Balkans to its trans-Eurasian Belt and Road initiative.

The likely framing of the superpower confrontation as an ideological battle between democracy and authoritarianism will not necessarily work in America’s favour in a Central Europe successfully dismantling liberal norms.

In a fiery speech last week on the centenary of the Treaty of Trianon, Viktor Orban seemed to reposition Hungary in the Chinese camp, exulting that “ The United States is no longer alone on the throne of the world, Eurasia is rebuilding with full throttle,” and declaring that “a new order is being born. In our world, in our lives as well, great changes are banging on our gates.” The EU will therefore find it difficult to strike a common position on China, opening up the continent to influence campaigns from both sides, and deepening political instability.

Merkel may have launched a campaign to use this crisis to Make Europe Strong Again, but to be torn between two great powers struggling to establish their respective spheres of influence is not a comfortable place to be. As Borrell nervously remarked to the German ambassadors this week, “it is fashionable to say that we are reaching a Thucydides moment. Let’s hope not!”

The United Kingdom is, then, placed in a difficult position. The timing of this crisis so soon after Brexit is unfortunate: dependent on trade deals with both China and the United States to make good the loss of our European markets, we are likely to be forced to choose one, and bear the reprisals of the other. The Chinese government is unfortunately only being truthful when it warns us, through its flagship newspaper, that “while the UK is no doubt hoping that toeing the US line … will help it gain a favorable trade deal with the United States, with which it began negotiations this month, the benefits are likely to be offset by the losses.”

The Global Britain fantasy of notionally right-wing Brexiteers was always parasitic on the American-led order maintaining access to Asian markets for us: a vision dubious at the time of the 2016 vote, and already vanished in 2020. As Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London notes in a recent survey of Britain’s unpalatable foreign policy options, our postwar supposed role was “a position within an international system that was ordered and stable, but that no longer exists”.

But instead of quietly reflecting on their role in dragging us into this disaster, Britain’s prominent neoliberals are instead promoting the absurd idea of importing Hong Kong’s three million British Nationals (Overseas) to a yet-to-be-built megacity on unused marginal land, surely the least thought-out program of imperial population resettlement on these islands since the Plantation of Ulster.

Removing Beijing’s political opponents en masse presents not the slightest threat to the Chinese regime, and instead strengthens it. It may lock us into a permanent state of tension with China unlikely to end in our favour. This is not serious foreign policy, but empty signalling primarily  for domestic purposes, Palmerston’s civis romanus sum speech for a country that has decommissioned all its gunboats. So much for Global Britain: halfway through 2020 it has already shrunk to a speculative high-rise refugee camp in North Lincolnshire.

What options are available to us in the real world? They are very limited indeed. As Freedman asserts: “No wonder the British foreign policy establishment is at a loss about what to do next… if the new big project is containing China, it is one in which the interests of the two countries do not wholly coincide and to which the United Kingdom could make only a limited contribution.”

Yet neither can we aim for strategic autonomy, because, “British intelligence and defense capabilities are deeply intertwined with American ones, and it would not be easy to disentangle them in short order. The most substantial recent investments, including in Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines, Queen Elizabeth–class aircraft carriers, and F-35 fighter jets, all rely on U.S. technology and facilities.”

The MoD’s recent program of military modernisation, paid for by winnowing down our troop numbers to dangerous low levels and carried out with the ostensible aim of enhancing our global reach in a world of greater strategic competition, has therefore only cemented our dependence on a declining hegemon. British politicians would do well, then, to match our rhetoric against China to our actual capabilities. If this is indeed the dawn of the Chinese century, our strategic considerations should look far beyond the headline-grabbing soundbites of the moment, plotting the onerous path ahead in decades rather than news cycles.

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Can India keep China at bay?

By Tim Marshall

A closer relationship with Europe might seem attractive, if Brexit had not poisoned the waters: but a Europe torn between Chinese and American influence will be a difficult relationship to maintain, if our closest neighbours maintain their links with China while we align with the United States for the sake of Hong Kong, or simply of nostalgia for better times. The practical and moral arguments against deepening relations with China are clear and compelling: yet those against tying our nation’s fate to that of a rapidly declining power merit serious consideration.

The handling of the Covid crisis has not enhanced our government’s reputation for either foresight or planning capability. Serious debate is needed before we are distractedly hurried into a generational struggle against a vastly superior opponent, with only an unreliable and now increasingly unstable ally for support.

In terms of the models they set for us, we are presented with a battle between two rival dysfunctional systems: where China’s foreign policy is excessively cynical and self-serving, America’s is excessively naïve and inept. China’s domestic politics suffers from an excess of stability, culminating in totalitarianism; but America’s from an excess of volatility, culminating in chaos.

The right balance for us is surely somewhere in the middle, maintaining as cordial a relationship as we can with each party, while ensuring as much individual freedom of action as possible, and as much strategic, economic and supply chain autonomy as can hurriedly be rebuilt after three decades of historic profligacy. Our future will not be autarkic, but it will be far closer to autarky, as much by necessity as by choice, as any mainstream commentator would have imagined just two months ago.

Britain reached its diplomatic height in an earlier period of multipolarity, during the long years between the Congress of Vienna and the Battle of Sedan when, as the most cynical and relentlessly self-serving actor on the world stage, we played rival powers against each other and avoided foreign entanglements as far as possible.

As Palmerston remarked in 1848, in a bon mot borrowed by both de Gaulle and Kissinger, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Our interests now are to get through the coming decades of strife as safely, securely and peacefully as we can. It is no great hardship to quietly abandon our permanent subordinate role in a Transatlantic alliance that has not, in recent years, served us well. The Special Relationship was always an unrequited passion, and America’s postwar hegemony the merest blip in our history.

In Freedman’s survey of Britain’s now urgent foreign policy dilemma, he suggests that “the country enjoys relative security as an island at the more tranquil end of the Eurasian landmass, with a decent economy, a moderate climate, and a high standard of living. Because of this, the case for a quiet life, for steering clear of trouble elsewhere, is not so unreasonable that it can be dismissed out of hand.”

This is the case for national Hobbitism, and it is an attractive one. It is not immediately clear that Japan or Switzerland or Sweden are worse models for us than America or China. To our nation as much as to the individual families of which it is composed, Covid has unleashed a world suddenly filled with hardship and danger, where the familiar has become filled with risk and threat we are unable, on our own, to manage. We may think of it as the sensible precaution of societal distancing: quietly withdrawing from a threatening world, completing the necessary domestic repairs we long put off, and waiting watchfully for better times.

This, in a nutshell, is the difference between the political and the scientific ways of thinking. Over the past eight weeks, on Lockdown TV, I have interviewed scientists and experts who sometimes disagree sharply with each other, but there’s a humility in their answers that is entirely absent from politics. Generally speaking, they accept that there’s much that they don’t know; very few things in science are anyone’s “fault”; instead scientists use odd words like “stochasticity”, referring to the fundamentally unpredictable aspect of nature.

The very different effects Covid-19 is having in different parts of the world are still not well understood, except as part of a complex context including pre-existing immunities and resistances, underlying health levels, demography, community and transport structures, perhaps even ethnicity and climate. Nobody really understands why it has not really taken off in sub-Saharan Africa, or why despite fears for Florida’s older population that state has not yet been badly hit, or why Japan has fared so well, despite its half-hearted government interventions.

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Which epidemiologist do you believe?

By Freddie Sayers

What we do know is that the virus started in China, that it was exported by air travel, that there was already community transmission in Europe and probably America as early as December. London and New York are the two busiest global travel hubs in the world — Heathrow alone had over 20 million passengers pass through it in December, January and February — so knowing nothing else you would expect these two places to be among the worst affected. In one of very few predictable outcomes, they have indeed suffered the world’s two worst outbreaks.

The political argument has zeroed in on the idea that the UK and the US should have acted earlier within the month of March, by 10 days or two weeks. Through a combination of shutting their borders, locking down earlier and ramping up testing and tracing, everything could have been different, or so the argument goes. We’ll never know for sure, but it seems oddly credulous to think that that short period was a silver bullet that would have changed everything — countries that did ban flights from China early, such as Italy and the US, were hardly spared.

Analysis

Coronavirus doesn't care about politics

By Tom Chivers

Back in March, the UK Government was still following its longstanding plan, endorsed by its scientific advisors — it is not spoken about much these days, but it is still there on the website if you fancy looking it up. It was based on the now-heretical principle that there would come a point when containment (with its testing and tracing) would no longer be viable, at which moment we would move to simply  ‘delay’ as much as possible and then ‘mitigate’. That is why contact tracing and community testing were dropped: it was always the plan. Some scientists still think this original approach was the sensible one, but faced with the alarming projections from Imperial College on March 16, the Government understandably ditched it.

To those who say that they should have seen what was happening in Italy, there remains the awkward fact that Neil Ferguson’s projections, based almost entirely on what was happening in Italy, didn’t materialise either. The revised Government plan was precisely designed to avoid becoming like Italy, with its horrible images of overflowing hospitals and triages in car parks — and that meant two urgent things: acquiring ventilators and increasing hospital capacity.

Off Matt Hancock went, brimming with rather more energy then than he has today, trying to succeed in his two big goals. But while the epidemic arrived, and with it a tragic number of deaths, it didn’t behave as expected. Remember the great ventilator race? As many ventilators as our good British companies could make, the Government would buy! Dyson, Rolls Royce and dozens of less glamorous and probably more relevant factories started frantically “re-tooling” for what the Prime Minister grimly dubbed “Operation Last Gasp”.

Turns out, they weren’t needed. Not only did the advertised wave of Covid patients never arrive in the promised number, it became clear that ventilation wasn’t the universally effective treatment everyone had thought. Reports emerged from New York that 88% of patients put on ventilators were dying; for many patients it turned out to be better to simply lie them on their front without ventilation. So the official number of extra ventilators the Government needed dwindled from 30,000, to 18,000, to 12,000 and then, quietly, to zero. James Dyson was sent back to his vacuum cleaners.

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Our dangerous addiction to prediction

By Stuart Ritchie

As for all those additional hospital beds that the situation in Italy implied we would need — the virus once again had other plans. In a huge Government-led effort, routine procedures were suspended, people were urged to avoid hospital, and existing patients were cleared out of wards. The Nightingale Hospital in East London was opened on time with its 4,000 additional beds, and thousands of further additional beds were created around the country in other Nightingale facilities.

From this unprecedented effort close to zero beds were ever used; these hospitals are perhaps the only example in history of a highly expensive and entirely unused government facility escaping any media criticism. As it turned out, the frantic preparing-for-Italy action plan may have only made things worse, as it led to additional avoidable deaths from other untreated conditions and accidentally seeded devastating secondary infections in care homes.

So, first the flu-like pandemic we had been initially well prepared for didn’t happen; then the Italy-style crisis that we subsequently prepared for with impressive speed didn’t happen either. All these well-intentioned government action plans, scrutinised by the political media, ended up struggling to be relevant amid a pandemic that defied prediction.

Fast forward to today and the big government action plan is now “test and trace” (they seem to have dropped the ‘track’ part, presumably because polling revealed people didn’t want to be tracked). Across the political divide, everyone is signed up to it — it seems modern and proactive and the “winning” countries have done it, so the only question apparently worth asking now is whether or not it will be well-enough implemented. But what are the chances that this plan, like all those earlier plans, ends up creating a lot of noise and finger-pointing but not making much difference to the trajectory of the disease?

I spoke to experts in South Korea and Hong Kong, the countries that pioneered the ‘test, track, trace’ method, and it seems clear that, even more than earlier initiatives, playing whack-a-mole with a virus in this way requires a coming together of surveillance, technology and buy-in from a biddable public. It also requires a manageable number of cases: it has worked in Asian countries as a way of keeping the virus out but it has never been tried in a scenario like the UK which has had millions of infections already and where the virus is now endemic.

Watch

Coronavirus doesn't care about politics

By UnHerd

Take South Korea, often held up as the example we should follow. Jerome Kim, Director General of the International Vaccine Institute based in Seoul, told me how on the back of a single individual infecting people in a nightclub the authorities ended up testing 65,000 people. They found 175 connected infections, some of them three or four ‘generations’ away from the original event. Yesterday, on day one of our equivalent scheme, we identified nearly 2,000 new separate infections nationwide, and the ONS estimated that 133,000 people are currently infected — to be as thorough as the Koreans, we would have to be testing the entire UK population every day.

Even in South Korea they are not finding it easy. In the Seoul nightclub example they had to allow people to come forward anonymously (it was a gay club) and then threaten police visitation if they didn’t — bear in mind this is a country which allows government surveillance of both mobile phone GPS data and credit card transactions to establish people’s whereabouts. In Hong Kong, which has also kept the virus at bay, the authorities send people to ‘quarantine camps’ for mandatory isolation.

The UK situation is not comparable. Even without our higher infection levels, we don’t have an all-powerful tech-enabled command-and-control government, and aside from some members of the cabinet, nobody wants one. Test and trace UK-style consists of thousands of hastily-trained agency workers asking infected people who they remember being with, then calling those people up and asking them politely to self-isolate for 14 days. No quarantine facilities, no app (yet), no police enforcement. It’s something to be getting on with, I suppose, but does anyone truly believe this will keep a highly contagious, already endemic virus, contained?

Much more likely, the virus will continue on its trajectory upwards or downwards and it won’t have much to do with government policy. If the estimates that only 7% of the population are immune are correct, and the virus is as contagious now as it ever was, we’ll soon know about it. As it is, with summer upon us, the virus seems to be in retreat everywhere across Europe. If the downward trajectory continues, it won’t be thanks to the ‘test and trace’ call centres.

Meanwhile, if Covid-19 does comes back with force later in the year, it will be because seasonal elements have combined to make it more contagious and effective, and our test and trace system, especially if it’s rusty by then after a long summer in abeyance, stands little chance of defending against it. We’ll soon be back to Plan A, focusing on providing medical care to the sick.

So as you read, in coming weeks, furious news stories about technical incompetence, citizen non-compliance, threats of stricter enforcement and blame in all directions — as if everything was hanging on the latest government policy — remember the humility of scientists instead of the solipsism of the political class. Yes, the Government action plan will most likely be ineffective, but politicians were never in charge of this anyway. It’s bigger than they are — the best they could ever hope to do is tinker around the edges. Coronavirus is nobody’s ‘fault’.

“This is a virus that has taken more than 200,000 lives across the world. It has shut down the global economy. The implications and impacts of this are extraordinary. Now it would seem entirely reasonable and sensible that the world would want to have an independent assessment of how all this occurred, so we can learn the lessons and prevent it from happening again.”

The answer is simple: China. For this sensible suggestion was enough to drive Beijing into fury. Admittedly, it was made amid a long-running feud between the two countries with strong words on both sides, threats of a consumer boycott from Beijing’s ambassador and a furore over leaked diplomatic conversations. “Australia is always there, making trouble,” blogged Hu Xijin, editor of Global Times, a brash tabloid that serves as Beijing’s attack dog. “It is a bit like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes. Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.”

Yet the Australian leader is correct. It makes perfect sense to determine how this disease broke out, then spread around the world so rapidly to cause such epic devastation — especially when it is still not clear precisely when, where or why it erupted in human beings. I have heard the same suggestion from Right-wing Tory MPs through to Left-wing human rights lawyers. Or listen to Winston Peters, New Zealand’s deputy prime minister: “It’s very hard to conceive of there not being a desire by every country in world, including the country of origin, for an investigation to find out how this happened,” he said.

But China opposes such an inquiry. A probe could expose the embarrassing truth about the source — whether a wild animal market in Wuhan, or one of two secretive laboratories working nearby with bats and coronaviruses. It might reveal more about the Communist Party’s crackdown on whistleblowing doctors, rejection of outside offers to investigate the emerging virus and cover-up of data. Officials have raised death numbers in Wuhan after global criticism. But it still seems strange that 13 flights with 2,990 passengers from Wuhan to Italy over the critical three-month period helped cause such contagion in Europe yet 7,530 flights containing 1,016,550 passengers to elsewhere in China sparked far fewer fatalities there.

China’s leaders are behaving like a big playground bully. They are throwing their weight around with threats to thwart an international investigation that might expose weaknesses inherent in a brutal dictatorship that does not permit dissent. Morrison deserves credit for standing firm — unlike our own political masters, who just mutter about the need for “hard questions“. He was the first leader of a major nation to raise valid issues over Huawei’s involvement in telecoms infrastructure. He has pushed hard for reform of the risible World Health Organisation. Yet China accounts for a big chunk of Australia’s trade as its biggest market for key sectors such as coal, beef, wine, tourism and education.

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For China, a legal reckoning is coming

By Guglielmo Verdirame

This is more than simply another diplomatic spat. Closer to home, it has emerged that China complained three times to the European Union in a bid to blunt a report on its disinformation efforts, warning that bilateral relations could suffer if Brussels dared accuse Beijing of exploiting the coronavirus crisis. Criticism was toned down as a result, according to reports, following some furious internal rows. Mention of a “global disinformation campaign” was dropped from public documents, although there were still softer allegations of covert operations on social media. Yet we know its officials tried to shift blame for the outbreak to both Italy and the United States.

Meanwhile, there have also been shenanigans in the South China Seas, where China has been making claims over vast areas of the ocean by building naval bases on coral reefs. The New York Times reported last week how it has been intimidating fishing boats from other nations, opening new ‘research stations’ equipped with military-grade runways and grabbing new chunks of contested reefs and rocks. Some are submerged, so would fail to confer rights under international law. “The Chinese want to create a new normal in the South China Sea, where they are in charge, and to do that they’ve become more and more aggressive,” said Alexander Vuving, a security expert in Honolulu.

There has also been a crackdown in Hong Kong, where brave protesters last year made clear their desperation to retain freedoms promised under the ‘one country, two systems’ deal negotiated during handover from Britain. Among the activists and politicians rounded up earlier this month was Martin Lee, the affable 81-year-old father of democracy who testified to British MPs how that agreement was designed to ensure “no Hong Kong resident would have to fear a midnight knock on the door”. Jimmy Lai, who founded an outspoken paper in the territory, was also arrested in tactics clearly designed to silence critics and deter further protests.

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Is China preparing for war?

By Maajid Nawaz

These moves demonstrate China’s assertiveness under Xi Jinping, who took power eight years ago. He has intensified domestic repression, seen most starkly with the hideous incarceration of Muslim minorities and ratcheting up of surveillance. He has stepped up pressure on other nations to have no truck with Taiwan, which helped lead to the world ignoring this small democratic nation’s early warnings on the virus. Now his army of diplomats even argue that “disregarding China’s huge sacrifice in the fight against Covid 19 is slander“, as one envoy told a British newspaper.

This is all part of his bullish strategy to “charge forward with a full tank” — as Xi put it to party acolytes two years ago when they backed his plan to retain control for life. “The Chinese people have understood since ancient times that there are no free things to enjoy,” said Xi, warning the National People’s Congress that the world might not accept their rise to supremacy. “To be happy, one must fight for it.”

Now he has unleashed ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ that fires off fierce insults at governments that cross his country, while any corporation that fails to follow Beijing’s diktats on Taiwan or Hong Kong faces being frozen out of the world’s biggest market.

With immense skill, China’s Communist leadership exploited the world’s desire for cheap goods in order to lift millions of its people from poverty while strengthening their own power. Now we can see clearly this ruthless regime’s determination to dominate the post-pandemic global order, speeding up its drive for ascendancy over the West. Xi clearly intends to grab maximum commercial and diplomatic advantage after emerging early from a catastrophe that exploded from within his own borders, while also capitalising on a gaping void left by the United States under its infantile president.

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We've cosied up to China for too long

By Nick Timothy

This is why the tussle over establishing the truth about this virus matters. I accept that some politicians are attacking China as a diversion from their own dismal failures over pandemic. But Beijing’s propaganda machine is running at full tilt to push the belief their response was best, since this promotes the idea that their autocratic style of government is most effective in crisis. It is worth noting, incidentally, that so fast does this virus spread, one study claimed two-thirds of cases might have been eliminated if Wuhan had been locked down one week earlier – and 95% averted if action had been taken three weeks earlier when Beijing alerted the WHO.

Yet this is also a battle to protect Xi at a time of potential weakness. There have been unusual ripples of dissent over his handling of the virus, along with hints that some party princelings harbour doubts over his leadership. There is also a looming recession that may stymie the scale of growth promised to the masses, hitting their promise to double the size of the economy in a decade and banish extreme poverty in time for next year’s centenary of the party’s birth on a boat in a Zhejiang lake.

These are insanely challenging times everywhere with pandemic raging. It has been made worse by the fact it strikes the planet at a moment when a pair of pugnacious nationalists are in charge of the two mightiest nations. The fuss over the WHO, botching a pandemic from the start due to its boss being a Beijing stooge, exposes how China has been seeking stealthily to influence multilateral bodies. Yet in truth it is only mimicking the West’s traditional tactics at a time when many key democratic nations — including our own — have lost confidence in their own values and look so confused about their beliefs. Only the wildest of optimists might dare hope that we will emerge from this sudden plunge into darkness with renewed strength.

We must accept China’s rise, not fight it nor fear it. We should see their concerns, work with their firms, learn from their culture, understand their politics. But at the same time we should follow the lead set by Australia and stand firm in the face of bullying — especially when it comes from Communist Party chiefs trying to escape blame for global pain. Yes, they are far from alone in making deadly mistakes over this disease, as we know to our cost in Britain. But their bungling is a consequence of autocracy, It almost certainly inflicted and most definitely intensified the suffering that has infected the whole world. We need to find the truth if possible. For as the great George Orwell wrote, whoever controls the past controls the future.

It is a struggle no government wants to see escalate. More realistic than its Western counterparts, the Chinese leadership shows few signs of believing the conflict can be definitively resolved any time soon. Incremental concessions and large-scale repression both carry high levels of risk for Xi Jinping’s regime. The ideal end-state for Beijing is probably long-term containment. But the situation in the former colony is not stable, and it is difficult to exaggerate the impact that suppressing the protestors by force would have on China’s position in the world.

It is often pointed out that Hong Kong’s economic importance has dwindled with the rise of mainland cities such as Shanghai. But this leaves out how much two-system governance shapes global perceptions of China and its future. Xi’s progress towards a neo-totalitarian surveillance state has deflated the Western elites’ confidence that China is on a path of slow evolution towards liberal democracy. Yet the fantasy still lingers. The likelihood that China will be an authoritarian great power in any realistically imaginable future is too disturbing to contemplate.

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It is worth recalling the comforting tale on which Western governments have modelled China’s development. The country was getting rapidly richer, and while average incomes remained low by international standards, the middle class was steadily growing. This process of embourgeoisement would lead to stronger demands for democratic freedoms, and China would become ever more like the West. Embedded in practically every Western government and regularly invoked by the Western businesses that operate in China, this is a story with almost no basis in reality.

It is true that the rise of the middle classes in early 19th-century Europe coincided with an expansion of liberal freedoms in some countries. This was the main thrust of Marx’s analysis of bourgeois democracy. (A little-noted aspect of recent liberal thinking is that it relies heavily on a crude version of Marxian class analysis.) But there is nothing in the historical record that says the middle classes are inherently a force promoting liberalism. In the late 19th century, they backed the restoration of monarchy and empire in France and militarism In Prussia. In the early 20th century, large sections of the European middle classes embraced ethnic nationalism and then fascism. There was not much sign of the freedom-loving bourgeoisie in interwar Europe.

While it is so far less developed, a similar pattern of bourgeois support for illiberal politics has emerged in many European countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Across the continent, far-Right parties enjoy the support of significant sections of the middle classes. In America, Trump’s constituency includes many from precarious middle income groups.

So, the linkage between the middle classes and liberal values is tenuous throughout Western countries. In the UK and other English-speaking countries, it is middle class students, professors and administrators that have shut down freedom of inquiry and expression in higher education. Woke capitalism and much of the mainstream media are continuing this trend. Threatened by what they call populism, bourgeois liberals have ditched the values that once defined them. Far from being a universal law, middle class support for liberalism looks like a brief historical accident.

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Another version of the story about China inevitably evolving towards liberal values focuses on those values’ role in underpinning prosperity. In this view, which is still received wisdom among mainstream economists, state-directed economies cannot sustain the continuous economic growth that is necessary for political stability.

Once again, this has little basis in reality. Central planning in the Soviet Union and Maoist China was a disaster, but from a longer historical perspective, dirigiste economic management has done remarkably well. Before the Great War, tsarist Russia had one of the fastest growing economies in the world. During the Meiji Restoration (1868-1890) Japan industrialised without importing anything like free markets or individualist values. The four Asian tigers — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — all displayed dirigiste features during their most rapid periods of development.

At this point, liberal economists invariably invoke a theory about stages of economic development. Dirigiste methods may work in emerging economies, they tell us, but underperform as economies become more mature. Continuing growth requires rapid innovation in technology and business models, and this is impossible when economic life is state-directed. A flourishing knowledge-based economy necessarily requires political freedom.

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Why this must be so is never explained. China is matching or surpassing Western countries when it comes to AI, robotics, bio-science and other areas of science and technology. Why shouldn’t this state of affairs continue? Economists reply that China’s lead will shrink if the tilt to authoritarianism continues. In that event, economic growth will slow, and the legitimacy of Xi’s regime will dwindle. Unless liberalising reforms are introduced, the regime will eventually implode.

This a confession of faith, not an empirically-based prediction. There has never before been an experiment like that which Xi is conducting at the present time, so there are no precedents on which to ground a forecast. Economic growth may slow as China becomes more authoritarian, or it may not. Even if it does, the regime may not lose much in popular support. Anti-Western nationalism and a state cult promoting the superiority of Chinese civilisation may compensate for a slower rise in living standards.

The condition of Western countries will be important. If they are politically gridlocked, ravaged by culture wars and backward in science and technology, Xi’s regime could credibly claim superiority in meeting the needs of a modern population. To be sure, there would be little or no freedom of expression or privacy. Troublesome minorities would suffer hideous repression. But for the majority, China would be a real-life version of Huxley’s brave new world, in which dissent is engineered out of existence. What reason is there for thinking such a system could not survive Xi and last for decades?

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A digression on Russia may be useful here. To include Putin’s regime in the same category as Xi’s betrays deep confusion. Both are authoritarian and increasingly anti-Western, but that is pretty much all they have in common. It is not only that one is a fast-shrinking economy, the other an economy that is advancing and expanding. The power structures of the two countries are very different.

Xi’s China is a high-tech totalitarian regime governed by the disciplinary institutions of the Communist party. His is not the collective communist leadership practised in China in the past; it is more like Stalin’s style of governance, though less sanguinary. But China retains an institutional backbone in the party, while Russia is a semi-failed state kept going by deals among oligarchs brokered through Putin. Even if Xi’s regime were to flounder, it would almost certainly be replaced by another authoritarian order. Post-Putin Russia could conceivably enter a protracted period of instability or near-anarchy.

There is a deeper difference between the two countries, which brings us back to the crisis in Hong Kong: they are anti-Western in very contrasting ways. Under Putin, Russia has abandoned any Westernising of the kind that was attempted by earlier leaders, from Peter the Great to Lenin, Stalin to Gorbachev. This anti-Western stance may come from personal pique at having been deceived by Western promises not to encroach on Russia’s near-abroad, made to Putin by Western governments during his early years as president. But the assertion that Russia embodies a separate civilisation in a time of Western decadence — which he has often made — is not novel. Though Putin is too much of a realist to be a mystical Slavophil, the tenor of his thinking would be congenial to Dostoyevsky and was welcomed by Solzhenitsyn.

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If Putin has turned away from emulating the West, Xi’s stance is more ambiguous. His is a regime indebted to the West in many ways. Xi’s surveillance state originates not with Confucius or Lao Tse but the 19th-century British Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a design for a rational prison. Where Russia belongs in the Counter-Enlightenment, China exemplifies the illiberal Western tradition of enlightened despotism.

On visits to China, I have found regime-friendly intellectuals studying Western thinkers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and the Nazi-era jurist Carl Schmitt. What these intellectuals are looking for is not a universal model, but guidance in navigating China’s path through the world. In the West, Enlightenment universalism is a continuation of monotheism. There is no indigenous monotheist tradition in China. Daoism may posit a mystical nothingness underlying the universe, but nothing like a transcendental God laying down morality for all of humankind. The secular evangelism of the Enlightenment is as alien to Chinese traditions as the Christian mission of universal salvation.

What has the absence of monotheism in China to do with the crisis in Hong Kong? Quite a bit, in fact. Beijing is not advancing a “Chinese model” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Provided other countries respect Chinese power, China does not care what type of government they practice. Xi may have founded Confucius institutes throughout the world, but they promote the innate superiority of Chinese culture rather than any missionary campaign of conversion. China has shown no signs of wishing to govern the countries that it has succeeded in incorporating into its global sphere of influence. Whether it be in Africa or Australasia, local politics are relevant only inasmuch as they impact on China’s interests. Xi’s China is unquestionably an imperial power, but it is not driven by any civilising mission.

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The implications for Hong Kong are reasonably clear. A large-scale crackdown would negatively affect global perceptions of China, but Beijing will assess the damage in strategic not ideological terms. The cost would include capital flight to Singapore (which is already underway), reduced foreign investment on the mainland and a significant setback in global stock markets. It is these risks that hold Beijing back from deploying heavy-duty force.

What a major crackdown would do to China’s human rights record is of marginal significance, if any, to Beijing. It is the West — not China’s leadership — that has been beguiled by a theory of development in which the final stage is a liberal democracy that protects individual freedom.

China will crush protest in Hong Kong when it concludes that the costs of doing so are less than those of letting it rumble on. Factored into its calculations will be the fact that major instability in Xi’s regime would have highly disruptive consequences for Western economies. Sooner or later, Xi will conclude that mass repression in Hong Kong will bring little lasting danger to his regime.

For China, 2019 was just another year. For the West, it was the year in which its illusions regarding China’s political future began finally to unravel. The belief that China is evolving to become what the West once imagined itself to be is already history.

Despite being the former colonial power, and therefore with unique historic, legal and moral responsibilities to Hong Kong, the UK has taken a notably more circumspect line on the ongoing protests than many of its allies, including the US, the EU, Canada and Australia.

Hong Kong’s Basic Law falls under Beijing’s authority, but it was established under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, to which Beijing and London are equal signatories. This treaty paved the way for the transfer of sovereignty from the UK to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. As one of the two guarantors, the UK has a legal stake in Hong Kong until 2047, when the provisions of the treaty cease.

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Having arranged the transfer of sovereignty of more than six million Hong Kong residents to Communist China — in effect handing back a refugee people to a repressive and authoritarian regime from which they had fled — there is also a strong case that the UK has a moral obligation to ensure that the people are not mistreated. One Country, Two Systems, the central principle of the Joint Declaration, is meant to safeguard the core freedoms and way of life enjoyed by Hong Kong people. It is more than just a guarantee to the business community that the city’s economic system would run free from interference from Communist China. It is also, and more significantly, a guarantee to the Hong Kong people, who denied a say in their future, might still have faith in their future.

Hong Kong is the only former UK colony that has not been allowed to decolonise. Repeated attempts to democratise Hong Kong and to establish genuine self-government, once in the 1950s and twice in the 1960s, were thwarted by Beijing, which then, as now, will not contemplate the existence of a Chinese political system independent of the Chinese Communist Party. Not only did successive UK and colonial governments acquiesce, it is also alleged that UK foreign office officials aided the Chinese in promoting the party narrative, including the rigging of a 1987 public consultation to make it seem as if the people of Hong Kong didn’t care so much about democracy.

What’s more, before 1981, the people of Hong Kong had the right to live and work in the UK. Without consultation, the British Nationality Act ended this, transferring Hong Kong people to a second-tier British National (Overseas) status with neither residency nor working rights. Even worse, even this limited status cannot be passed on to children born after 1997.

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In addition to its legal and moral responsibilities, the UK also has a responsibility to safeguard its significant and continuing interests in Hong Kong. There are more than 30,000 UK nationals living in the city, and more than 170,000 British Nationals (Overseas). In August a UK consular employee was detained on what were almost certainly political grounds; and UK businesses, both UK and Hong Kong based, have come under unprecedented political pressure.

Beijing has publicly demanded that Cathay Pacific — under threat of denying their flights into Chinese airspace — provide lists of employees who have privately supported the protests, and then forcing a change in senior management, including the replacing of the company’s chief exectuive, when the company attempted to stay neutral. The company has now sacked employees for expressing support for the protests, including pilots and the head of the cabin crew union.

Other blue-chip UK companies, including Swire and HSBC, have come under similar pressure. State-run media are making no secret that Hong Kong-based UK companies are being targeted. With the Hong Kong public and all levels of businesses in the city facing similar pressures, the capitulation of the UK’s remaining “Hongs” — companies symbolic of Hong Kong — helps foster an environment of fear.

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Beijing has also repeatedly made unfounded accusations of the UK (and US) acting as a “black hand” behind the protests. It has publicly refuted the UK’s legal and diplomatic right, in line with international norms, to comment on the situation, and in private has repeatedly ignored requests for meetings. The Chinese Embassy has also threatened the UK with “serious consequences” should it speak out on Hong Kong.

China has changed fundamentally under President Xi. It is increasingly difficult to give China the benefit of doubt as it becomes more assertive, authoritarian and repressive. Beijing publicly acts against UK rights and interests, and attempts to hijack the narrative — the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, is the latest in a line of regulators to investigate Chinese state-run media over reporting on Hong Kong. A campaign of public misinformation can only be countered publicly: the UK must act to frame public understanding on Hong Kong and present its perspective on UK-China relations.

As a long-time and central player in many international organisations, not least a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UK has the diplomatic influence, connections and know-how to build and utilise international pressure. This was well demonstrated in the way the UK was able to first confront and then apply pressure to Russia following the Skripal poisonings.

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Beijing has unilaterally declared the Joint Declaration, a legally binding international treaty, a “historic document” of no continuing significance, and Hong Kong to be a purely internal issue. It has actively sought to deny other countries from commenting on Hong Kong, and to silence the voices of Hong Kong people even when invited to speak by international bodies; Chinese diplomats routinely interrupt diplomatic proceedings. All of this represents a significant break from the international rules-based system, so a challenge to Beijing’s position on Hong Kong would be keenly resisted.

Domestically, the UK should consider reviewing the status of British Nationals (Overseas), to expand their rights, and the rights of their families. This need not mean residency, but could include a long-stay working visa to provide an option should the situation in Hong Kong continue to worsen. The BNO is more than a passport: it is a form of British national status, and should be an issue for the UK to decide.

The UK has a uniquely important connection to Hong Kong and its people. It is a connection in law, from a shared history and in moral responsibility. It is also a connection through the more than 200,000 British nationals, including BNOs, who continue to live and identify with Hong Kong. UK engagement with the Hong Kong question is not only in the UK’s interest, but is also in the interests of Hong Kong and China, both immediate and in the long term.

An increasingly debt-laden China needs access to international capital markets, and it knows that this is only possible with Hong Kong’s freedom of information and expression, and rule of law. It knows that these freedoms and institutions cannot just be set up or switched on elsewhere on the mainland — trust takes generations to build. And with trust increasingly breaking down in Hong Kong the longer these protests continue, neither the current situation nor a return to the status quo are a viable option any longer.

At worst, the revelation will reinforce views of the US President as a compulsive property developer for whom everything – even parts of other people’s countries – has a price. At best, it might cast Trump as a President from an earlier age, when the United States was expanding in part by buying its rivals and enemies out.

The practice might seem archaic, but is it worth taking another look at the potential for states to buy land from other states? After all, the US did pretty well out of it. About one-third of the territory that comprises the US today came in exchange for money. Louisiana was bought from Napoleon in 1803; Alaska from Russia in 1867, and money changed hands as part of the treaty under which the US gained the northern half of Mexico in 1848.

As recently as 1917, Woodrow Wilson bought the Danish West Indies and renamed them the US Virgin Islands. If you go right back to beginnings, Dutch colonists bought the island of Manhattan for a pittance from native American tribesmen in 1626.

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Nor, in perhaps seeking to add Greenland to the list, is Trump quite so out of order as it might seem. The US had a plan to buy Greenland at the same time as Alaska in 1867, and the possibility was raised again by President Harry Truman in 1946, when he offered Denmark $100m. And just look at a map, or preferably spin a globe. Would it not make a lot more sense, in sheer practical, geographical, terms, for the place to be run by the United States – or Canada? The US already has a major air base at Thule in the north of the country, with missile early-warning and space surveillance systems, and the changing climate is opening up new shipping routes. In many ways a sale would make eminent sense.

Except that Greenland and Denmark don’t want to give it up – for many of the same reasons, no doubt, that the US President has expressed an interest. With Russia and China eyeing opportunities in the Arctic, Greenland’s strategic significance is obvious. It is rich not just in fish, but in all manner of natural resources, most of which have barely been tapped, but could become more accessible as the ice melts.

And while, as Trump pointed out, Denmark already foots quite a bill for Greenland, there is also the small matter of Danish national pride. To sell the vast territory of Greenland to the United States would suggest that Denmark was strapped for cash, guided by mercenary considerations, and felt so little responsibility for the 57,000 or so residents that it was prepared to “sell” them.

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Such a prospect would also cast doubt on the quality of its democracy. Greenlanders under Danish rule enjoy broad autonomy, and if there is any appetite for change, it is in the direction of full independence rather than a change of owner. The preference of local people was not a consideration when the United States was expanding; it would be now.

That Denmark is not about to sell Greenland, however, should not mean that the idea of selling territory has entirely had its day. It has long seemed to me that in certain cases, a financial element could help in the resolution of territorial disputes – not all, by any means, but some, and especially those that have arisen as legacies of empire.

Crimea would be an obvious candidate. Soon after Russia illegally annexed the territory in 2014, no less a figure than former UK foreign secretary Lord Owen floated the idea that Russia might be permitted to pay for a lease on the territory, on the model of the 1903 US arrangement with Cuba over its base at Guantanamo Bay.

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There would obviously be misgivings about appearing to “reward” Russia for blatant wrong-doing, but the fact is that Crimea’s sovereignty has long been disputed; its transfer to Ukraine in 1954 meant little, because it remained in the then Soviet Union, the majority of its population looks to Russia, and – to put it bluntly – Russia is not going to give it back. So why not make Russia pay – a lot?

It can be argued that Russia is already paying, in the subsidies and investment entailed in reincorporating the territory into Russia. But a sale, or a lease, would be a demonstrative means of compensating Ukraine for the loss, with a lease – even an indefinite lease on the Guantanamo model – probably being more palatable to Ukraine, as it would preserve at least the semblance of territorial integrity.

Still with Russia, a sale – or long lease – is an obvious solution to its dispute with Japan over the Northern Territories (Southern Kurile Islands). The Russian Far East could do with Japanese investment, but this is stalled, because Japan has made the return of the islands a condition of signing a Second World War peace treaty. There have been tentative overtures over the years –the first Japanese tourists are due to arrive in the (uninhabited) Southern Kuriles in October – but so far, Russian national pride has precluded an agreement, and it has not needed the money enough.

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Closer to home, a long – 999-year – lease and the concept of shared sovereignty was the solution favoured by Tony Blair’s government (and before that by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, then Foreign Secretary, in 1971) to end the simmering dispute with Spain over Gibraltar. It was designed to square the circle between the reality of UK administration and Spain’s 300-year-old territorial claim. But the proposed agreement was greeted with cries of “sell-out” when it was sprung on an unsuspecting House of Commons in 2002 and it was finally scuppered by Gibraltarians in a referendum.

This does not mean, however, that a sale or leasing agreement would still not be the best – perhaps the only realistic – solution to such disputes. And there is surely a question as to whether 35,000 Gibraltarians should have been able to veto an arrangement negotiated by an elected government on behalf of tens of millions of UK citizens. Fierce opposition of the local population to any change in sovereignty has also been a block on any settlement with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, still more so since 1982, when Argentina took the territory by force. But could a time not come when a lease or a sale makes sense?

There are other disputes, too, that could be amenable – or at least smoothed along – by a financial element. Such deals might sweeten the land swaps sometimes proposed for small tracts of the former Yugoslavia where an ethnic group has ended up on the “wrong” side of a border. Throwing money at the problem was the principle behind Jared Trump’s – now apparently aborted – plan to rework the stalled Middle East peace process. You can contest the ethics if you like – and many Palestinians did – but given the dismal failure of all other plans hitherto, might not a more mercenarily transactional scheme have some merit?

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An argument can also be made for preferring an outright sale to a lease. The US lease on Guantanamo is indefinite, so almost akin to a sale. The term envisaged for the UK to lease back Gibraltar was 999 years, so a millennium away. But the current protests in Hong Kong graphically illustrate the perils of leases. While the UK held Hong Kong Isla and Kowloon indefinitely, the rest – more than 90% – of the territory was on a 99-lease signed in 1898.

During the 1980s, the UK took the decision that it would hand over all of Hong Kong in 1997, and secured an undertaking from China that Hong Kong’s way of life would be guaranteed – under the formula “one country, two systems” – for 50 years. Now, barely 20 years in, the tensions are clear and the denouement is uncertain. Many Hongkongers feel the UK bears continuing responsibility; but it lacks all power.

Back in Greenland, though, the authorities are cheerful. Rebutting Donald Trump’s interest, serious or no, has afforded the perfect platform to remind the world of its existence. “We’re open for business,” said the country’s Foreign Ministry, “not for sale.”

It might be worth adding: for now.

As far as political protests go, that’s not necessarily so unusual.

Christian organisations have often been at the centre of protests and demands for citizens’ rights. From the Black Church’s central role in the Civil Rights Movement to Catholic backing of Solidarity against Communist rule in Poland, as well as various Church-led pro-democracy campaigns throughout Latin America and Africa, hymns and prayers are often deployed in political confrontations.

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These examples are all taken from areas where the populations are predominantly Christian. Whereas, even though Christianity has been present there since the 1840s, few citizens in Hong Kong claim it as their religion – about 10-12%. And the make-up of the protesters is no different: most of them have likely never stepped foot in a church.

So why the hymns, then?

Some have suggested they are simply easy-to-sing-in-unison songs. Others argue that it is strategic, since the law police use to regulate or disperse public gatherings does not cover religious events.

But beyond these convenient reasons, the song is just one particularly noticeable sign of a much larger reality in the territory: the Church in Hong Kong wields power beyond its numbers, and its power has brought it into conflict with Beijing.

Even though most protesters have probably never gone to a church service, most of them have been pupils in church-founded schools. As was usually the case for many former British colonies, much of the education system in Hong Kong was established by churches during the UK’s long rule, such that today church-founded schools educate over half of all primary and secondary students in Hong Kong.

Many of these schools incorporate religion into their curriculum as a subject of study. With such dominance over education, and other social services as well, the Christian churches of Hong Kong have established their influence among the population, shaping the culture and people. Many Hong Kong residents are therefore familiar with church songs and with weightier aspects of Christianity as well, such as the churches’ outlook on social justice and rights.

And while the protesters, past and present, have not generally been Christians, their leaders have been. Two of the three founders of Occupy Central, one of the main groups leading the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests, are Protestant Christians (one of them is a Reverend). Leading student activist Joshua Wong, who cofounded Scholarism – the predominant student group of the 2014 protests – is a fervent Evangelical whose father heads one of the leading Christian anti-LGBT groups in Hong Kong (the younger Wong has publicly split with his dad’s stance on gay rights but obviously inherited the knack for political activism).

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The Church’s influence extends to the government. Two of the four individuals to occupy the role of Chief Executive of Hong Kong, the highest political office in the territory since the handover to China, have been devout Catholics. This includes the current Executive, Carrie Lam – a Beijing approved politician who has become a target of the protests after she tried to push through the extradition law.

Despite generally being seen as carrying Beijing’s water, Lam has refused to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), essentially placing a ceiling on her own career within the Chinese government, because she would be required to renounce her faith in order to do so.

Lam’s story of competing loyalties embodies the conflict between the Church and the CCP that is being played out across China, and now in Hong Kong.

The CCP has the opportunity to extend its reach into Hong Kong through officials like Lam and policies like the extradition law. But the freedoms of speech, religion and travel afforded to the churches of Hong Kong during the time of British rule – and maintained under the current “one country, two systems” policy – have long allowed the Hong Kong churches to extend their influence into China by both criticising the CCP and supporting illegal underground churches in mainland China. Such actions represent a threat to the Chinese government.

Catholics in mainland China can legally practice their faith only through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a government body that regulates them into a tightly managed and Communist-friendly version of Catholicism. But in Hong Kong, the Catholics are free to practise as they wish – as well as having the freedom to freely criticise the Chinese government.

Much criticism has come from the outspoken Cardinal Joseph Zen (now retired). He rose up the ranks to eventually lead the Church in Hong Kong and spent decades as a human rights advocate, speaking out against the Chinese government’s repressions of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Falun Gong religious movement of the 1990s, and more.

For years, Cardinal Zen and the Hong Kong Catholic hierarchy, backed by the Vatican, also helped support the massive underground Catholic network in China.

Similarly, tens of millions of Chinese Protestants worship in illegal underground “house” churches. This is especially common in the southeast. The illegal congregations in these provinces have been supported by nearby Hong Kong, which supplied these illegal mainland churches with everything from moral and spiritual support to theological training and Bibles.

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These Christians are intentionally flouting China’s hardline regulations against religion and consciously challenging the Communist Party’s grip on power with their defiance. No wonder Beijing is irked.

As a result, under Xi, authorities have cracked down on these ‘foreign religions’: they’ve demolished unregistered houses of worship, jailed religious leaders, and even detained entire congregations and communities of religious believers who worship outside of officially-recognised religious organisations.

In a more disturbing move, last year, the Vatican and the CCP concluded years of negotiations with a deal to merge the government-controlled Catholic organization and the underground Catholic Church in China, while allowing Beijing to maintain a substantial role in approving the appointment of new bishops. Many have viewed this deal as a win for the Chinese government, extending its oversight over all Catholics in the country.

Lately, the CCP’s campaign against Christianity – a combination of repression and co-opting – has reached Hong Kong, coinciding with its more general attempts to chip away at democracy and freedom in the territory.

Beijing has tightened restrictions for mainland Christians travelling to Hong Kong, as many have done in the past years to attend Christian conferences and gatherings. And upon returning, those visitors have been subject to intimidation and detention.

More recently, Christian leaders in Hong Kong have become direct targets of Chinese bullying, with several pastors being questioned, and at least one prosecuted, for work done on the mainland. Several Protestant Christian leaders of the 2014 protests were also among those jailed in Hong Kong for their activism against Chinese repression.

While Catholic leaders in Hong Kong have not been harassed so directly, many worshippers there see the deal between the Vatican and Beijing as a disaster; Cardinal Zen personally confronted Pope Francis in an attempt to scuttle it before it was finalised.

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The Pope’s agreement with the CCP is seen a betrayal of their brothers and sisters in the mainland, an erosion of the leverage that the Holy See held against the Chinese state, and a signal that the Vatican is willing to sacrifice its loyal followers  (perhaps even those in Hong Kong) in order to establish better relations with the Chinese government.

Meanwhile, the CCP had also found support within the Hong Kong Christian elite from Paul Kwong, Archbishop of Hong Kong’s Anglican Church. He was appointed, in 2016, to an official advisory position within the Chinese government and subsequently became known for his CCP-friendly stances. He and the Anglican church approached the 2014 and 2019 protests with a combination of pro-Beijing statements and silence concerning police crackdowns on demonstrators.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Hong Kong’s Christian minority has been especially outspoken in its attempts to protect the territory’s democracy, and a major part of the resistance movement – the imposition of authoritarian rule in Hong Kong – is at least in part a measure by the CCP to target and control the Church.

Though eclipsed by the 2014 and 2019 protests, there have been two previous instances of significant protest in Hong Kong against Chinese heavy-handedness. The first major demonstration against Chinese rule came in 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets on July 1, the anniversary of the handover to China (the same date as this year’s storming of parliament). Their purpose was to reject a “National Security Bill” that would have given the government added powers to battle “sedition” and “subversion” including restricting links between Hong Kong citizens and “foreign political organisations.”

Hong Kong’s Christians were among the most vocal opponents of this bill; 90% of the territory’s Catholics saw it as designed to limit freedoms in Hong Kong (the Vatican could certainly be considered a “foreign political organisation”, no?) and both Catholic and Protestant congregations mobilised many of their members to march against the proposed law.

Similarly, when the government in 2012 tried to require schools to teach nationalism and pro-Chinese propaganda, churches rejected the proposed curriculum for their schools and helped organise tens of thousands of student protesters (including a young Joshua Wong) to march against the proposed regulation.

Many Christians now fear that this new extradition bill could be used as justification for arresting religious dissidents in Hong Kong and placing them in Chinese cells next to their mainland counterparts. But just as Christianity in mainland China has continued to grow in resistance to government efforts to suppress and control it (a common saying is that there may now be more Christians in China than Communists), the Hong Kong Church has remained defiant of Beijing in the face of new threats.

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Leaders such as Joshua Wong and Cardinal Zen are as vocal as ever. Wong was recently released from prison for his leadership in the 2014 protests and immediately took up a major role in the new demonstrations.  Meanwhile, the 87-year-old retired Cardinal Zen has taken to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to support the current protests.

Even Archbishop Kwong and the usually pro-Beijing Anglican hierarchy have acknowledged the necessity of the latest protests and urged the government to back down.

Even though Beijing has been careful to present its new policies, such as the extradition bill, as responses to secular concerns like maintaining law and order, there is a clear sense that the authorities are becoming more overtly anti-religious.  The first legal complaint over police handling of the protests to reach Hong Kong’s High Court concerned perceived anti-religious bias. During a particularly violent crackdown by police against protesters on June 12 – which saw many demonstrators taken in by local churches as they fled police batons and tear gas – one police officer allegedly demanded that a clergy member marching alongside the protestors “ask your Jesus to come down and see us”. The High Court dismissed the blasphemy complaint against the police as outside of the Court’s purview.

The churches are not in charge of the protests in Hong Kong, which have endured for weeks without central leadership. But the Church’s influence over the current protests goes far beyond a single Christian hymn. From criticising the Chinese Communist Party and supporting underground churches both before and after the handover, to calling upon the population to defy repressive Chinese-proposed laws in the early years of the “one country, two systems” era, the churches of Hong Kong have actively mobilized opposition to Beijing and created an atmosphere of defiance against the CCP.

And so the current round of protests in Hong Kong reflect the larger ongoing battle between the CCP and the Church.  So far, the protesters have stuck to singing the eponymous chorus of “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.” The full version of the song, however, goes on to make several declarations and a promise:

Jesus is risen from the dead
Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth
Jesus is living in His church
Jesus is coming for His own

Was the police officer who challenged protesters to call Jesus down familiar with this latter verse, I wonder?

Regardless, his comment reflects not just the derision that Beijing has towards Christianity and other religions, but also fear: not that Jesus himself is on his way, but that his followers are coming to challenge the Party, unless the Party comes for them first.

In the end, as Christians in both mainland China and Hong Kong have responded to repression with solidified resolve and greater levels of defiance, the Communist Party’s fears may become a self-fulfilling prophecy in Hong Kong and throughout the country.

As anger over a deeply unpopular extradition bill with mainland China erupted into the most serious violence Hong Kong had seen in years, one protester, Hailey Kok, found herself amid clashes between police armed with rubber bullets and beanbag rounds outside the territory’s parliament building.

“My parents came from China, they took a big risk to bring me to Hong Kong and escape the fear,” she told me. “And now what’s happened? Where is the freedom to speak out?”

Five years after the 2014 Umbrella Movement brought parts of the city to a standstill, anger has returned with a vengeance. Back then, it was students who were demonstrating for the right to elect Hong Kong’s leader. This time, it wasn’t just the young teeming the streets.

The protests, which have now been going on for a fortnight, have electrified the city and saw two million marchers all clad in black flood the canyon-like streets of Hong Kong Island on 16 June. That’s almost a third of the population. So overwhelming were the numbers, they killed the bill stone dead. Carrie Lam, the city governor whose determination to ram through the extradition agreement was the catalyst for the protest, has been left with her career hanging by a thread.

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The awesome scale of the march did force an apology from Lam, but the marches have now moved beyond the bill to become a wider expression of malaise about life in one of the world’s wealthiest – but also most unequal, expensive and crowded – cities.

The past five years have seen a steady worsening of many of Hong Kong’s deepest-rooted problems – despite an expanding economy, astronomical cash reserves and one of the world’s biggest budget surpluses.

Inequality is at its highest in 45 years. As Hong Kong’s top tycoons pocket (tax-free) billions in dividends, elderly women are dragging stacks of cardboard through the streets to sell for HK50 cents (5p) per kilo. The housing crisis, too, is intensifying. More and more people are being forced into squalid, illegally subdivided flats. With one in five people below the poverty line, many are reduced to living in notorious ‘cage’ homes, enclosed by wire mesh with only room for a single bed.

There has been precious little political will to confront any of this; Asia’s financial capital is at pains not to hurt its reputation as the world’s freest economy. And it has all fuelled the growing impression of Hong Kong as a once futuristic city now stuck in the past.

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Its extraordinary post-war boom is now but a memory. Year after year, in e-commerce and the digital economy, it falls further behind the Mainland, which boasts the rise of tech giants and financial markets in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. It has also been left trailing by Singapore in areas such as fintech.

Hong Kong built its glittering wealth on its unique status as a city which enjoys the rule of law and freedom of speech on the doorstep of the world’s second largest economy – which allows neither. Yet the city’s future expansion is focused on integration with the Mainland, and in particular the fast-growing province of Guangdong which borders Hong Kong. How the tension between integration and independence is resolved will be pivotal.

Beijing, in concert with the Hong Kong government and leader it effectively appointed in 2017, has been cracking down in the years since the Umbrella Movement, as it steps up attempts to integrate ahead of 2047, when the “one country, two systems” agreement expires.

Leaders from 2014 have been jailed, one foreign journalist expelled, pro-democracy lawmakers disqualified and a party advocating independence banned. But combined with the chipping away at the agreement that was designed to guarantee the city’s autonomy for 50 years after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the extradition bill proved a step too far.

As Tom Lai, a 23-year-old protester told me, “The government is no longer a Hong Kong government, it is a China government. They are not thinking about Hong Kong people.”

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This partly explains why, for a society that remains conservative in many aspects, the marches of the past two Sundays have been far more diverse than their 2014 predecessors. The young and the old, students, families, office workers and manual workers, those living in homes they own and those in public housing – this affects them all.

Their activism has been about defending something Hongkongers already have: the supremacy of the common law system, which has underpinned the city’s prosperity and freedom for decades and which stood as a beacon for millions of refugees who fled to the city from the chaos of Mao’s China. That’s why so many hundreds of office workers walking home on the network of high-level walkways spontaneously chanted their support to demonstrators honking car horns on the streets below.

It’s unclear, though, where the movement on the streets of Hong Kong goes from here. Organisers have insisted the marches will continue until Lam steps down, but she would only be replaced by another Beijing apparatchik. Antony Dapiran, a lawyer and author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong, said all eyes were on the administration of President Xi Jinping, which has repeatedly backed the bill, on how it responds to the current volatile situation.

“There is a feeling that ultimately Beijing decides what happens,” he said. The central government could either react aggressively as it did after 2014, or seek to build bridges as happened after mass protests in 2003 against a proposed national security law.

There is, he adds, “no sign Xi Jinping will back down over exerting control within China’s borders, or even beyond”.

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But nor is there any sign that the new generation of protesters is willing to stand down. “It’s the youngest activists, the younger generation who are the future of Hong Kong in the coming decades, who have shown themselves to be the angriest and the most radical,” Dapiran said.

“They have a huge appetite for change, and no trust in Beijing.”

With the Communisty party fixating on national sovereignty, unity and control and a new cohort of Hongkongers resisting, who knows how far either side will go. As Lai told me last week: “We will still fight. This is Hong Kong, this is my home. We must protect it.”

There is only one exception in the media coverage. The China Times – whose owners famously sympathise with Beijing – barely mentioned the Hong Kong protests at all. For most Taiwanese, such self-censorship is just another indicator of the ideological obedience expected by the Communist Party of China.

The official language of Taiwan might be Mandarin Chinese, the island may be only 100 miles across the sea from the mainland and its majority culture very similar to it, but the desire for political union is now a distinctly minority interest.

After 1949, when the nationalist Kuomintang lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan, the party acted on the basis that it was the legitimate government of the “Republic of China” and would one day reunite the whole country under its leadership. Theoretically, that is still the basis of the country’s constitution, though few believe it.

With the Democratic Progressive Party currently in power, the political options now are more often expressed as a choice between the uneasy status quo and a move towards outright independence, despite the risk that might entail invasion by the People’s Republic. The older generation generally prefers the former and younger people the latter.

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The more that Beijing gets heavy in Hong Kong, the more the mood in Taiwan turns towards the idea of independence. The idea of ‘one country, two systems’ provided the basis for Hong Kong’s reunification with the People’s Republic in 1997. In January, Xi Jinping proposed it as the model for Taiwan too. But the view here is that it is rapidly becoming a hollow lie in Hong Kong, so why would Taiwan entrust its future to the idea?

Mandy Hsiao-chuan Liao, Assistant Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University has observed a change of mood in the island’s politics:

“A person advocating the possibility of ‘one country, two systems’ is now seen as a person who will sell Taiwan to China and denigrate Taiwan’s identity and values of democracy and freedom. As a result, the Hong Kong events have encouraged more young people to support a Taiwan identity separate from China.”

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party must have known this, and yet they pressed on with moves to erode Hong Kong’s special status. Above all things, Beijing seems to fear disintegration; the ruling party is concerned that tolerating local diversity could unravel the country. According to Chi-Ting Tsai, Executive Director of the Centre for China Studies at the National Taiwan University: “One of the greatest fears among the Chinese leadership is fragmentation. There’s a concern that they can’t control what goes on in the provinces.”

But there is more to national unity than political control. President Xi also seems wedded to a vision of enforced homogeneity. In many areas of life, his leadership is enforcing policies based on the idea that there is only one way to be Chinese – that the majority culture must become the universal culture.

From the incarceration of up to a million Muslims in detention camps in Xinjiang province, to the suppression of Tibetan identity, to the imposition of policies intended to supplant the Cantonese language in Hong Kong, the aim appears to be the eradication, or at least the minimisation, of difference. Xi Jinping’s vision of national unity demands it.

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In the past few years, members of the Politburo have repeatedly spoken of the need for ethnic minorities to follow the ‘five identifications’. They must identify with the motherland; with the Chinese nation; with Chinese culture; with the Chinese socialist road and with the Communist Party.

The same prescription applies to everyone else. In Hong Kong the battle has often focused on language. Most are proud to speak Cantonese and view it as their mother tongue, yet that is not how the national government sees it.

Ben Bland, the author of a recent book about young people in the former British colony, Generation HK, argues:

“Young Hong Kongers have put themselves on the front line of the current protests because they are fighting not just for their freedoms but for their very identity. The generation that has come of age since the handover in 1997 see themselves, first and foremost, as Hong Kongers, not Chinese citizens.”

That is anathema to the Politburo in Beijing.

In April 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced a ruling that 80% of the country’s citizens must speak the national language – Mandarin Chinese – by 2020. The Ministry’s ruling was an admission that almost a third of the population, around 400 million people, do not speak the nominally ‘national’ language. Instead, they speak regional ‘topolects’ – Cantonese, Shanghainese and others – that are mutually unintelligible. This diversity threatens the homogenisers. The campaign to impose Mandarin nationwide has been stepped up.

The reaction among the young bubble tea-drinkers in Taiwan has been to take greater pride in speaking their native tongues. Although they are taught Mandarin at school, they are increasingly proud of speaking the local topolect of Fujianese, even calling it ‘Taiwanese language’.

Enforced monoculturalism has formed a major strand of the Chinese nationalist project since its emergence at the end of the 19th century. The problem of how to define the ‘Chinese Nation’ – the ‘zhonghua minzu’ – has dogged thinkers and politicians alike for decades.

For long periods, under Soviet influence, the Communist Party was prepared to tolerate difference, delaying the creation of a single homogeneous nation into the far future. However, in the wake of the breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, some Chinese theoreticians began to argue vociferously for a new approach: a ‘melting pot’ in which differences would be eradicated in the interests of national unity.

Xi Jinping seems to have listened to them.

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During the 1990s, as orthodox communist ideology retreated, Communist Party pronouncements increasingly featured the word ‘nation’ alongside the more traditional ‘people’. Whereas the ‘people’ only included socialists, the ‘nation’ could include anyone, so long as they followed Beijing’s definitions of what the ‘nation’ believed. Since Xi’s coming to power in late 2012, the Party has doubled-down on national uniformity.

What should we call this new political ideology – one that features a single ‘core’ leader, insistent demands for national homogeneity, intolerance of difference, rule by party not by law, corporatist economic policies, a focus on discipline and an ideology based on racial exceptionalism – all backed up by a massive surveillance state?

China’s Communist Party has long talked of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Xi Jinping now seems more interested in building “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

As the Taiwanese argue about their island’s political future, what they see across the water fills them with concern. Xi Jinping’s problem is that the more worried the Communist Party becomes about national fragmentation, and the more it tries to impose national unity, the more it generates movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Hayton’s book The Invention of China will be published next year

Yet while my experience was unpleasant, unnecessary, unjustified and inconvenient, I was unharmed. I flew back to Bangkok, and from there back to London. I can see my family and friends again, and I can speak out freely. Chinese critics of the Communist Party face an altogether far graver threat.

Two years ago today, Gui Minhai, a bookseller and publisher in Hong Kong, disappeared while on holiday in Thailand. Gui, born in China but a Swedish citizen, ran Causeway Bay Books along with four colleagues, publishing and selling works critical of China’s Communist leaders. Gui was abducted by Chinese security agents in Thailand, and taken by force to mainland China. His four colleagues also disappeared at various moments in October 2015 – one of them, Lam Wing-kee, arrested in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, another, Lee Bo, a British national, abducted from his Hong Kong warehouse. Yet Gui’s four colleagues were all gradually released one by one in the following months. Gui, however, remains missing.

For the first three months after his disappearance, there was no trace of Gui Minhai. He, then, suddenly appeared giving a ‘confession’ on Chinese state television, claiming he had voluntarily handed himself over to the Chinese police in relation to an alleged car accident that occurred in 2003. His daughter Angela, who studies in Cambridge and has been campaigning for her father’s freedom, was able to speak to him by telephone three times in the first half of 2016, but has not heard from him for sixteen months. He has been denied access to legal counsel and Swedish consular assistance. He has not been officially charged or tried, and his whereabouts are unknown.

Two years on, it is time for the international community to ask some very serious questions of China. It is time to speak up for Gui Minhai. The Swedish government and others have been remarkably quiet, claiming to be working through diplomatic channels to assist Gui – yet after two years it is time to conclude that quiet diplomacy has not worked.

China has cleverly withheld information about why Gui is being detained, making it awkward for international human rights organisations to take up his case. Astonishingly, only PEN International, of which Gui is a member, has spoken out. That must change. This is surely a case of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention, which requires action by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances or the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Angela Gui has spoken at the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, and the British Parliament, and written an op-ed for The Washington Post, but her appeals for help appear to have fallen on deaf ears. She herself has faced threats and surveillance. Yet as she says, this is not about one man alone. “This is about China actively extending its control beyond its borders,” she argues:

“This is about China kidnapping and illegally detaining more and more people because of their political beliefs. It’s about European citizens no longer being able to know that their human rights will be protected … In what has been called ‘the darkest moment’ for human rights in China in recent years we have to make sure that people like my father are not forgotten. Because to stay silent over what happened to him is to guarantee that it will happen again.”

When I was denied entry to Hong Kong, many people spoke up for me. The British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and US Congressman Chris Smith released statements. Hong Kong legislator Ray Chan courageously staged a protest in the Legislative Council, holding an enlarged photograph of me with him, taken in London two weeks earlier, and he was thrown out of the chamber for doing so. I am deeply grateful for such support, which is important, not for me personally, but for Hong Kong and the principles at stake – for this is not about me, it is about Hong Kong and its future.

But if such statements can be made in defence of a British national denied entry to Hong Kong, shouldn’t there be a far louder outcry when a Swedish national is abducted and disappeared into mainland China and held almost incommunicado for two years? When Angela asked me if I would speak at a vigil outside the Chinese embassy in London today to mark the second anniversary of her father’s abduction, I immediately agreed. I know how important solidarity is. But I asked her who else would be speaking. Her reply was heartbreaking:

“To be honest, you are the only one speaking out for my father in Britain right now”.

That must change. Join us, and ask China: Where is Gui Minhai?