Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is somber. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

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By John Gray

Those who believe Trump shares a mindset with the world’s leading tyrants are mistaken. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese leader displays his all-consuming narcissism. Putin is an archetypal creature of the Soviet system, a cold-eyed killer schooled in the art of survival. Xi is a suspicious autocrat possessed by the insecurity of his position. Putin’s aggression combines self-preservation — his own survival inseparable from that of his regime — with a neo-tsarist vision of a mystical “Russian realm” targeted for destruction by the West. Xi’s “Chinese dream” is the project of making China into the global hegemon and an unapologetic affirmation of Chinese civilization.  

Embodying nothing except his own emptiness and venality, Trump is the ideal dupe for these flinty tyrants. Possibly he fears Putin as the possessor of kompromat of some sort — there must be many possibilities — and he has certainly done business with the regime. But if Trump is behaving like a Russian asset, it is not because he was recruited as a Manchurian candidate in Moscow 40 years ago. Putin never expected Trump to become president (any more than Trump did himself) and seems to view him with bemused contempt. Trump sees the Russian dictator through the lens of his ideal self-image as strongman and admires him as a model of how to use state power to accumulate personal wealth. 

Those who speak of the Putinisation of America can point to undeniable parallels. Putin is a master of vranyo, the Bolshevik practice of telling lies that both speaker and audience know perfectly well are falsehoods — as when he denied that the “little green men” invading Crimea in 2014 were Russian troops. The goal is not persuasion but domination: by imposing a narrative that is transparently false, the very idea of a domain of facts independent of power is undermined. With his incoherent boasting — claiming to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability, then justifying a resumption of the war to destroy it — Trump also asserts power over facts. The difference is that Putin knows he is lying, whereas in Trump’s moment-by-moment solipsism, truth has no meaning.

For his critics, Trump is the kingpin of a Putin-style kleptocracy. It is true that his second administration has seen the presidency monetized to an unprecedented degree. Diplomacy has become a rent-seeking family business. Insider trading has been normalized. In August of this year, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) launched a premier data feed allowing Wall Street banks and high-frequency trading firms access to his market-moving Truth Social posts milliseconds before they become available to the public, with subscribers paying a hundred thousand dollars a month for the service. 

By the time they leave office, Trump, his family and acolytes will have amassed immense riches. Likewise, Putin’s extraction of capital from Russia’s economy has, by some estimates, made him richer than Elon Musk. Yet wealth and government interact differently in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Under Trump, the US is ruled by a variant of capitalism in which the state is used as a means of corporate enrichment at the expense of America’s strategic interests. In Russia’s version of state capitalism, corporate influence is curbed when it threatens the state itself. The same is true in China.

When Russia’s richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, became involved in opposition politics and negotiations to sell part of his oil company, Yukos, to American firms, he was arrested at gunpoint on his private jet, sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian penal colony and Yukos bankrupted. When the CEO of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, criticized China’s financial regulators, he was taken out of circulation and his business empire dismantled. In contrast, the Trump administration authorized the export of high-end computer chips of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia for export to China. During Xi’s visit to Washington, Trump bent the knee in more than one sense. He reportedly pitched the Chinese leader regarding purchases of American military technology, violating decades-long commitments to Taiwan and other allies. He prioritized corporate gain over national security and America’s standing in the world.

Trump’s “transactional” diplomacy consists of the exchange of American power for promises of private gain. The settlement of the Ukraine war being brokered by Trump’s special envoys, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and the real estate investor Steve Witfkoff, follows this playbook. A multibillion-dollar deal to acquire the international holdings of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining private oil company, has apparently been discussed, along with reopening the Nord Stream pipeline, blown up in September 2022. Elon Musk’s Space X — on Trump’s instructions, according to Musk — imposed speed limits on Starshield, which allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian drone and missile attacks. Sanctions have been paused, and Trump has called more than once for Zelensky’s removal. 

Trump’s aim is full-scale economic détente with Russia, which he believes will realize large profits for him and his coterie. Very likely he and they will benefit, but there is something spectral about the fabulous wealth envisioned in these sordid machinations. Why should Putin respect the terms of any deal? The “energy ceasefire” Trump believed he had agreed with him was flouted within hours. Much of Trump’s chicanery is based on fantasies — the reverse of realpolitik. If Ukraine is being sold out, it may be for next to nothing. 

Lured by dreams of financial gain, Trump has torn up whatever remained of an American-led “rules-based” order. This is more than the much-discussed passing of a unipolar order. American power is imploding, with the post-Cold-War leviathan now a floundering, flailing behemoth. Rather than an “unreliable friend”, the US seems closer to the enemies of the countries that depended on it for their security. Yet there can be no assurance that America’s new strategic partners will keep their end of the deal. When they met in St Petersburg in October, Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner captured in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Such a toadying eulogy may be understandable. For the US, Yalta 2.0 may yield little more than the prisoner’s release. The presumed exchange is that Russia ends its support for Iran while the US forces Ukraine to surrender; but America has no way of ensuring Russia’s compliance, let alone that of China or Iran.

The Iran debacle itself began with a whim that set in motion a fateful escalation. The illusory prospect of another Venezuela-style coup, semi-magical in its flawless operational execution, was irresistible. What Trump described in March as “a little excursion” has been a forced march to strategic defeat. The result of decapitating the Iranian leadership has been to install a military dictatorship more repressive than the decaying theocracy it replaced. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become a permanent threat to the Strait of Hormuz. The pre-war status quo, in which it was an open international waterway, is irrecoverable. 

This was not unforeseen. Similar bombing campaigns have been war-gamed many times, with similar results. As Barbara Tuchman showed in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), history is not so much a catalog of error as a succession of follies whose consequences can be known in advance. 

However the war develops, America has forfeited its position in the Middle East. Over the past months, its bases in the Gulf and Iraq have been disabled and its armories depleted. Tens of billions of dollars have been expended using costly missiles against cheaper and more quickly replaceable drones. Iran’s partner in the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthis have turned another vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, into a high-risk corridor, while launching a deadly wave of strikes on Saudi airports and refineries.The Gulf monarchies are constructs of European colonialism propped up by American security guarantees that have proved effectively worthless. It cannot be long before regime change comes to the Kingdom, weakened by festering rivalries within the House of Saud since Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz Carlton coup in November 2017. How could the debt-laden US withstand the collapse of the petrodollar, which channeled Saudi oil revenues into an AI-led stock market bubble already showing signs of bursting? 

Another “short, intensive” bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, which seemed to be prefigured in the “limited” American strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz early this week, would only postpone a further American retreat. Trump’s curtailing aid to Israel has been seen as reducing the likelihood of a resumption of the war. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump may still think they can “finish the job”.  

Iran’s economy is being slowly strangled by the American naval embargo that is blocking its seaborne oil exports. Yet the regime retains the capacity to devastate the Gulf’s energy production, causing acute shortages of diesel — the fuel on which the global economy runs — and irreplaceable agricultural chemicals. Undersea cables and data centers could also be attacked. The true Iranian nuclear option is disabling water and desalination plants. Weaponizing its geography, with its mountainous streams, inland rivers and lakes, Iran could wreak an enormous civilian catastrophe in the desert kingdoms of its Gulf enemies. 

At a global level, a species of total war is already underway. In the delirium of the Western mind, Gaza has been singled out as a unique catastrophe, but the reach of the battlefield into civilian life is practically universal. In Ukraine, Putin’s relentless bombardment destroys schools and scientific academies and cuts off electricity and water, aiming to render Kyiv uninhabitable and drive out millions of desperate refugees. Across Europe, Russia is orchestrating assassination, arson and cyber-strikes, together with drone strikes that could easily spiral into mass casualty events.  

The Baltic and Nordic states have fortified their defenses, but most European countries seem paralyzed. Poland — the most militarily prepared — is in the throes of constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic centrism has reached its endgame. Teetering on the edge of default, the Fifth Republic is rehearsing the upheaval that will come when Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace — as must now be likely — and Jean-Luc Mélenchon mobilizes an insurrection against her. “Cost-of living” rioting and looting has spread to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland and Albania, among other countries. It is hard to envision the French banlieues and AfD strongholds in former East Germany accepting the cost of deploying European troops indefinitely in Ukraine. Nor is it clear that Europe could afford to forgo the billions of euros’ worth of oil and gas it buys from Russia (which help Putin fund the war). A European solution is a mirage, and for all the heroic resourcefulness of its struggle, Ukraine cannot go it alone. Unless Zelensky’s supporters in Washington can somehow tie Trump’s hands, the logic of the situation is a brutal partition.

In America, Trump’s rise was a by-product of the neo-liberal cult of globalization. It was not simply an increase in inequality that stoked “populist” revolt. Whole sections of society were denied any productive role. Capital was exported and manufacturing offshored, labor imported and communities abandoned. With their workless families, drug habits and short lives, the human detritus of American industry could be safely left to molder on their reservations. Yet post-industrial decline has now affected much of the middle class. Occupations and career structures have melted into air. Neoliberal economics was the enterprise of re-engineering capitalism without a bourgeoisie, and the hollowing out of middle-class life has continued under Trump’s corporate kleptocracy. There was bound to be a countermovement from the Left. New York mayor Zohran Mandami’s “democratic socialism” is not a movement of organized labor. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zack Polanski’s movements, it is a bourgeois populism, varnishing the status anxieties of heavily-indebted graduates and downwardly-mobile professionals with high-rent progressive causes. Incubated in campus seminaries of anti-Western orthodoxy, Mamdani’s leftism is set to be a deciding force in Democratic politics. 

A sea change is underway in the Republicans as well. As he limbers up for a presidential campaign in 2028, JD Vance is cultivating the same nativist constituency that is the audience of Tucker Carlson — aside from Trump, America’s most accomplished demagogue. A devil’s brew of anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and conspiracy theory is shaping up as the ruling ideology of the MAGA Right. As in Europe, the old center ground no longer exists. 

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By B. Duncan Moench

The midterm clean sweep was a repudiation of Trump more than an endorsement of the Democrats. The winners included Dr Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan, US Senate) and Dr Abdul Hamawy (New Jersey, US House), Egyptian-born Muslims closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrats who campaigned strongly against the war. Foreign policy positions that used to be bipartisan are being questioned and rejected in both parties. Europeans who are still invested in the notion that the Trump era is an unfortunate anomaly would be wise to think again. Nothing is further from reality than a reversion to Nikki Haley-style interventionism. It is not fantastical to see the US becoming the first advanced post-Western state and joining Russia in a China-led Eurasian bloc. 

That does not mean such a concert of powers would be stable. If a trilateral summit between Xi, Putin and Trump is held at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shenzhen scheduled for later this month, their exchanges may well come to nothing. In some ways this looks less like February 1945 and more like the run-up to August 1914. Now as then, great powers are engaged in wars for control of natural resources against a background of tangled and shifting alliances. With multiple players and no one in charge, miscalculation by any of them could bring disaster on all. 

Another future is possible, however. Rather than drifting towards another Great War, we may be entering an era of peace. A curious kind of peace, to be sure, accompanied by unending bloodshed. Proxy wars and urban terrorism will rage unabated. War and peace will, in effect, be one and the same. The West will cease to exist as a geopolitical or civilizational bloc. But joining forces with its adversaries will fuel another stock market boom, and what neo-Marxian theorists fondly call “late capitalism” will enjoy a new lease of life. Having used the neoliberal interlude to build a mercantilist juggernaut, China will re-establish globalization in a dirigiste form that entrenches its economic primacy, with Russia exploited as a vassal state. A certain equilibrium will prevail, underpinned by the shared interests of transnational ruling classes.

Then again, none of this may come to pass. The future may not be advancing authoritarianism but accelerating disintegration. If Taiwan is not easily absorbed, Xi’s autocracy may be overthrown, and China could revert to disunity of a kind recurrent in its history. Putin might be toppled by war-weary oligarchs, only to be replaced by a more extreme anti-Western despot ruling a nuclear-armed Muscovy surrounded by breakaway fiefdoms. The United States may fragment, with enclaves of anarchic high-tech vitality booming alongside wastelands of poverty and desolation, presided over by an enfeebled federal government.

But of one thing we can be certain. Donald Trump has brought Western hegemony to a close. A world-historical figure as much as Napoleon or Mao, the founder of MAGA has ushered in a post-American age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What the West forgets about China

By David Lloyd Dusenbury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump already advertised his extreme dissatisfaction with allies who took advantage of America’s free-trade fanaticism — regardless of huge trade deficits — to deny US exporters access to their own markets even as they flooded the country with cheap imports. Trump was equally unhappy with allies who were “free-riding” US military protection, while spending very little on their own defense: in many cases not even 2% of their GDPs.

Japan was squarely in the line of fire on both accounts. On economics, structural obstacles to US imports had persisted even after years of talks, while on defense Japan was not devoting even 1% of GDP to defense, with 2% a far-off fantasy.

At the time, I was under contract with Japan’s foreign ministry — not to lobby the US government or any such thing, but to help redefine the country’s national strategy. That was Abe’s own personal focus, and therefore I met him every time I went back to work in Tokyo. He himself told me how very worried he was about the possibility of a Trump victory, a worse problem for him than for other leaders.

Obama, after all, had already caused him needless problems, including sending Caroline Kennedy as his ambassador to Tokyo. That empty-headed celebrity degraded a post previously held by eminent ex-speakers of the House or Senate Majority leaders, who Japanese prime ministers could usefully consult. On top of that, Kennedy took it upon herself to publicly criticize Abe for visiting the nationalistic Yasukuni Shrine very dear to his core constituency, an unprecedented impertinence for an ambassador.

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It was in that fraught context that Abe decided to ignore all protocol rules, and brush aside both the foreign ministry’s traditional caution and indeed US law, to try to meet Trump as soon as possible after his surprise election. His aim? To explain — truthfully enough — that his own goal was to make Japan a much stronger ally for the United States: neatly pre-empting anti-Japan policies even before they were formulated by Trump’s “transition team”.

And so it was that, on the afternoon of 17 November 2016, Abe and his interpreter met with the President-elect in his family apartment in Trump Tower. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was present, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner — but as they all sat comfortably on sofas, there were no officials or note-takers in sight.

That not only ensured a relaxed atmosphere, but also provided legal protection against the US Logan Act which prohibits private US citizens, including Trump before his inauguration, from negotiating with foreign governments.

As it happens, Abe liked Trump, and vice versa, and each believed the other’s assurances that they would step in whenever officials allowed disagreements to get out of hand. In fact, over the years that followed there were no US-Japan quarrels, and more immediately word got back from Tokyo that Abe thought Trump very reasonable — and a better negotiating partner than the studiously reserved Obama.

This feedback persuaded Trump that he could ignore State Department reservations, just as Abe had ignored his famously over-cautious foreign ministry, and bargain face-to-face with foreign counterparts, just as he had countless times before as a real-estate magnate.

In addition to less memorable encounters, Trump’s personal diplomacy in his first time culminated in the unprecedented June 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They met right on the DMZ, which Kim actually invited Trump to cross, making him the only US official to ever have stepped on North Korea’s soil. Some televised cordiality ensued while the TV cameramen had a bit of a rugby scuffle.

In the aftermath, in an astonishing display of collective amnesia, Trump’s critics kept saying that the Trump-Kim meeting had achieved nothing, because the DPRK had refused to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet that ignored how things had been before: with an alarming build-up of threats against South Korea, which Trump defused by his meeting with Kim.

Now, Trump is once again traveling in Asia to defuse a rise in mutual threats. But though North Korea remains as quiet as ever — a continued testament to Trump’s adept diplomacy six years ago — the President faces a much bigger crisis: with Xi Jinping’s China.

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After mounting threats against Taiwan, and even a date-specific 2027 invasion plan, over recent months China has launched a broad campaign of geoeconomic escalation. One obvious example is Beijing’s politically deadly import boycott of US soybeans, whose exports to China went from 985-million bushels in 2024 to zero so far in 2025. The US, for its part, has revoked the small-package tariff exemption, once set at $200 but more recently at $600, which allowed a tsunami of Chinese clothing and gadget postal-order imports at extremely low prices, which drove many remaining US small manufacturers out of business.

This escalation culminated in last week’s Chinese attempt to limit the US products that can be made with imported Chinese-refined rare earths. This is an unprecedented intrusion, and one which incidentally exposed years of policy paralysis. The fact is that “rare earths” are not all that rare; they only seem so because unreasonable environmental restrictions virtually prohibit processing in the US.

Either way, ahead of his vital meeting with Xi on Thursday, Trump has prepared in the usual way — buttering up his Chinese counterpart with unreciprocated praise and fulsome compliments. Yet he is also loaded for bear with the tariffs America has already imposed, which really weigh heavily on the Chinese economy, whose years of ultra-rapid growth are but a fading memory.

The Chinese middle classes that invested their savings in apartments for rental — because bank deposits earned virtually nothing, while the stock market mostly lost money for investors — must now rent them for very little — with huge numbers unrented impoverishing their owners. Unfortunately for them, far too many housing blocks were built before the construction companies themselves finally collapsed.

Meanwhile, China’s huge investment in railways and roads has also slowed: too many high-speed trains were traveling empty. That means that the parents of many poorly educated youngsters, who can no longer find construction jobs, must support them instead. As for their well-educated compatriots, they can no longer expect to immediately find a good job in the cities—in huge numbers, they are living in basements on menial gig-economy jobs. In short, China is overbuilt and over-supplied for a rapidly aging and falling population, and needs access to the insatiable American consumer to have any real growth.

Having imposed tariffs unilaterally — simply because he is not paralyzed by free-trade dogma — Trump can now reduce them in exchange for Chinese concessions. That includes a return to soybean imports, with farmers an important pillar of the MAGA coalition, and a toning down of truculent threats to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, Trump knows that he cannot ask the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war in Ukraine.

As for Japan, Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister, promises to end the post-Abe decline in US-Japan policy cooperation. Under Abe, a minimum of communications between officials in Tokyo and Washington was quite enough to ensure that both countries coordinated smoothly, for example to sustain the Philippines and other weaker countries threatened by China.

After Trump left office in 2021, and after Abe himself was murdered, everything had to be negotiated point by point. Abe’s successors hesitated to act as decisively as he did, meaning significant initiatives just petered out. Fortunately for Trump, Takaichi, the motorcycle rider, martial artist, and anti-immigration Right-winger, was very much Abe’s disciple.

And, certainly, their meeting seems to have been a success. Takaichi gifted Trump a golf putter that once belonged to Abe, while the pair signed a rare-earth minerals deal and reiterated tariffs agreement negotiated earlier in the year. But for their relationship to thrive over the longer term, Takaichi must herself do what Trump’s Argentine protege just managed to do very successfully: win a parliamentary election to gain more seats for her party, allowing her to rule without frail coalition partners.

So far, at any rate, Trump’s highly personalized diplomacy is again serving him well, though of course his meeting with Xi Jinping will be the biggest test of all. That Xi has just locked up top generals he had himself appointed means that there are cracks in his regime on top of the stalled economy, while Trump faces relentless opposition at home — so both men will try to be tough poker players, in spite of some weak cards.

In 2014, this quiet 24 year old from rural Guangdong jumped from the 17th floor of a mall in Shenzhen, just across the road from his favorite bookshop. His death reverberated across China, drawing attention to his beautiful and disarming poetry, as well as to the despair of millions of factory laborers across the nation. By evoking images of spare parts, discarded screws and lumps of iron, Xu used China’s most revered classical art form to articulate the degrading experience of modernity.

A few years later, an essay by live-in nanny Fan Yusu also became a surprise literary sensation. “My life,” she began, “is a book that is unbearable to read.” While Fan cared for wealthier people’s children in Beijing, she mourned her “left behind” children in “motherless villages”. She worried that they, too, could “become screws in the world factory and terracotta soldiers on the assembly line”.

Neither Xu nor Fan set out to write political tracts. Their verse and prose were coping mechanisms, efforts of profound humility and humanity, and that’s what made them so heartbreaking. These so-called “bottom-rung”, or diceng, writers forced people at every level of Chinese society to confront the fate of those who had been forsaken during the years of economic uplift, which saw millions of people move from the countryside to the cities in search of factory jobs.

At the time, Marxists and those on the New Left saw migrants as poignant symbols of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) discordant messaging: socialist ideology foregrounded ordinary workers, while free-market economics required their cheap labor and exploitation. Living on the outskirts of new towns and cities without official residence permits (hukou) or access to any form of social security, China’s estimated 274 million rural-to-urban migrants have lost their ideological status. They have gone from being celebrated by the regime as “worker peasants” to the pejoratively labeled “floating population”, “vagrants” or “I-slaves”. These city workers have effectively become illegal migrants in their own country and, unwittingly, central protagonists in China’s contemporary identity crisis. From such despair, a powerful new literary movement has sprung.

China has long had an established literary genre of “bottom-rung” fiction, rooted in a belief that literature should “flip minds” and awaken people to the suffering of others. But now, the confluence of industrialization with widespread internet access in China has given rise to perhaps the largest working-class literature movement in history. These writers are telling their stories on their phones, in literary forums or in self-published worker magazines — whether or not the Party approves of them as “pure” literature.

The latest of these writers to capture China’s imagination is gig worker Hu Anyan, whose memoir I Deliver Parcels in Beijing will be published in English later this month, two years after it went viral in China. At the time of writing, Hu had already worked 19 jobs since leaving school, including as a waiter, bike seller, popsicle wholesaler and delivery driver. As a delivery driver, Hu suffered daily humiliations. He was blamed for failing to keep fresh a notoriously smelly durian fruit, when no one was at home to receive it; penalized for late deliveries even if a customer gave the wrong address; and refused entry to malls because of his garish, low-class uniform.

However, his artistic spirit sustained him. A few years before, Hu’s eyes had been opened to the world of literature when he worked as an unpaid drawing apprentice with a comic book publisher. He and a bunch of fellow anime enthusiasts listened to punk, talked up rebellion and individualism, and read Kafka. “From then on,” he writes, “both work and writing became ways for me to build my spirit.” The group committed to writing and reading “wild works” — edgy underground comics and literature that couldn’t be published anywhere except on subversive online forums — and to rejecting any work that resembled “tamed livestock that had long lost its animal nature”. In an age of intense pragmatism and material ambition, Hu instead devoted himself to the humanities.

In his book, Hu argues that the only way to maintain one’s individuality and sanity in the age of Big Data is to remember what it is that makes us human, and to resist the algorithm at all costs. “What I learned was that so long as I didn’t care about being efficient, if I forgot about my return on investment, then every customer was easy to get along with,” writes Hu, with an almost child-like innocence.

Hu’s memoir has sold more than two million copies in China, and a TV adaptation is already in the works. Its popularity signifies a deep philosophical shift in China, and reflects a widespread feeling that the China Dream is over. Whereas white-collar workers once read factory-worker writers like Xu Lizhi and Fan Yusu with a degree of disconnected sympathy, Hu’s experience of gig work resonated with them. Seeing themselves as products of the “gaokao factory” (China’s incredibly stressful university entrance exams), and competitors in an immensely oversaturated job market, graduates have started to re-brand themselves as “IT peasants”. There’s increasingly a sense of communality with those migrant workers who have felt this despair all along.

For “bottom-rung” workers, the myth of social mobility died long before China’s slowing economy started to worry those higher up the ladder. But in its place, a devotion to the humanities has blossomed. While the majority of lower-rung authors write for no other reason than to process menial work into something meaningful, they have created a growing folk tradition of life outside the system. Migrant dorms and communes are places where artists, vloggers, musicians and writers nurture a freewheeling, troubadour spirit. Picun village on the outskirts of Beijing, which was home to thousands of migrants before it was demolished in 2023, was famous for its New Workers Art Troupe and the Picun Literature Group, in which workers hosted pop-up exhibitions, gigs, plays and poetry readings. More recently, artist Li Liao exhibited his scooter and screenshots from his Meituan “super app” at a gallery in Shenzhen, rural migrant Wang Haijia was dubbed “the courier poet” for his widely shared poem “People in a Hurry”, and 23-year-old Song Yucai become an online sensation for singing on the streets of Chengdu after grueling days out on his bike.

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Many white-collar workers are following their lead, turning back to the humanities, and even returning to the countryside to work the land. Having been warned against studying non-vocational subjects by anxious parents and strident educational influencers, the young have decided they no longer want earning potential to shape their decisions. Interest is growing in rural reconstruction movements such as the Bishan project — a rural commune committed to bringing modern ideas and culture back to traditional village life that was shut down by the local government in 2016. And people continue to intentionally set up libraries and artistic communities away from cities. The countryside is once again becoming a place of the imagination.

Rattled by the prospect of graduates turning into a bunch of work-shy hippies, Xi Jinping announced in 2021 that it was necessary to stop what he called this trend of “involution” and “laying down”. One way to do this was to “disrobe”. In a public ticking-off of disillusioned university graduates, state broadcaster CCTV suggested they consider “taking off the long gown”. This is a reference to a story by one of China’s most revered writers, Lu Xun, in which failed scholar Kong Yiji insists on wearing the “long gown”, the sartorial symbol of wealth and education, in contrast to the “short jackets” worn by the poor and uneducated. The moral of the story is that status is a trap and those who cling to it are obtuse and conceited. By continuing to ally itself with Lu Xun, a writer beloved by Mao, the CCP is trying to shift the focus away from its own economic responsibilities towards China’s workforce to the moral responsibilities of the individual.

One proponent of disrobing is Ding Yuanzhao, a graduate of Oxford as well as China’s two most prestigious universities, Tsinghua and Peking, who this year was forced to sign up as a delivery driver when he couldn’t find a suitable job. It offered him a stable income, he told the Oxford Mail cheerfully, and it enabled him to “make a contribution to society”. He will not be the last scholar destined for a wardrobe change.

In her science fiction story Folding Beijing, Chinese novelist Hao Jingfang imagined a future in which the different classes of society were physically separated into three spaces, and that traveling between them was a criminal offense. Now it seems possible that white-collar and blue-collar workers are folding into one. Automation, algorithms and AI pose existential threats to everyone’s role in society; all workers will end up competing for similar jobs. In such a world, literature offers an opportunity to live beyond the rat race.

“Max Weber, whom we know of as a harsh melancholic realist, wrote about ‘this great and wonderful war’ and how marvelous it was to still be alive to experience it, and yet how bitter it was that his age prevented him from going to the front.”

At no point did Weber and many other war-cheerleading Germans of the time appear to consider the possibility that the war might not turn out the way they thought it would.

I see Europe in a similar position today. Like Weber, many intellectuals and politicians of our era are gung-ho about going to war with Russia. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Western military intervention is the historian Timothy Snyder, previously at Yale, now at the University of Toronto. He said in 2023: “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”

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European politicians, too, are becoming increasingly gung-ho about fighting the Russians. One of them is Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president. I knew him from my time in Brussels, when he was a humble MEP, the embodiment of a calm, intellectual northern European. He said last week that security guarantees for Ukraine invariably mean that the guarantors are willing to fight the Russians.

I am not underplaying the security threat posed by Vladimir Putin. The intrusion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace no doubt constitutes an unacceptable act of aggression. Nato has every right to shoot them down and should signal strongly that this is what will happen next time. But defending your alliance is different from fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, a country that is not part of Nato.

The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today’s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.

The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgments are more persistent.

The biggest of all was that Russia’s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgment has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie — that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain’s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country’s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money — how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.

If you measure an economy on the grounds of purchasing power, a completely different picture emerges from that suggested by our complacent statistic. According to the World Bank, the world’s largest economy, by far, is China, provided the measurement is made on the basis of purchasing power parity. (Purchasing power parity accounts for goods being more affordable in some countries than in others.) Number two is the US. Then comes India, and then Russia. Germany, in sixth place, is the biggest of the European countries.

Based on this measure, the 10 countries that form part of an alliance with China and Russia, the so-called Brics, are bigger than the US, Western Europe and Japan together. We live in a truly bi-polar world. The US and China are the leaders of each side. We no longer call the shots, even if we think we do. Over time, the other side will become bigger, because they are growing faster than us.

Since the start of the war, Russia has outgrown all of the G7 economies. The British economist John Maynard Keynes would not have been surprised, because what happened was a classic Keynesian war economy effect. The UK experienced this effect during the Second World War. Putin re-organized Russia into a war economy.

I am emphasizing these economic facts because this is what will inform the reality on the ground in Ukraine going forward. It is money that buys weapons. This money for Ukraine has dried up. The US has given €115bn in total bilateral aid to Ukraine so far, which dwarfs Germany’s €21.3bn and €7.56bn from France. Without the US, there is absolutely no way that the Europeans could afford to bankroll the war themselves. For that, they have to borrow money.

Or they could raid the €210bn of frozen Russian assets that sit in Europe. Previously, Germany, France, Belgium and the European Central Bank have opposed an asset raid — for different reasons. Belgium has most of the money on its soil. The money sits in the vaults of Euroclear, a large financial depository based in Brussels. France and Germany might be on the line for any compensation claims should Russia win in commercial courts. The ECB believes that an asset raid is illegal and would irrevocably damage Europe’s reputation as a financial center. Under normal circumstances, it would be hopping mad for the EU to take such risks, but if they want to continue to support Ukraine, this is the only financial vehicle they have at their disposal. Now that the European Commission has come out with a proposal for unlocking the money, there is now a good chance that it could happen.

And then what? Leaving the complex technical and legal issues aside, the EU will run into a problem very similar to Margaret Thatcher’s caricature of socialism: eventually, they will run out of other people’s money. The misjudgment is that the €200bn will tide us over until Donald Trump leaves office, when he will be succeeded by a Democrat who will happily resume providing the lion’s share of the funding. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said recently that the war will end when Russia is economically exhausted. That’s the Western strategy.

But our sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy. Remember Einstein’s characterization of madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes. The EU has so far agreed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. A nineteenth is now being prepared.

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There are indeed some signs of financial stress in the Russian economy. Russia’s central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, admitted earlier this year that the Russian economy managed to expand on the back of essentially free resources, labor, sequestered industrial capacity, and liquid assets from the country’s National Wealth Fund. These resources have been truly exhausted, she said. But this comment was not addressed to the West, but to Putin. Putin needs to find means to create new resources. As does the West.

But Russia has something that Ukraine has not. China is a better ally to Russia than the US is to Ukraine. The Western neocons keep on underestimating the depth of the China-Russia alliance, which is the result of inept US foreign policy over the last ten years. By placing sanctions and tariffs on both countries, the US ended up creating a strategic alliance between them. The US, meanwhile, is much more detached from Ukraine under Trump than under Biden.

The mistaken idea behind Western sanctions is that Russia and China are dependent on Western technology like semiconductor chips. Very much to the surprise of the Biden administration, China managed to build high-performance chips themselves. Last week, China turned the tables by placing a ban on the import of Nvidia chips.

The €200bn in frozen assets that we might unleash in loans to Ukraine can also easily be matched by the other side. China could give a loan to Russia, collateralized on Western assets in China, or on receipts from legal compensation that Russia may be entitled to in the future. It is an ongoing misjudgment to think that the West — the smaller part of our duopolistic world — is going to smoke out the larger one.

Misjudgment of this scale and number is what turns regional wars into world wars. Our army of tweeting, war-hungry Western intellectuals are Max Weber’s successors. They leave me in no doubt that there is substantial support for a glorious war, just as there was over 100 years ago.

Skepticism in China about Christianity predates Communism by quite some way. When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1510) began to visit in the late 16th century, they found that even those elites who were sympathetic to their faith required a great deal of persuasion before entering the fold — God appeared to ask too much while offering too little and so many of the aspects of Christianity they would have to adopt seemed to clash with traditional Chinese life. Doing away with concubines seemed self-defeating, since they might furnish a man with an heir. Removing ancestor tablets from the home meant losing the means of paying filial respect. The crucifixion of Jesus struck many as shocking rather than heroic: corporal punishment was reserved for the very lowest in society.

Still, Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

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Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organizations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organizations were banned in favor of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out.

Even then, given the CCP’s interest in managing people who possess the ability to influence whole communities in China, the ideological soundness of church leaders has never been taken for granted. Education at seminaries is tightly managed, with a strong focus on patriotism. Qualified clergy face constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty, to which some respond by emphasizing Christianity’s proletarian credentials: Jesus was a carpenter, who chose fishermen as his early disciples and had harsh words for merchants and the wealthy.

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organizations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicization”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

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The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicization” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership program. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalization in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularization theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanization. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

But it is not yet five months since Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Oval Office ended abruptly — and in humiliating fashion — after Trump dressed down his Ukrainian opposite number, accusing him of “gambling with World War III”. Trump’s months-long charm offensive with Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, was characterized by lengthy and seemingly convivial phone calls that flattered the Russian president’s ego. Nonetheless, it did not budge the Kremlin’s position on the war. An apparently irate Trump, who styles himself as the ur-peacemaker, now claims to want to “finish” the war through other means. On the surface, it seems as if Trump’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine has entirely shifted in the last two weeks.

If Trump is still committed to ending the war in Ukraine, which last autumn he promised he could do in 100 days, then he has decided — for the time being at least — to achieve that goal by forcing Vladimir Putin to back down rather than giving him what he wants. Today, he is not just promising a restored weapons supply, he is even purportedly asking Zelensky if he can strike deep into Russian territory, potentially as far as Moscow. “Absolutely”, reportedly replied Zelensky, “We can, if you give us the weapons.” Is this a new Trump, whose electoral commitment to isolationism and peace has seen him launch attacks on Iran and now promise to use American military might to bend Moscow to his will? And if this new, serious Trump is willing to use such levers to get his way, do his intentions go beyond a change in policy toward Russia and Ukraine?

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Why Russia fell out with Iran

By Ian Garner

The halls of power in Washington are riven with divides over these questions. A substantial group, including, most notably, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, have been vocal advocates for a rapprochement with Moscow, which they see as a means to disrupt the emerging Russia-China partnership by trying to get on side with Moscow and thus weaken Beijing. Meanwhile, another group, including Senator Lindsey Graham, advocates for a more hawkish policy toward Russia that resembles Cold War-era visions of containment and would play well with an American public that remains deeply suspicious of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In recent days, analysts have struggled to understand where Trump stands, given that the president now seems to be as critical of Vladimir Putin as he has been of Xi Jinping, and whether his new approach will last.

The explanation for the last fortnight’s events is as simple as it is frustrating for analysts and Ukraine’s military planners: although the White House’s policy in the short-term may have changed, the underlying logic of Trump’s behavior remains just the same. Few can disagree that Donald Trump — ever since the Eighties, and certainly since 2016 — has been a creature who feeds on, and whose persona has been created by, media attention. It is Vladimir Putin’s continued stalling over giving Trump the grandest of all headlines — Trump as the great peacemaker in Ukraine, Trump as a potential Nobel Peace Prize winner — that is likely motivating the president to change tack today.

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Trump seems to feed on news coverage that, whether as hero or villain, makes him out as the protagonist of the story: the deal-maker who calls the shots. Look at how often he complains of being treated unfairly by the media, how he stages extravagant shows of signing executive orders and appearing in the White House to dictate the run of political play, and how he even brought a military parade to Washington in June. Trump’s staged phone calls with Putin, his elaborately orchestrated peace talks in Saudi Arabia, and his Oval Office blow-up with Zelensky — all of which favored the Russian president — have come to nought.

Moreover, theatrics sympathetic to Putin now offer diminishing media coverage, as the public have become used to them. Unlikely to succeed, making another offering to Putin would be of little interest to a fatigued public and media. What better than to perform an outrageous volte-face, play the strong man, and generate endless inches of media coverage in articles just like this one? Look past the headlines, and Trump is behaving entirely predictably, at least according to his own lights.

Unsurprisingly, then, the Russian political apparatus is totally unfazed by what seems like terrifying news for a country whose economy is barely running on fumes and which can barely stop Ukraine’s makeshift drone strikes, let alone repel offensive US-made weaponry. The Russian stock market surged in response to the news of the weapons deal and Trump’s talk of sanctions, while former Russian president and current Security Council member Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter dismissed Trump’s move as a “theatrical ultimatum.” Hardly known for his political nous, even Medvedev has Trump pegged.

Should Trump make good on his latest promises — and there is no guarantee that the weapons systems at hand will make their way to Ukraine, let alone be used for offensive strikes on Russia itself — the war might well be prolonged or even turned. That, of course, would still turn on Ukraine being able to strike deep and hard enough into Russian territory to affect the population en masse or to cause fear of a military collapse among the Russian elites. Should massive tariffs or wide sanctions on Russia also be implemented, Trump and Ukraine may even force a desperate Putin to the negotiating table. Until they do, Volodymyr Zelensky and his allies — especially the NATO nations that have been on tenterhooks ever since the American president was inaugurated in January — will at least be pleased with this new spirit of collaboration.

Nonetheless, they will remain hesitant about whether a man like Donald Trump can really commit to a long-term policy of military support for both Ukraine and the Western alliance. In a BBC interview on 14 July, Trump admitted that he trusts “almost nobody”. Should Vladimir Putin find a way to stroke the president’s ego, give him an opportunity for a grand media spectacle, and allow him to make some more headlines, another sudden U-turn might be in the offing. State visits, gifts, and all sorts of other attention-generating moves might be enough.

Meanwhile, there is only one big winner from this chaos. As Trump continues to blow hot and cold with his allies, eroding stability and certainty in both the financial and security worlds, Xi Jinping will look on with calm confidence. Until Trump commits to a coherent, long-term strategy that will ensure American economic dominance and military superiority continue — and that would likely mean continued and transparent cooperation with either NATO or another group of reliable allies, a move that today seems unlikely — the day that China overtakes the USA as the world’s superpower only looks to grow closer.

The CCP is now working on an even larger dam, one that will tame the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s longest river. This new edifice will generate three times the hydroelectric power of the Three Gorges Dam. Depending on the geographical provenance of its building materials, the new dam will probably add another few microseconds to each day on Earth.

Microseconds, being a millionth of a second, are imperceptible, but China’s march into the future is becoming impossible to ignore. This is a country whose forays into gigantism include the world’s biggest building, longest bridge, largest air terminal and — to its deep shame, one imagines — third-largest skyscraper. Long derided as a manufacturer merely of low-quality, imitative goods, China is threatening to lead the world in anti-aircraft drone swarms, humanoid robots, gun-toting robo-dogs, hypersonic fighter jets, and maglev hyperloops that will, sooner or later, make China’s existing network of high-speed trains look as rusty and decrepit as its antediluvian counterparts in Britain.

The comparison, though unflattering, is instructive. In cost, at least, Britain’s second-ever high-speed rail project — the first was the Eurostar — matched China’s flair for gigantism. But it was reduced in scope, piece by piece, until it became a connection merely between Birmingham and the suburbs of London. While Britain made a eunuch of its grandest infrastructure project, failing to build a late-20th century iteration of a technology we invented in the 19th, the Chinese were pioneering, in the form of the maglev hyperloop, a technology we might not emulate until the 22nd.

In many respects, China is outperforming even the United States. As the winds of change howl, look for taut windsocks. We can see one in the form of the Techno-Industrial Playbook, the product of a pan-institutional banding-together of dozens of American think-tankers. Many of these think-tankers, over the course of their careers, have been principally concerned with economic growth. But the playbook is something more muscular: a plan for reinvigorated American technological strength, a plan via which the country can reinvigorate its industrial base, attract the world’s top talent, and take control of important resources such as rare earth minerals. It is a sign of changing times and, to use a well-worn phrase, interesting times.

As for Britain, there has been talk in this publication and elsewhere of Anglofuturism: a neo-Gaullist project via which the country might be propelled into a future that, though founded on what is now frontier technology, feels like home. But if any country is currently and coherently reifying such a vision, it is China. To use the coinage of the artist Lawrence Lek, a Londoner of Malaysian-Chinese extraction, we can call this vision Sinofuturism.

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Any attempt to understand Sinofuturism must begin with the pit out of which China has bootstrapped itself. China’s “Century of Humiliation” began with the mass opium addiction fomented by the East India Company in the 1830s and continued with the resultant Opium Wars. China’s defeat by the British was followed by defeat by Japan and the attempted carving-up of the country by a greedy host of foreign powers. This wretched period finally ended, according to the Chinese telling, with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, following a 22-year civil war, in 1949. Much misery lay yet in store: Mao alone is believed to have been responsible for 65 million deaths, through both mass murder and the famine that resulted from the “Great Leap Forward”.

Britain and America, in living memory and beyond, have been spared the agonies of famine and state-sanctioned mass murder. Those of us native to the postwar West are probably incapable of fully understanding the effect on the Chinese psyche of those traumas and humiliations. But we do know that China yearns to be the best, to be the biggest, to command respect, and to be invulnerable both to rival powers and to nature itself.

It is in this respect, in that domineering attitude to nature, that we can see one of the most significant differences between China and the Anglosphere. China, says Thomas White, a sinologist at King’s College London, sees nature as a resource, as something to be exploited and engineered. “There is a faith in the ability of humans to intervene in ecological processes in order to improve them, rather than a sense that human impact is inevitably detrimental.”

We can see traces of this attitude in China’s ecology-wrecking dams, its weather-altering geoengineering and its desert-defying Great Green Wall. In these endeavours there is an inheritance from the millennia-old Chinese dream of taming floods. It was a dream realized by the legendary engineer, Da Yu, whose labors secured him emperorship of the Xia Dynasty. Five-thousand years after Yu’s supposed existence, the Chinese press paid Jiang Zemin, the engineer-turned-president who oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the profound compliment of calling him “the new Da Yu”. (If you continue to doubt the significance of this kind of engineering to Chinese governing, note that the Chinese word for politics — 政治 — contains an ideogrammatic element denoting “water management”.)

Most of China’s great nature-defying projects would be out of place in the West. To return to the debacle of HS2, one imagines that the Chinese were mystified to learn that Brits spent £100 million to build a shed for the benefit of rare bats. Perhaps they are also mystified by our willingness to waylay large infrastructure projects on account of individuals who might be bothered by noise or are unwilling to be moved. In contrast, the building of the Three Gorges Dam entailed the displacement of at least 1.4 million people.

This disregard for the human is another foundational difference. Whether you ascribe it to collectivism, Confucianism or a post-traumatic invulnerability to complacency, Sinofuturism is, by and large, disinclined to make way for the individual. It is this illiberal tendency, to a Western eye, that fosters some of the most appalling examples of the CCP’s inhumanity: the political imprisonments, the constant surveillance, the abuse of animals, the fearful neighbors, the indentured Uyghurs. China’s dominance of global manufacturing, even on behalf of companies headquartered in the West, is at least partly dependent on forced labor. Sinofuturism has involved the pulling of levers that Westerners would be unwilling to touch.

Cheap labor, too, has been a tremendous asset to Chinese manufacturing — as has rampant IP theft and the cornering, via dealmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, of the entire industrial supply chain. Thanks to these factors and others, China has clawed itself back to the technological frontier. In the ninth century, Chinese monks discovered gunpowder; in the 21st, we learned this April, Chinese engineers have successfully tested a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, unleashing an intense fireball without needing to use radioactive material. But more important than any particular new technology, says William Matthews, of Chatham House, is China’s mastery of the production of technology. “The real potential China has technologically is that, because it’s got such enormous manufacturing capacity, it has the potential to implement AI systems that are designed for logistics optimization and supply chain optimization.” Faster and more efficient manufacturing allows China to spam out electric vehicles and other technologies that the CCP has judged in advance to be worth dominating.

Doing all this automatically — replacing all that cheap labor with robot arms and so on — is a project currently underway, for China, like the West, faces the civilizational challenge of a tumbling birth rate. The West has tried to cheaply address the problem by importing millions of migrants, thus storing up further problems while impeding (and in some cases retarding) the development of automation. China’s program of automation looks the better bet.

And the CCP’s goal, says Matthews, is to lead the way not only in robotics, but in other emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum computing. “It aims to use these as a basis for effecting what amounts to a qualitative shift in economic power, similar to the original Industrial Revolution, that will lead China to a position where actually economically, at the national level, it outcompetes the United States.”

America remains the wealthier country, and the home, as Elon Musk has pointed out with regard to Sinofuturism, of the hyper-futurist project that is Starship. But China is growing in civilizational confidence, the effects of which are visible not only in its space program, which is aiming to build the first moon base, but in its architecture. It is telling, in this respect, that Xi Jinping has banned “oversized and xenocentric” buildings, of which the “big pants” skyscraper, which resembles a pair of trousers, is a notorious example. The result of the edict is that China’s multiplying cityscapes will no longer be the plaything of experimental Western modernists. Sinofuturism’s larger infrastructure, writ in monumental concrete, will retain its herculean Maoist drabness. But pre-revolutionary design tropes, such as courtyards and the use of feng shui principles, are becoming more visible in the country’s newer building projects.

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What, though, is the end-state of Sinofuturism? To the extent that China remains a communist state rather than an autocracy sui generis, it is not of the proselytizing variety. The USSR wanted to spread Communism around the world; the leading members of the CCP, according to Matthews, have little interest in such evangelism. “Their ideological position is one that’s based on the idea of distinctive civilizations with their own value histories. There’s a desire to displace the United States, but that, I think, is with a view to minimizing external interference.” There is little evidence that Xi wants the Chinese flag to flutter over Western capitals, though an annexation of Taiwan might make us reconsider that assumption. As does the Chinese march through our industry, property and universities.

And as America might discover in a war over Taiwan, hegemons tend not to come in pairs. The Thucydides trap is well-documented, and one emerging technology in particular might be the key to domination. It is not an uncommon view among AI researchers that the first country to develop artificial superintelligence will secure for themselves an indefinite global hegemony. This country’s sovereign AI, according to certain prognostications, will outthink its opponents at lightning speed, rendering those opponents harmless. Matthews envisages a slower takeoff of AI capability, and a more enduring bifurcation between American and Chinese systems. But the prospect of Chinese domination of AI, and of a world shaped by the CCP’s values above all others, ought to focus the mind.

There is much to deplore about modern China. But the West might, at the same time, examine its confidence and ambition. If it is to be the values of the Anglosphere, rather than those of the CCP, that define the next centuries, then we ought, pragmatically, to consider how it is that China has revitalized itself so effectively. We should not wish for a government that would displace 1.4 million people to build a dam, but nor should we wish for a government that allows individual Nimbys to block infrastructure that would benefit tens of millions. The Victorians had more centralized planning power than we do, and the result is that we still skulk around in the structures they left us. More fundamentally, they wanted to build things that would last. We need to rediscover those long-dormant muscle fibers.

Democracies are very good at industrial innovation, but less good at long-term industrial planning. China’s recent progress in AI is the fruit of a plan set down in 2017. I’m told that, a little later, the British government was warned by experts that it had a brief window in which to corner a new technology called a large language model. The government acknowledged the opportunity but did not act on it. Training runs multiplied in cost and Britain no longer has the option of getting ahead. A reinvigorated West, along the lines of the one envisaged in the Playbook, will need to relearn how to design, and stick to, far-sighted industrial plans.

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That applies in particular to trade. As America’s allies are currently discovering, erraticism is not an attractive feature in a customer. And much of the developing world sees China, instead, as a more worthwhile partner, with the result that China has secured reliable supplies of every important mineral. But there are many downsides to the handing of economic dominance to China, which is, at best, indifferent to the liberal internationalism that has brought such prosperity to the world. To this effect, the economist Noah Smith writes that, in comparison to postwar America, a dominant China “will be less interested in creating freedom of the seas for other nations, and more narrowly concerned with protecting its own trade… [And] for all the sneers directed at America’s self-appointed role of ‘world police’, it was more willing to stand up to regional conquerors than China has proven so far.” Embrace the Belt and Road Initiative in haste; repent at leisure.

The irony is that China is, in certain intellectual respects, a child of the West. In a glib sense, that is to be expected of such a prolific thief of IP, but the phenomenon goes much deeper. As White observes, the Chinese faith in human reason and progress, and in humanity’s ability to triumph over nature, have a “direct lineage to the Enlightenment”. And Marxism, of course, with all its ideas about the progression of history through certain stages, is itself a Western invention.

In every Chinese reach for greatness, then, one can discern at least a vestige of what we can think of as civilizational anxiety of influence. It is an anxiety that is borne not only of that uneasy intellectual inheritance, but of the long and torturous Century of Humiliation. And it is an anxiety that, should things continue in the present vein, will persist for much longer than the primacy of the West. As if suffering from sleep paralysis, we are becoming aware of our sclerosis, but are not yet able to arrest it. Our political classes are responding to this dangerous new world with a combination of clumsiness and naivety. What the moment requires of the West, though, is a project of revival — one that is pragmatic enough to analyze what is effective about Sinofuturism, but bold and self-confident enough to surpass it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first signs emerged back in 2017, during the years of Trump One, when the US for the first time acted very directly against China’s techno-economic rise. Seeing its increasing threat, the Administration cut off access to some of the advanced technology that China really needs, starting with advanced microprocessors, the “chips” of both missiles and smartphones. Tellingly, this was the one Trump policy that Biden did not reverse. Indeed, his Administration tried to strengthen the technology export controls.

Now, as Trump Two kicks off, America is dealing with a distinctly more aggressive China. It has become clear that Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is not about a richer or a happier nation, but rather a stronger and indeed more warlike one. He has been visiting the different headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army to urge the assembled officers to be ready to fight — to really fight, and win! Further, it seems that defectors have reported that Xi has told members of the Central Military Commission to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

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So while the immediate rationale behind the humiliation of Zelensky in the White House would have been to soften up Russia and obtain a prompt ceasefire, and start negotiations for a territorial compromise, it was all done in the service of Trump’s larger and longer term ambition of neutralizing China. In this, he is pulling off a “reverse Nixon”: instead of courting China to oppose the USSR, as Kissinger and Nixon did in 1972, Trump wants to detach Moscow from Beijing.

Of course, today’s Russia is but a shadow of the still vigorous USSR that Nixon had to contend with. But even in its much-weakened state, Russia still adds a great deal to Chinese power. It provides everything from jet engines for Xi’s fighters (its own remain stubbornly unreliable), to Polar access via Russia’s arctic ports, railway access to Western Europe via Kazakhstan and Moscow, and overland access to Iran and the Middle East.

More simply, Russia’s immense territory interposed between China and the “West”, both in Europe and North America, would function in war as the Pacific Ocean serves the US, from San Diego and Pearl Harbor to Taiwan and China.

Trump is much better placed to bargain with Putin than Biden ever was — for one thing, he never insulted Putin as Biden did. But that is not the main reason why Trump has a decent chance of pulling off this diplomatic maneuver. These days, one of Putin’s growing worries is the territorial integrity of easternmost Siberia, Russia’s Maritime Province.

Local officials and academics in Vladivostok voiced acute concerns about Chinese intrusions even during my last visit in 2019 — before the sharp increase in China’s relative power caused by the Ukraine war. Since then, things have only grown more concerning.

Ultimately, the problem is demographic. Eastern Siberia — officially the “Far Eastern Federal District” — is a tad smaller than Australia, much bigger than the European Union and twice the size of India, but only had a population of 8.1 million at the last count. Meanwhile, China’s northernmost big city Harbin has more than 10 million inhabitants all by itself, while its Heilongjiang province has 30 million, and Inner Mongolia another 24 million.

As the Chinese increasingly outnumber Russians along that immensely long and scarcely patrolled border, there are other shifts there to alarm Moscow. One small example tells a significant tale. In 2023, the Chinese government abruptly issued an ordinance that mandates the use of the pre-Russian name “Haishenwai” for Vladivostok, in place of the previous “Fúládíwòsītuōkè” — which was clearly a meek attempt at a Chinese pronunciation of the Russian name.

This seemingly innocuous linguistic tweak belies a deep historical resentment. The Chinese still remember with great bitterness the collapse of imperial power in the 19th century, and the ensuing territorial losses under “unequal treaties” and forced concessions to the British, French, Japanese, Austro-Hungary, Germany (in Qingdao where good German beer is still made), and even Italy, in Tianjin.

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Over time, most of those territorial losses were revoked, including Hong Kong that reverted to China in 1997, but not the biggest territorial losses by far, which were extorted by Imperial Russia in 1858 and 1860. They now constitute a slice of Siberia and Russia’s Maritime Province in the Far East, including Vladivostok. In spite of the passage of time, many in China still remember the lost territories and the old humiliations only too keenly. Let’s not forget why the Russians invaded Ukraine.

Then, more recently, another warning appeared, with China’s very quiet but momentous request to build a modern container port in the bay of Slavianska, in Russia’s Maritime Province south of Vladivostok, where Chinese territory arrives within 11 miles of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese certainly have a very good reason to build the port: the economy of the entire its north-east, the “rust belt” Dongbei, has long suffered from its distance from a seaport. As the economy there is transformed, so the Chinese threat increases.

So, yes, it is certainly a key Western interest that the war in Ukraine ends advantageously, with an agreed territorial settlement not imposed by either side. Equally, it is vitally important that Russia should not be as dependent on China as it now is. Europe may have its head stuck in the sand in this regard, but it seems that Trump has spotted this opportunity, realizing that in Putin’s pursuit of a favorable outcome in Ukraine there is an opportunity to detach him from Beijing. While it might seem far-fetched, even for this most unpredictable of presidents, the televised humiliation of Zelensky did seem to indicate that Nixonian intent.

As often happens, Trump breaks with American presidential traditions more in style than in substance. In reality, the 45th and 47th president is in a tradition of realist presidents, going back to Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, who have viewed world politics as a great-power club, rather than an arena for idealism.

In brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, for example, Theodore Roosevelt accepted a Japanese sphere of influence in Korea, South Manchuria, and Sakhalin Island as the price of maintaining a balance of power in East Asia between Russia and Japan. In his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, TR said that “it would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others”.

This realist tradition endured the reign of the arch-idealist Woodrow Wilson. Following the entry of the United States into World War I, Wilson asked his adviser Col. Edward M. House to draw up plans for a postwar League of Nations. House suggested to Wilson that such a body “might be confined to the great powers”. In a diary entry at the time, House wrote: “Why permit [smaller powers] to exercise a directing hand upon nations having to furnish not only the financial but the physical force necessary to maintain order and peace? I am sorry to come to this conclusion, because it does not seem toward the trend of liberalism. However, the idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary.”

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Wilson’s eventual plan for the League of Nations failed to win ratification in the US Senate, thanks precisely to the realists. Some of these, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, favored a US-British treaty with France to deter future German aggression but thought that the League of Nations was a utopian experiment doomed to failure.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often held up as an avatar by the internationalists, was much more in the realist grain than they would like to admit. FDR, who had served as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, sought to avoid his ex-boss’s mistakes in his own thinking about world order after the defeat of the Axis powers. Roosevelt put his hopes for the postwar world in “the Big Four” or “the Four Policemen”: the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China, which would dominate their respective regions, while smaller countries might have “ostensible” participation.

The only “policeman” with a democratic form of government was the United States: Winston Churchill’s Britain ruled its empire outside of the British Isles undemocratically, Stalin’s Soviet Russia was a communist dictatorship, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China was an anticommunist dictatorship. When the Declaration of the United Nations (the term for the anti-Axis alliance coined by FDR) was signed on Jan. 1, 1941, the Big Four signed it first; the other 12 members of the alliance had to wait until the following day.

In wartime Britain, too, realism dominated thinking about the postwar world to come. Like FDR, Churchill was skeptical about global institutions in which each state, no matter how small and weak, had equal authority. In 1943, Churchill proposed that a “Supreme World Council” run by the great powers that would oversee regional councils for Europe, the Pacific, and the Western hemisphere. In a visit with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill came up with what he referred to as his “naughty document” — a secret agreement that assigned shares of influence in Central Europe and the Balkans to Britain and the Soviet Union. Greece was to be 90% under British influence and 10% under Soviet influence, Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be 50% British and 50%, and so on.

Focused on winning the war, FDR delegated postwar planning for the permanent United Nations organization to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, an ardent Wilsonian who recreated the flawed design of the League of Nations under a new name. Cold War rivalries immediately paralyzed the great-power-dominated UN Security Council, because each member had a veto.

The Soviet-backed takeover of China by Mao’s Communists turned the Middle Kingdom from a US ally into an enemy, while Britain’s postwar economic weakness left Washington and Moscow as the only two global military powers in a bipolar world. However, the postwar recovery of Western Europe and Japan and the Sino-Soviet split led President Richard Nixon to conclude in July 1971 that there were now five centers of economic power, if only two of military power — the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, and China.

According to Nixon, “these are the five that will determine the economic future and, because economic power will be the key to other kinds of power, the future of the world in other ways in the last third of this century”. Determined to extricate America from the war in Vietnam and to avoid similar entanglements, Nixon in 1969 had already espoused “the Nixon Doctrine”, declaring that “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower necessary for its defense”.

Following Nixon’s opening to the People’s Republic of China, the Shanghai Communique in 1972 acknowledged China’s interest in Taiwan: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position.”

Following each of the three global conflicts of the 20th century — the two world wars and the Cold War — idealist hopes for a “new world order” free of great power conflicts excited many Americans. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent republics in 1991 led liberal internationalists to call for “a league of democracies” to police a globalized world society, while neoconservatives dreamed of a single global market and “rules-based order” policed by the Washington alone as the “world’s only superpower”.

But China under Xi Jinping and Russia under Boris Yeltsin and his successors rejected American hegemony and called for a multipolar world in which they would be the hegemonic powers in their own regions. It is not “blaming the victim” to point out that invitations to join the US-led NATO alliance were followed by the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and of Ukraine in 2014 (and, on a larger scale, in 2022).

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The realists saw this coming. On Aug. 1, 1991, three weeks before Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, President George H. W. Bush, a consummate realist, told the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that it would be better for Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to remain together in a loose union, rather than make a hard break with Moscow. In the speech, derided as “Chicken Kiev” by the neoconservative New York Times columnist William Safire, the elder Bush warned: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

For its part, the United States has continued to observe the Monroe Doctrine by treating the North American quartersphere as its own exclusive domain, toppling regimes it does not like and installing clients. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, Bush I invaded Panama in 1989, and Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 in “Operation Uphold Democracy”. By abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban after 20 years of warfare, Joe Biden tacitly acknowledged that Central Asia is less important to Washington than North America. Similarly, by moving quickly to end the costly proxy war in Ukraine and opposing Ukrainian membership in NATO, Trump is signaling that Eastern Europe is not a core American interest, either.

Nor is enmity against Russia baked into the American tradition. For most of the time since the United States achieved independence, Americans have been morally repelled by successive forms of Russian autocracy — even as US diplomats have viewed Russia as a counterweight to powers that pose greater potential threats. During the Civil War, to deter Britain from intervening on the side of the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration welcomed the Russian fleet to American ports, including New York, where Russian naval officers paraded down Broadway past cheering crowds. Harper’s opined that it would “be wise to meet the hostile alliance of the Western Powers of Europe by an alliance with Russia”.

Under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, an American naval squadron arrived at the Russian Baltic port of Kronstadt to a 21-gun salute and a display of American flags. To thwart British influence in North America, Johnson’s secretary of state, William Seward, bought Alaska from the Tsar and tried but failed to obtain Greenland for the United States. In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland from Denmark; in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged President Eisenhower to try to buy Greenland; and Trump has revived the idea at a time of increased tensions with Russia and China.

Tsarist Russia was America’s ally against Imperial Germany in World War I, and the Soviet Union was America’s ally against Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. Only the elimination of other great-power threats led to rivalry between Washington and Moscow. Now that China is viewed as America’s greatest strategic rival, an American strategy of seeking to pry Beijing and Moscow apart, if possible, is only to be expected.

There may be sound arguments based on realpolitik to oppose Trump’s strategy toward Ukraine. But to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The ephemeral spasms of Wilsonian utopianism form the exception to the rule that American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles. Uncle Sam may engage in flowery talk — but allies and enemies alike know that he drives a hard bargain.

Perhaps Starmer should have heeded these warnings. For just as Johnson and the spooks understood, China is increasingly exploiting technology for geopolitical ends, using hi-tech heft to project its power and surveil its opponents. And as I can reveal, it has received help — from scientists working here in Britain, even as cash-strapped UK universities have accepted funding for these projects via dubious Chinese sources.

In the early years of the last decade, China realised it had a problem. America was investing heavily in space-based communications systems. There are civilian applications for this technology, but it also benefits the military: as demonstrated by Elon Musk’s Starlink, described by one Ukrainian officer as “the essential backbone” of battlefield communication. And as the Americans rushed ahead, China felt it was falling behind. So, in 2016, it announced a technical project of epic proportions: the Space-Ground Integrated Information Network (SGIIN). It was a project designed to comprehensively integrate space-based information networks and mobile communication systems by 2030. It has a clear dual-use potential: civilian applications with significant military implications.

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Enter Wayne Luk, a computing professor at Imperial College London. Through a complicated network of academic and corporate connections, Luk has become deeply involved in China’s satellite communications programme. His research at Imperial has been funded in part by a £400,000 grant from the “State Key Laboratory” devoted to this field, which works closely with China’s military and is embedded within the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The latter company is on the US Treasury’s sanctions list because it is deemed to be part of the Chinese “military-industrial complex”.

But Luk’s involvement goes beyond academic research. Together with Niu Xinyu, his former Imperial College PhD student, he also co-founded Kunyun Information Technology, a Shenzhen-based manufacturing company. Luk served for years as its chief scientific officer, and more than 5% of the firm is owned by the Chinese government. By 2018, just a year after its founding, Kunyun was making ultra-fast AI-adapted chips deployed in satellites and navigation systems for the controversial C919 aircraft, which reportedly includes technology stolen from the West by industrial espionage.

If Luk’s story suggests technological collaboration that could help China’s military, Stefan Kittler’s narrative is even more troubling. A computing expert at Surrey University, Kittler has been central to developing surveillance technologies that could significantly enhance our ability to track and identify individuals. And for many years, he has collaborated with researchers at Jiangnan University, where a new lab was recently named in his honour. He had earlier co-founded another Jiangnan lab devoted to “pattern recognition and computational intelligence”.

Once again, that scientific language arguably belies a more hard-nosed reality. For one thing, Kittler has co-authored numerous papers with Jiangnan academics who have also conducted research commissioned by the Chinese military. In 2018, he co-chaired a conference in Beijing on biometric recognition together with Tan Tieniu, a former PhD student at Imperial College who now serves as the secretary of the local Communist Party branch at Nanjing University, which happens to be the base of China’s State Secrecy Academy.

Like with Luk, these technologies aren’t merely there for show. On the contrary, as The Sunday Times reported in 2020, his FaceR2VM project, jointly funded by the UK and China, conducted research aimed at allowing people to be identified from the bumps and ridges on their ears and noses, and by their facial expressions, even if they were wearing a mask. That’s exactly the sort of technology used to follow China’s political dissidents, and minority groups such as the Uyghurs.

Kittler’s relationship with China also extends beyond the lab. In 2016, at a glittering ceremony in Beijing, he was given a “Friendship Award” by the then-vice premier Ma Kai — a prize reserved for “foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress”. In January, he is due to teach at a “winter school” alongside his friend Tan Tieniu, sanctioned by the US for his involvement in human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

Not that we should necessarily be surprised. As William Hannas of Georgetown University explains, though Luk and Kittler are hardly unique. Beijing, says the former China expert at the CIA, “has a long track record of appropriating the skills of US scientists” into their service. The same, Hannas adds, is also true of Britain.

On this side of the Atlantic, officials are discretely making similar sounds. Together with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) recently compiled a list of every research partnership between British and Chinese universities. Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources told me it included some 500 separate projects — of which about 10% were “red flagged” on the grounds they posed a risk to national security or human rights.

But given the concerns over the way the People’s Republic uses technology, fears dating back years, why are British institutions still accepting Chinese cash? The answer, as so often with the university sector, is because otherwise they would go bust. As UKRI reported, joint research with China brought in an extra £440 million between 2007-21, even as Chinese students studying in Britain spent £5.4 billion on tuition fees and accommodation in 2021 alone.

To an extent, such compromises are the bread-and-butter of being in government, especially for a country as eager for foreign investment as Britain. Yet if opposition Conservatives have obvious reasons for scepticism — George Freeman, a research security minister under Rishi Sunak, says it’s vital that Britain “better protect” its intellectual property and research — observers outside Parliament are worried too.

Sam Dunning, the director of China-UK Transparency says that China has “long sought to exploit our open societies and academia to modernise its military”. This, Dunning adds, must stop: even with the imminent reset in Anglo-Chinese relations. Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch makes a similar point, saying it’s “shocking” that a professor such as Kittler would share a platform with a colleague sanctioned for human rights abuse.

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Yet if Hurfurt insists that the government must ensure that British research “cannot be exploited by rights-abusing regimes abroad”, change may not be forthcoming. Though neither Luk nor Kittler responded to a request for comment, an Imperial College spokesperson said that the £400,000 grant “was accepted following appropriate due diligence assessment” — and that “we regularly review our policies in line with evolving government legislation and sector guidance and practice, working closely with the appropriate Government departments, and in line with our commitments to UK national security”. The grant ran out at the end of 2022.

Over in Guildford, a University of Surrey spokesperson said that Kittler’s collaborative work had begun “when the British Government was actively soliciting, promoting and encouraging business and academia to engage and collaborate with organisations and institutions in China”. Now that the “geopolitical climate” had changed, the spokesperson continued, the university “had applied rigorous due diligence to all research collaborations” and had sought input from the Cabinet Office’s Research Collaboration Advice Team. All the same, the university stated they were “fully aware” of Kittler’s roles in China, and indeed was proud of its international collaborations.

That, of course, still leaves the one body with authority to impose genuine change: the Government. But here again, we probably shouldn’t expect too much. When the issue was raised in the Commons earlier this month, the relevant minister sounded remarkably vague. Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, merely promised that British research was both “world class” and “safe”. When I asked for more details, a Government spokesperson didn’t offer much beyond insisting that Labour was “taking a robust approach to managing risk” by helping universities make “informed decisions”. At the same time, however, he noted that universities were independent bodies, and were therefore free to pursue research partnerships abroad — so long, that is, they complied with “security policies and regulations”.

Given, however, that the spokesperson also emphasised the need for “sustained and pragmatic engagement” with China, anyone hoping for a ban on scientific engagement with the People’s Republic is likely to be left disappointed. Then again, given Starmer’s landmark meeting in Rio, and the desperate need for growth that underpins it, that’s surely unsurprising. “We have to be real,” concedes one Whitehall source. “China isn’t going away.”

Many of these ambitious youth have flocked to the cities from the countryside in search of a better life. But according to the most recent census, 39% of its population still hold rural hukous, or legal housing registrations. This means that when inhabitants leave their homes to work in the cities, the land cannot be sold. It remains bound to them forever.

Not everyone thinks this is wise. Reformers argue that farmers should be allowed to sell their plots before moving on. Large agricultural companies could then swoop in to buy the land and build vast Iowa-style factory farms all over the Chinese countryside. This, they say, would enhance China’s agricultural productivity and yield, which is currently comparatively low: the snaggle-toothed, sun-beaten peasants are deeply inefficient compared with the robot harvesters, fruit pickers and milkmaids at work in the West.

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The reformers warn, too, that China is becoming too reliant on America. And while still self-sufficient in grain crops, it is struggling to satisfy a growing appetite for meat which it currently imports in large quantities from America and Brazil. So in order to wean itself off American cattle, something which may become even more urgent with the advent of Trump 2.0, China will have to disinherit its peasantry and embrace the factory farm.

While tempted by the vision of agricultural self-sufficiency, President Xi Jinping is loath to do this. On a practical level, China’s political elites see the bountiful countryside as a social safety net during times of economic hardship. China doesn’t have a government-managed welfare system; faint gestures, such as the 医保 healthcare system, are still in their infancy. So the fact that the poor know how to grow their own food and have the land to do so is hugely important. It also provides a useful safety net in case of emergencies. During the Covid lockdowns, many of the migrant workers who keep Chinese cities running returned to their rural hometowns, planted cabbage and lived off their land. Had that land been sold, they might have starved instead.

China’s top brass also fear that if rural villagers were able to sell their land, they would be targeted by predatory corporate interests in league with corrupt local governments. This is exactly what happened in Russia during the Nineties, when citizens of the former USSR were given vouchers representing their share of the collective economy as it was privatised. Many of them immediately sold these vouchers to cowboys for cash, and drank it the same afternoon. Out of such misery, the oligarchic fortunes of Roman Abramovich and his cronies bloomed.

In any case, the CCP is terrified at the thought of swarms of disinherited peasants destabilising the urban outskirts. The hukou system currently keeps the 300 million peasants working in the cities in their place. These migratory workers are treated as second-class citizens and only residents are given priority access to local schools and hospitals. Eliminate this pecking order and Chinese public services will be overwhelmed.

But there’s another reason that Xi is hesitant to abandon the peasantry. Like the majority of Chinese leaders, he was sent to the countryside as a teenager during Mao’s Cultural Revolution — and still harbours deep admiration for the soul of the Chinese peasantry. At the age of 15, Xi was sent down to a village in northern Shaanxi, a poor and barren region, where locals live in caves. At first, by all accounts, he found it difficult to adapt to this troglodytic way of life. But it soon toughened him up. According to official propaganda, which is no doubt embellished, he built methane tanks, and dams to protect villagers from flooding. To this day, Xi credits his time in Shaanxi for teaching him what life was really about; happiness comes from struggle, he says, as he urges today’s young Chinese to do the same.

These feelings are echoed by the wider CCP leadership. For China’s elites, abandoning the countryside to robots and drones would be a sociocultural tragedy. Some respected theorists, including Wen Tiejun, believe that if the CCP betrays the peasantry, it is making itself vulnerable, as city dwellers aren’t nearly as loyal as the villagers. For Wen, the villagers preserve the true spirit of China, while the essence of the West has seeped into the corrupt cities. He has a point: the process of urbanisation is inevitably a process of social atomisation. In a city, it is every man for himself. Yet the CCP desires the opposite: for every man to be united in a shared effort, and it is villages, not cities, which produce men like that.

In 2006, former president Hu Jintao said that: “The countryside is the cradle of the Chinese nation, agriculture is the foundation of the national economy, and farmers are our bread and butter. If we lose these three, we will also lose the foundation of our nation.” Like Xi, Hu Jintao comes from a generation of elderly Chinese policymakers who once tasted rural life. They still prefer the austerity foods of their youth and many retire to the countryside in later life. These men often have an instinctual, conservative contempt for cities, and hold a near religious reverence for the ancient traditions of the villages.

So after decades of facing outwards, China’s elites are now turning inwards. Xi’s recent drive to protect Chinese ecology is a case in point: in the Qinling mountains of Shaanxi, he has ordered the demolition of villas and hotels three separate times. It has become one of his signature policies, deeply intertwined with nationalist ideas and anti-corruption campaigns. For Xi realises that while urbanites have no connection to the land, its past, or to each other, the peasantry keeps the idea of China alive. For as long as there are people tilling the fields and speaking in dialects, China will never forget who she truly is.

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

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

Now this process is almost complete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given the Nato campaign was justified by the need to halt what was described as a Serbian “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the circumstances surrounding the bombing, which left three Chinese journalists dead, remain murky. While Nato insists the attack was accidental, Beijing’s claim that it was deliberate was bolstered by a subsequent investigation in The Observer, which suggested the building was targeted by the US in order to foil Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts on American tactics and weaponry — allegations denied by Washington.

Yet if the circumstances of the bombing remain contested, the international consequences of Nato’s campaign against Serbia are clearer, as indeed is the difference between the China of 1999 and the China of today. There is, in short, no doubting the symbolism of Xi’s visit to the Balkan back-yard of the European Union.

A quarter of a century ago, although China was already the world’s second largest economy, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, its options for retaliation against the US bombing of its sovereign territory were limited. Today, not only is China the largest economy in the world — it is orders of magnitude more powerful in military terms, with significantly more means of exerting strategic, diplomatic and military pressure on the US and its allies, ranging across Africa to the South China Sea to the Taiwan Straits. On the site of the embassy now stands a new complex, incorporating a Confucius Institute as well as offices, workshops and a hotel. It is a symbol of China’s wealth and soft power as much as its world position. Perhaps even more significant than enhanced Chinese power, however, are the changes in the wider international order.

The Nato bombing over Kosovo was both the moment of peak liberal international hubris, and the moment the so-called “rules-based order” began to crumble. On the one hand, the campaign was justified by the need to defend the human rights of Kosovo’s majority Albanian population from a counter-insurgency campaign against Albanian separatists waged by Belgrade. On the other, the Nato bombing was also in explicit violation of the UN Charter, whose articles protected member-states’ sovereign rights to be free from external interference.

Unlike previous humanitarian military operations during the Nineties, in this case the circle was not squared by the UN granting authorisation for the Nato military intervention. The UN could not offer its imprimatur because of the threatened use of veto by Russia and China, permanent members on the UN Security Council. Both countries were suspicious of Western states’ growing proclivity to use force in defence of human rights, and both had good reason to want to discourage their own restive peripheral minorities from seeking outside military support.

Despite the lack of UN legitimacy, the pressure of the Nato bombing campaign, as well as behind-the-scenes Russian diplomacy, eventually forced the Serbian state to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, allowing Nato to occupy the province and establish an international protectorate in the territory, where NATO has remained ever since. Kosovo would eventually unilaterally declare independence from Serbia in 2008 — a claim to independence still denied by Belgrade. Serbia still enjoys the support of Russia and China in its efforts to stymie international recognition of Kosovo’s independence, while independent Kosovo now enjoys the recognition of most of the world’s states.

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The 1999 bombing campaign was, therefore, both a moment of Western triumph and Western overreach. Defended at the time in the most grandiloquent terms as a cosmic battle between good and evil, the Nato campaign showed the West at the peak of its power, able to intervene militarily wherever it wanted on humanitarian grounds, unrestrained by international law or convention and without UN support. But it also amounted to the sabotage by Western states of the very same rules-based order enshrined in the UN, whose liberal maxims — including non-intervention in internal matters — were extended as the guarantee for non-Western states to accept Western leadership. Although the civilian casualties cited by Western states to justify the bombing quickly began to unravel, the precedent had already been established.

After Kosovo, humanitarianism became fused with every Western war-effort — whether the need to defend Afghan women from the Taliban, Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, or Libyans from Colonel Gaddafi’s vengeance. From an international order based around sovereign states and citizens’ rights, Nato ushered in a cosmopolitan order based around global states on the one hand, whose political and legal claims have limitless jurisdiction, and a morass of deracinated humanity on the other, which no longer enjoyed any national protections except for the prospect of a humanitarian intervention in their favour.

Today, this humanitarianism is still regarded as the basis of the West’s global right — as seen in America’s efforts to build a “floating pier” to distribute humanitarian aid to besieged Palestinians in Gaza; in effect, the US is shoring up its legitimacy in the Gaza war by ministering to the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs in the midst of an Israeli bombardment by US-supplied arms. What has changed is more on the other side of the geopolitical divide. Across the Nineties and early 2000s, Russia championed the rights of sovereign states against the humanitarianism of Western states. Since the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, however, Vladimir Putin has deployed the Nato model to justify Russian expansionism. It begins with military intervention to defend embattled separatist minorities (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbass) against genocidal central government forces (Tbilisi, Kyiv), followed by the establishment of protectorates (the former People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk). The Kremlin twist to the Nato model is then to annex the protectorates.

Between Nato and Vladimir Putin, there is now no longer anyone in the international order today willing to defend the principle of non-intervention and state sovereignty. Two obvious European successors to claim the mantle of defending national sovereignty — Brexit Britain and embattled Ukraine — have both rejected pursuing a politics of national independence in favour of plumping for Nato, the single transnational organisation that has done the most to destroy not only individual states (Libya, Yugoslavia), but state sovereignty as such, which Nato expressly jettisoned in favour of fighting for the humanitarian responsibility to protect.

And what of Serbia? For all the diplomatic support it has received from Russia in its efforts to stymie Kosovo’s independence, Serbia’s international position is much closer to Ukraine’s than that of any other country in Europe. As with the Nato intervention, occupation and eventual dismemberment of Serbian territory with Kosovar independence, so Russia has done to Ukraine in Crimea and Donbass. If any two European countries have a joint interest in maintaining their sovereignty and territorial integrity from the predations of more powerful neighbours, it is Ukraine and Serbia.

This is partly why Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has exported Serbian weapons to Ukraine, while also managing to avoid joining the EU sanctions on Russia that have blown back against Western economies. Here, Vučić is trying to perpetuate the diplomatic tradition of neutralism and non-alignment that Serbia inherited from the former Yugoslavia, which sought to balance between East and West during the Cold War.

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Yet while he is no less autocratic than the Yugoslav Communist leader Marshal Tito, Vučić nonetheless lacks Tito’s toughness. Not only did Tito allegedly threaten to assassinate Stalin when Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948, but he also went on to establish an independent geopolitical bloc — the Non-Aligned Movement — alongside Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesian independence leader Sukarno and Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. By contrast, although Vučić assiduously courts outside patronage, he does not have the vision to establish an independent bloc, even though the circumstances for doing so are so much more propitious than in Tito’s day — one need only look at economic growth figures for India and Indonesia to see that. Nonetheless, even Vučić’s limited and unimaginative efforts to balance between Brussels, Moscow, Beijing and Washington D.C. indicate that there are more political options available for those canny enough to pursue them.

After all, long before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the international rules-based order was buried beneath the rubble of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. While Xi’s China may offer countries around the world more space to exercise political independence from the West, its transactional vision of international relations is no substitute for Western leadership, and its support for Russian revanchism indicates it does not have the vision to lead an international order of sovereign nation-states. Despite many vesting their hopes for liberation from American hegemony in a multipolarity, the truth is Xi’s Chinese nationalism offers no meaningful counter-pole to Nato. Rather, it demonstrates that until there is a state willing to pursue a robust sovereigntist politics of national independence, the international order will continue to be plagued by grandiloquent globalism — with all the strategic overreach and geopolitical rivalry that comes with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

That sense would turn out to be illusory. In mid-August, Singapore police arrested a couple here in their mid-forties as part of a country-wide raid targeting suspected money-laundering. The man had a passport from Saint Kitts and Nevis, The Straits Times reported, while his partner had a Dominican passport — but both were also Chinese nationals.

Overall, 10 people were arrested across Singapore that day and charged with offences relating to money-laundering. The group held passports from countries including Cyprus, Turkey, and Vanuatu, but all originated from China. Police seized assets including wine, jewellery, Bentley and Rolls-Royce cars and Patek Philippe watches, collectively valued at S$1 billion (nearly £600 million).

The raids and the trials that are expected to follow have shone a light on the exodus of money — both licit and illicit — from Xi Jinping’s China. And it draws attention to Singapore’s role as a haven for China’s business elite, both legitimate businesspeople fleeing an increasingly restrictive regime, as well as the small fraction suspected of financial crime. In 2022, China surpassed Russia as the world’s leading exporter of wealthy citizens, according to Henley & Partners, a firm that advises people on how to get residency and citizenship through investment.

Many business elites have decided that the good life is no longer possible in China as long as Xi continues to torment the private sector. Ever since the disappearance of Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 2020, Xi has been cracking down on the leaders of private businesses. Regulators cancelled the stock exchange listing of Ma’s Ant Group, the giant financial tech business behind the Alipay app, which would have been the biggest stock listing in history. And since then, a number of other sectors have had their collars felt, from online gaming to private tutoring, each move apparently aimed at shoring up the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of a healthy society and curbing the excesses of capitalism.

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This February, the banker Bao Fan, a legendary tech dealmaker, went missing. His company China Renaissance said he was “cooperating” in an investigation, the details of which have never been specified though his disappearance has dragged on for months. According to the FT, he was in the process of establishing a family office in Singapore to manage his personal wealth. Such vanishing acts undoubtedly unnerve the super-rich, spurring many of them to flee the country.

That is, if they can find a place to go. Escape routes appear to be narrowing at a time of growing strain between China and the West. Ireland, Portugal and the UK have all abolished “golden visa” programmes that offered residency in exchange for investment. It’s getting harder to leave China too, with immigration lawyers reporting delays in processing passport renewals, while both Chinese and foreign nationals have been banned from exiting. For now, however, Singapore continues to offer a global investor programme which grants permanent residency, a tier just below citizenship. It remains a favoured, and largely discreet, bolthole.

High-profile Chinese residents based in Singapore include Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance; and Liang Xinjun, a founder of Fosun — and it is rumoured that so do some of the founders of Alibaba. A number of Chinese companies including Shein have also established their global headquarters in Singapore. Nio, a Chinese electric vehicle maker, listed on the Singapore stock exchange last year.

There is little official data that reveals just how many wealthy Chinese have relocated to Singapore, but the indications are everywhere. The cost for expatriates of membership at the 36-hole Sentosa golf club has more than doubled to S$840,000 (nearly £500,000) over the past few years, inflation that appears to be driven largely by Chinese money. There were also about 700 family offices created in Singapore at the end of 2021. These are set up to manage the private wealth of an ultra-rich family, and again the main motor of expansion is the mainland Chinese expat, according to lawyers and other professionals in Singapore.

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Mainland Chinese were the biggest foreign buyers of property in Singapore from 2016 until this year, when US buyers overtook them. But while they started out buying largely in Sentosa — the only place in Singapore where foreigners are allowed to purchase landed property — Chinese émigrés are increasingly settling on the main island, renting what Singaporeans call a “GCB”, a “good class bungalow”. This is a sprawling luxury home with its own garden, a status marker on a crowded island where most of the population live in high-rise apartment blocks.

At the start of the pandemic, wealthy Chinese would offer a year’s deposit and a guarantee to pay rent at twice the market rate to secure a property, a Singaporean executive told me. “They’ll spend a few hundred thousand dollars on the interior of the house, including converting one of the rooms into a karaoke bar,” he said. “They’ll buy Bentleys and Rolls Royces — one or two for the husband and wife — and then half a dozen large Toyota vans for their entourage.”

Now, Singapore is turning against these extravagant Chinese émigrés. The city-state balances delicately between East and West: it has deep defence ties with the US — and has allowed America to deploy the Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone, from its Changi air base this year. Yet it also relies on China as its biggest trading partner. The official reaction to the influx of Chinese money was therefore to be stealthy about it: officials advised Singapore banks not to talk about poaching business from Hong Kong, for fear it would make the Chinese government bristle.

But as the cost of living went up in Singapore, as elsewhere, there’s been growing public discomfort at rising rents and ostentatious displays of wealth by mainland Chinese. Singapore is a tightly disciplined society, with public protest largely restricted to a single city centre park. But it is a democracy all the same and its government is still sensitive to public opinion, particularly after a 2011 general election when concerns about blue-collar immigration and its impact on housing and transport led to gains for opposition parties.

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With public opinion souring, Singapore’s regulators are getting tougher on foreign money. Authorities have asked at least 10 banks including Citigroup’s Singapore subsidiary to provide documents to the money-laundering investigation (the bank says it is “committed to the fight against money laundering”). Banks are, in turn, stepping up scrutiny of customers. Singapore government officials are also expected to demand that investors bring productive capital — helping to grow businesses and employ significant numbers in their country rather than just looking for a place to store their wealth.

For an earlier wave of wealthy mainland Chinese in Singapore, it was enough to stay on Sentosa and enjoy their wealth in the relative seclusion of an island that most Singaporeans only visit for a day trip. They were out of sight, out of mind. But later arrivals, with flashier ways, have attracted a level of attention that risks spoiling the fun for everyone.

These similarities may be useful to gauge the internal party power of Xi, but they tell us nothing about his economic policies or ideology. While Mao’s ideology during the Cultural Revolution was directly anti-Confucian, Xi’s is pro-Confucian. While Mao’s great economic turns — “the Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution — were motivated by ideology and disregarded stability, Xi’s policies are motivated by the opposite desire: to produce a more stable society.

This reflects evolution over the past 40 years. Following Deng’s sharp pro-market turn that placed economic growth centre stage, first after Mao’s death in 1976, and then even more decisively after the Tiananmen crackdown, China grew tremendously (at an average annual rate of more than 6% per capita between 1992 and 2012), while inequality increased (measured by the Gini index, from 36 to 47 points over the same period). The new China made many people rich, reduced poverty, changed the structure of the elite by having it much more private-sector oriented, and made the country “moderately prosperous”.

This trend was overseen by Jiang Zemin, the General Secretary of the Party from 1989 to 2002, and then by Hu Jintao, who held the two highest offices (head of the Party and head of the state) during the following 10 years. The embourgeoisement of the Chinese elite had to be given an ideological veneer — and Jiang Zemin provided this in 2000, when he introduced the policy of the “Three Represents” which allowed rich entrepreneurs to be more easily accepted in the nation’s governing bodies. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the Chinese People’s Congress became the richest legislative body in the world, exceeding even the US Congress in the number of dollar millionaires in its ranks.

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Both in personnel and ideology, then, a party whose claim to legitimacy was largely rooted in equalising chances and outcomes for most Chinese was gradually becoming the party of the rich. Based on micro data from household surveys, one paper I worked on with Li Yang and Filip Novokmet found that the top 5% of Chinese society had dramatically changed: in 1988, less than one quarter of the elite was linked with the private sector; by 2013, the year after Xi’s ascent to power, that share was close to 60%. We also found an increasing split between the social composition of the party overall and the party’s own elite: while the Party in 2013 still had a majority membership of the “old” (state-related) social groups, the top 5% was increasingly dominated by the “new” social groups (private-sector entrepreneurs and professionals).

The rich not only became more important, but were more visible too. Conspicuous consumption and disregard of public modesty — recall the story of the black Ferrari crashed in Beijing by a son of one of Hu Jintao’s top allies in 2012 — added to the perception of the Party as condoning many of the worst displays of nouveau-riche arrogance. And it seemed very possible, whether for better or worse, that the CPC might continue to evolve into an outwardly pro-rich party, defending the interests of a monied oligarchy, stimulating capitalist development, and holding power similar to the ruling South Korean party during the period of General Park’s rule. The term “communist” in the name of the Chinese party should not make us think such an evolution is impossible: North Korea’s communist party runs a monarchy.

But Xi seemed to have had a different view on the matter. At around the time he assumed his highest powers in 2012, there were two possibilities for the CPC: become a pro-capitalist party both in deed and ideology, or repress the most glaring displays of capitalist power within the party and outside and send the message that the ultimate arbiter is the State and the Party, not the new moguls and oligarchs. In addition, it could discourage ostentatious displays of wealth, punish the most corrupt, and shift the gears of the state towards ensuring less inequality, especially by reducing the urban-rural gap and the division between Eastern and Western provinces.

If we look at Xi’s “Common Prosperity” programme in a realistic way, and not fantasise that it represents some vague return to Maoism, it makes perfect sense: it is the overdue readjustment of excessively pro-capitalist policies, which, while perhaps good for growth, threatened to produce social anomie. And, in taming the liberalisation of his predecessors, what Xi proposes to do is not so different from what social democratic parties of Western Europe realised after the Second World War. Letting capitalism run amok, they thought, would produce another Great Depression, and such developments would only provide grist to the mill of the increasingly powerful Communist parties and trade unions linked with them. By contrast, their social-democratic policies were remarkably successful, so much so that a version of the period’s French sobriquet of the Trentes Glorieuses is applied across much of Western Europe. Inequality went down, growth picked up, and a “normal” middle class composed of hard-working and well-educated workers and employees was created.

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We do not know if Xi’s policies will be equally successful. Western European countries were democracies; China is not. West European policies did not depend on one man, or a narrow consensus; they were the product of a much wider intellectual movement that dated back to the pre-war period. Xi’s policies could therefore fall prey to the desire of his eventual successor to differentiate themselves from him — especially if they, similarly to Jiang Zemin, put greater emphasis on economic growth and do not shy away from supporting capitalists. Outside of government, China’s citizens may be, as some parts of the middle class seem already, tired of the repetitive insistence on an ideology that seems an awkward mélange of Marx and Confucius.

Yet while China’s future may not be as firmly seated as Xi wishes it to be, the main ideas behind his “turn to the Left” can be easily articulated: expand the role of the state and the Party, reduce the power of capitalists, and keep growth going while making sure it does not become socially destabilising. We do not need recourse to some fanciful Maoism to explain it. Rather, to borrow the metaphor of Chen Yun, one of the early Chinese Communist leaders, it is time to slightly narrow the cage within which the private sector operates. After all, if such a “readjustment” is successful, it will set China on a track for reasonable growth (of 4-5% per year) over the medium term. This will maintain some inequality, particularly when it comes to geography, and China’s capitalists will still get rich — but they will not be in political control.

Recent reports of China’s economic decline are thus much exaggerated. They reflect the unconscious absorption by Western and Chinese analysts of a Dengist emphasis on growth alone: uniquely in the case of China, growth rates below 7-8% per annum are seen as precursors of economic demise. Yet while Deng’s approach made sense in a post-Mao China traumatised by voluntarist economic policies, it cannot be, nor should it be, maintained forever. As in every country, economic growth and social stability have to be balanced. China will not grow at 10% per annum; nor will it cease to grow. It will not rule the world, nor become irrelevant. Instead, it will maintain an intermediate position — an outcome that should be welcomed by both China and the West.

The Chinese understand the bewitching power of the panda, using them as tools for soft power outreach and diplomatic communication. When, for example, all those animals on loan to the US and UK were recalled  earlier this year, experts in “panda diplomacy” warned that this tracked steadily worsening relations between China and the West.

But following Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the United States, we’ve seen a further exchange of panda platitudes. First, Chinese officials hinted that panda loans to America might once again resume. Then, White House mandarins responded with enthusiasm. The geopolitical subtext is clear: US-China rapprochement may be in the offing.

The first modern instance of panda diplomacy was in 1941, when Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, presented “a chubby pair of comical black and white furry pandas” to an American zoo. At that point China had only been a republic for three decades, and these creatures made an ideal choice of Year Zero symbol: though widely distributed in the Pleistocene era, today they’re found only in a small region of central China, making them distinctively Chinese. Meanwhile, in a culture ancestrally rich with animal emblems, pandas came with neither astrological connotations nor — unlike the mythical dragons — symbolic links with the imperial rulers so recently deposed.

Following the Kuomintang’s exile to Taiwan in 1949, the early uncertainty of the Chinese Communist successor regime’s relationship with the West is exemplified by the story of the WWF’s first poster-panda. Chi Chi was born in the wild in Sichuan in 1955, and kept in Beijing Zoo for two years, before being loaned to Moscow Zoo along with another panda at the request of Soviet diplomat Kliment Voroshilov in 1957.

At the time, most panda gifts were bestowed on other Communist states, including several sent to North Korea, all of which died due to poor treatment. Chi Chi was more fortunate: sent back to Beijing after Russian scientists mistook her for a male and requested a female instead, she was sold to Heini Demmer, an animal broker, who sought expressions of interest from American zoos. But the US Government, who still recognised only the exiled Kuomintang administration in Taiwan, refused to allow her entry, asserting that the US embargo on goods from China extended to pandas.

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Demmer took Chi Chi on a tour of European zoos instead, including a 1958 stop at London Zoo. It was originally intended as a short visit. But she proved so popular that the zoo purchased her, and she remained a star attraction in London for the rest of her life. Three years later, she inspired the naturalist and painter Sir Peter Scott to design WWF’s first logo, when the charity was founded in 1961.

Between Chi Chi’s arrival in London, until shortly after the WWF’s foundation, the postwar People’s Republic of China focused less on international relations than its own internal transformation. Over this short, brutal period, China embraced a regime-imposed version of the industrialisation that, in the West, had taken a century or more. Acclaimed by Mao as the Great Leap Forward, this five-year plan focused on boosting steelmaking and agricultural output, with little regard for side-effects.

The side-effects were numerous nonetheless. The most notorious was famine: an estimated 20 to 30 million Chinese citizens starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. But as the historian Elena Songster notes, another was ecological devastation. This was both due to new farming incursions into former wilderness, and also to a rise in hunting, as desperate people killed and ate anything they could catch. In turn, this prompted a shift in government policy from research to nature preservation, with Beijing mandating the creation of nature reserves, and new regulations to control hunting.

So the Great Leap Forward impelled a rapid shift in the Chinese state’s approach to the natural world — one that echoed shifts also under way in the West. Even as the WWF was founded, in the hope of protecting wildlife from Western depredations, new Chinese regulations both acknowledged the value of their natural resources, and also sought to preserve them from exhaustion.

As Songster recounts, a pivotal 1959 policy paper argued further that “rare and precious” species were valuable not just on commercial but also symbolic grounds. These national “monuments” showcased China’s uniqueness — especially the giant panda. Between 1957 and 1982, a total of 23 giant pandas were presented to foreign countries.

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China has continued to industrialise and grow — and the relative balance of geopolitical power has shifted accordingly. Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of once-imperial Britain’s relative decline in that balance, than the 1984 agreement by Margaret Thatcher to hand Hong Kong back to Beijing. But another CCP policy change the same year also reflected China’s growing confidence: the decision that panda diplomacy would henceforth be conducted not via panda gifts but panda leases.

As of 1984, all pandas are the property of the Chinese government. They are sometimes leased to foreign states in exchange for annual fees, but may be recalled at any time. Any baby pandas born to leased pandas are also the property of China. And panda leases serve not just as a vector for overseas diplomacy but also, within Chinese domestic discourse, as proxy for public sentiment concerning international relations. Ya Ya, one of the pandas whose US lease expired this year, occasioned outrage on Chinese social media when images showing her in apparently poor condition were published.

But these gentle creatures have also acquired other, less officially-sanctioned resonance. Pandas are notoriously reluctant to mate in captivity, and the birth in captivity of live panda cubs is a cause for global news headlines. Researchers have offered many explanations for this, including that simply being horny and in proximity to a panda of the opposite sex isn’t enough: pandas have to fancy each other too.

When shipped to Moscow to mate with An An, one of the other panda cubs originally shipped there from China, the WWF poster panda Chi Chi showed no interest in her prospective panda suitor. Instead, she expressed sexual interest in her human male keeper, suggesting that a lifetime in captivity had left her radically confused as to what desire is for.

And it appears that pandas are far from the only species reluctant to mate in captivity. The panda was an effective logo choice for the WWF not just for visual impact, but also because their distinct ecological niche is so obviously vulnerable to habitat destruction as a consequence of modernity. And as has become apparent in several decades of conservation effort, outside that wilderness niche pandas simply do not thrive.

It’s growing increasingly apparent that the extractive, resource-consuming aspect of modernity has a recursive effect on humans too. Over the century of panda diplomacy, rising economic and technological development has been paralleled by falling global fertility rates. Research suggests these phenomena are closely linked. Last year, China’s population began shrinking, too. The reasons for China’s now very low birth rate are complex, but suggested factors broadly resemble those in the developed West, and include expensive housing, social atomisation, and mutually exclusive demands on women to achieve both maternally and professionally.

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Beavers are tormenting Britain

By John Lewis-Stempel

Perhaps we could say of high-tech modernity across both East and West that, whereas we have been trying for decades now to protect elements of the natural world from the depredations of modernity, we have been less assiduous about extending similar protection to our own nature. The right to follow in Chi Chi’s footsteps and unmoor sexual desire from reproduction is enshrined as a moral and political desideratum, even as that reproductive end has itself variously been problematised and technologised. Much as with female pandas in captivity, who submit to all manner of invasive fertility-related procedures, human women in low-fertility countries are also now presented with (or exploited by) an ever more invasive battery of scans, studies, and procedures, framed by activists as normal — and with about as much of an impact on overall species fertility as scientists’ efforts with pandas.

It is far from clear whether China will ever resort to the Western strategy of kicking the demographic can down the road, by inviting inward immigration. In the meantime, once-meteoric Chinese growth is likely to level off, making China a less likely future threat to the United States — even as flattening domestic consumption makes wealthy, friendly overseas trade partners ever more appealing. As East and West confront their respective population-related challenges, then, we might read the brief halt and sudden revival of panda diplomacy as mutual acknowledgement that the superpowers probably need one another more than they need a new Cold War.

But if the central demographic challenge is the same for both, it’s far from clear that either has much idea of how to address it.

Back at the very germination of the modern age, in 1440, Thomas à Kempis pointed out that: “Wherever you go, there you are.” We owe most of what we call “civilisation” today to industrial and post-industrial modernity; but we now face the effects of that modernity on our own ability to self-replicate. We cannot, after all, create nature reserves for ourselves.

Even China was rattled. President Xi made it clear that nuclear war was not an option. Then Hamas triggered the real possibility of a widespread ground war across the Middle East. As Biden and Xi meet in San Francisco today, everyone wants a way out.

For Xi, such geopolitical chaos is an existential risk. China is falling apart. The $18 trillion economy has tanked. The collapse of Evergrande, the nation’s property giant, exposed a simple truth. It wasn’t just one huge company that had gone bust. It symbolised the loss of a dream: the Chinese no longer believe that property is a safe investment.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, foreign direct investment into China turned negative for the first time, killing any hope of rising export sales. The Belt and Road Initiative was supposed to alleviate this, bringing valuable raw materials — food, energy and data — back to China. It should have become a revenue generator, but it has turned into a system that bleeds cash. The poor emerging market nations it targeted often had to borrow money from China to cover the cost of building its physical infrastructure — and now, thanks to rising inflation and the global slowdown, they cannot pay back those loans.

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All this helps explain why Xi, who is convinced the only way forward is to return to an export-led strategy, visited China’s Central Bank (PBOC) a few weeks ago. It was shocking to see the nation’s leader deigning to meet lowly technocrats. Xi is unhappy with how they are portraying China; no doubt he demanded that they make the numbers prettier, even though the world lost faith in the veracity of China’s numbers a long time ago. In the same vein, the arrest in September of a former PBOC boss on suspicion of corruption may have been an attempt to project control, but it hasn’t worked. Xi’s internal opponents are muttering, and the Communist Party wants to get back to making money. They certainly don’t want to waste China’s already declining youth demographics on a senseless war with the US, the world’s most formidable military power. Taiwan can wait.

Biden, meanwhile, has his own problems. Both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr are breathing down his neck in the polls. Only 14% of Americans think that Biden has improved their standard of living. Threatening China won’t change this. Nonetheless, in recent months, he has engaged in a serious show of force by deploying aircraft carrier groups to the Pacific and the Middle East, and by revealing frightening new technologies such as the new nuclear gravity bomb. The message to China, Iran and Russia is to back off; Biden is ready to escalate.

In reality, however, the public appetite for spending money on foreign wars dropped even further once Israel stole the spotlight. It is now almost impossible for Biden to justify further funds for Ukraine, especially with President Zelenskyy refusing to hold elections, a move which killed any idea that he was fighting for democracy.

Nor can Israel expect unconditional US support. The prospect of conflict across the Middle East is splitting Jewish and young votes, both of which are critical for Biden’s re-election chances. Since warfare is expensive as well as inflationary, a serious and historic geopolitical rapprochement would be far less costly. Now could be the moment that both the US and China agree to play nice for the sake of the world.

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Such a deal might require Xi to burn both Moscow and Tehran, but they have already served their purpose. Their bullying changed the American perception of risk and brought Biden to the negotiating table with China. Putin may not be losing in Ukraine, but he faces increasing opposition at home. His position is precarious: Russia needs China, but China doesn’t need Russia. The same goes for Iran. Washington is more valuable to Beijing than Moscow and Tehran combined.

Xi knows that global harmony would necessitate an armistice in Ukraine and for China and Russia to stop their support of Hamas and Hezbollah. In return, Biden understands that this will require an end to America’s hawkish rhetoric. Already, the seeds of this shift are being sown: when, in another highly unusual move, Xi summoned California Governor Gavin Newsom to Beijing last month, Newsom lay the groundwork for the reconciliation by saying “divorce is not an option”. Given that Newsom is Biden’s preferred successor, this change of tone was very important. China has already said it is “ready to improve ties with the US at all levels”, and has even offered to negotiate a deal on nuclear weapons.

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All of which suggests that both sides know the other cannot afford a messy divorce. The White House can’t raise or cut taxes, and Beijing can’t stimulate its economy either. It’s a stalemate.

Could this be why former prime minister David Cameron has agreed to serve as the Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom? If a US-China deal is in motion, it constitutes a rare opportunity to shape and craft a new story for the world economy and a new phase of superpower relations. Would the US task the British to do the work necessary to construct this potential new order? It’s not inconceivable, especially given the White House is distracted by its own domestic issues.

The benefits of such a “kiss-and-make-up” photo-op would certainly be widespread. It would generate a rally in the markets and a huge sense of relief among the citizens of the world. The “make-up” part wouldn’t even need to be that friendly. The US and China could continue to fight against each other invisibly: underwater, in space, in cyberspace and with spygames. But, as long as these battles were fought out of sight, things could get better. A cold war always beats a hot war — and kicking today’s problems into the future seems like a fine solution for now. In a world where everyone is preparing for the worst, a note of optimism wouldn’t go amiss.

In the decade since, more than a trillion dollars of investment have poured into BRI projects, a figure that rivals what Western countries together put into their aid budgets. That China found eager suitors around the world for its new largesse is no surprise, not least because Western countries had started pulling in their horns — with Britain, for instance, recently cutting an aid budget that had been a pillar of its soft power in order to build an aircraft carrier.

But in filling that vacuum, China has unsettled Western nations and few of them will attend when representatives from more than 100 countries gather in Beijing for the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Increasingly, especially in the American foreign policy community, we hear talk that China is using the BRI to build a rival bloc to the West.

In an apparent response to the BRI, at the recent G20 Summit, the US and some of its partners announced an infrastructure programme to connect Asia and Europe. But if they’re hoping to go head-to-head with China, they may want to reconsider their tactics because one thing China is really good at is building infrastructure. In the time we’ve spent trying to make up our minds about whether to dig a short tunnel to Euston station, China has installed nearly 40,000 kilometres of high-speed railway.

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In any event, finding nefarious intent in the BRI may say more about the observers than the observed. A recurrent temptation we in the West face is to look at China’s behaviour through Cold War lenses, substituting the Middle Kingdom in the role vacated by the fallen Soviet Union. Seen this way, the BRI appears to be China’s attempt to transform its economic power into political control by drawing a string of countries more closely into its orbit. Some even detect an ideological blueprint in China’s willingness to forge partnerships with autocratic regimes, citing it as evidence that it wants to build an anti-democratic, anti-Western bloc.

In reality, though, there wasn’t much geopolitical thinking behind the original conception of the BRI. Instead, it was concocted by bureaucrats who were trying to solve an economic challenge: China’s economy had run into a wall. To overcome the 2008 global financial crisis, it had embarked on a massive fiscal stimulus and succeeded in lifting the world economy out of recession, but also left itself with a lot of excess capacity. Meanwhile, China was nearing the limits of a growth model that had relied on low-wage workers to assemble goods for export. As the huge surplus labour force was mopped up, wages rose, auguring a future in which Chinese firms would no longer be able to undercut their competitors abroad.

If it were to escape this classic middle-income trap, China would need to orient its output towards more technologically advanced production, and move its labour-intensive assembly offshore. Having built its economy by luring the waves of outsourcing that had helped deindustrialise America, it now needed to do the same and move some of its own manufacturing to lower-wage zones beyond its borders.

A group of civil servants came up with a plan to achieve this: by creating transportation networks that would give it access to overseas markets, supplies, and labour, and then exploiting those links to develop its partnerships, China would be able to expand its economy beyond its national borders. It would not use a classic aid programme like the Marshall Plan to do this, though. Instead, Beijing would encourage its banks to stump up the capital on commercial terms, something they were quite able and willing to do given the vast pools of capital accumulated in a country that saves nearly half its output, and where the list of high-yielding opportunities at home has been diminishing.

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The policy proposal landed at a propitious time. With Xi Jinping having just gained power, Beijing was growing increasingly concerned that its good relations with Western trading partners would come under increasing strain. Barack Obama’s ascent to the US presidency and his administration’s pivot to Asia, which boosted America’s military presence as a counterweight to China, solidified this perception. China’s subsequent exclusion from negotiations around the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership only reinforced that belief in Beijing. Xi made the BRI his own, and it soon became a linchpin of his new economic policy.

While the BRI was crafted as an economic programme, it soon became apparent to the Communist leadership that it could drive a new geopolitical strategy too. For one thing, the BRI gave China the chance to showcase a whole new model of development. Whereas the Western approach to global development focused on using multilateral financial institutions, such as the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization, to engineer pro-market policy regimes, then assist their implementation with targeted aid, China believed that building infrastructure was the key to development. Meanwhile, China regarded the regime of development or governance or human rights a country might choose to use as entirely its own business, a position which reflected its tradition of non-interference. Given the widespread perception in the developing world of Western countries as arrogant imperialists imposing their own moral or economic agendas, China’s standoffishness proved a refreshing change.

All the same, the BRI hasn’t created an alternative global financial architecture — at least not yet. Unlike the multilateral order created at Bretton Woods in 1944, it has more limited ambitions. The IMF, World Bank and WTO operate all over the planet; China’s BRI is focused primarily on Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania — in effect, in those parts of the world that could at a stretch be called its hinterland. And when it comes to diplomatic engagement, China still prefers to avoid multilateral regimes to focus on the more modest but practical approach of bilateral relations.

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This approach, though, is causing China some growing pains as it engages with the world in a way it’s never seriously done before. On the one hand, the BRI is serving the country’s goal of expanding its export potential. But in many countries, especially in Africa where China has a large and growing presence, the administrative capacity to manage complex infrastructure programmes is lacking. As a result, the initial euphoria over Chinese largesse has in recent years given way to a more sober assessment, as payments have come due and some governments have struggled to meet them.

This has led some Western commentators to latch onto the concept of “debt-trap diplomacy”, the idea that China has loaned money with the aim of later swooping in and seizing assets when the debtor defaults on payments. Often cited as an example of this is the case of Sri Lanka, which allowed China to take direct control of one of its ports on a 99-year lease when its government found it couldn’t pay its debts.

But the reality is probably more prosaic. China is learning the hard way what Western governments have dealt with for decades — the problems of insolvency in sovereign debtors. In response, it appears to be re-orienting towards a somewhat more Western style of “small but beautiful” lending that prioritises smaller, targeted projects. Over the years, Western governments have developed an elaborate global architecture through such institutions as the Paris Club, which facilitates the quick resolution of fiscal crises. But China has resisted joining such bodies, instead working through problems on an ad hoc basis. That hasn’t always been easy. Debt diplomacy seldom is, and China is finding that the role of benefactor can ultimately carry a hidden price.

The hype of the BRI’s early years has given way to a more sober assessment of the costs and benefits of engagement with China, as its partner countries find the role of an aspiring hegemon goes beyond just doling out goodies. Many countries still find it useful to have a rival pole they can play off against the US-led alliance, but Italy’s recent reconsideration of its participation in the BRI can probably be seen less as an instance of the Western allies circling the wagons, than of many countries rethinking the degree of dependence on China they’re willing to countenance. China has built its soft power and cut its teeth on diplomacy, but it too is finding that the fun part of the BRI may now be over.

That China’s agents would dare to infiltrate the heart of the British government has been widely portrayed as an unprecedented development. “This is a major escalation by China,” one anonymous senior Whitehall source told The Times, which broke the news, adding that: “We have never seen anything like this before.” It is hard to know whether such sentiments are genuine or exaggerated for effect. Either way, they seem rather overwrought.

China has been engaged in extensive espionage operations in Britain, and around the world, for decades. As a 2021 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee stated accurately: “China almost certainly maintains the largest state intelligence apparatus in the world.” Moreover, as the report also noted, China employs a “whole-of-state” approach to espionage, co-opting a range of state and non-state actors, as well as ordinary citizens at home and abroad, to help carry out this work. Chinese students studying abroad, for example, may sometimes be pressured by the government into reporting information back to Beijing — though far more often about the activities of their fellow ethnic Chinese students than state secrets.

It is true that, in recent years, a rising China has escalated its overseas intelligence operations. Since he came to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made what he calls “comprehensive national security” the central priority for China’s party-state. He has handed China’s premier foreign intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), along with its military equivalents in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), greater authority and more resources both old and new (such as cyber) to more assertively collect intelligence, protect Chinese interests and project Chinese influence worldwide. The result has been the uncovering of a litany of hacks, thefts and scandals. Of these, the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States in February may have been the most high-profile, but was among the least successful and consequential (as compared with, say, MSS’s massive 2015 breach of US government security clearance records).

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But this is simply what nation-states, and especially the world’s major powers, do. Though perhaps distasteful, it should hardly be a shock. In fact, Britain should be particularly familiar with the business, given its history as an epicentre of the Cold War spy game. Those who walk the corridors of power in Westminster and think the present situation is unprecedented had best read up on the Cambridge Five.

Of course, Britain and its allies in the Western world are also spying on China — as we taxpaying citizens might reasonably hope they would be, if China really is the security “challenge” our governments say it is. In July, CIA Director Bill Burns did not shy away from saying publicly that the agency had “made progress” in rebuilding and expanding its spy network in China, years after Chinese counter-intelligence managed to identify and kill nearly all of the CIA’s agents operating in the country, following a 2010 intelligence breach (potentially the work of either a mole or cracked encryption).

There is some evidence that our spies have been wildly successful of late — at living rent-free in Xi’s head, anyway. Because whatever the furore in London, it pales in comparison with the escalating level of paranoia about hidden hands and foreign forces that has emerged in Beijing in recent years. Not only is China in the middle of a sweeping ongoing counter-espionage campaign — with the MSS currently calling on the public to engage in a “whole of society mobilisation” to hunt down spies and traitors, and triumphantly highlighting arrests on its new social media account — but more serious, if mysterious, goings-on higher up hint that Xi’s concerns about the loyalty of his people could be playing havoc within the Chinese system.

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The breaking news on Thursday night was that China’s defence minister, Li Shangfu, had been arrested and placed under investigation. The source for this information was, of course, US intelligence. But the fact had already been rumoured in China, as he had not been seen in public in weeks. Li’s fate seems linked to that of two top generals of the PLA Rocket Force (which oversees China’s nuclear weapons) who were hauled away a few months ago. The Force’s deputy commander, meanwhile, allegedly committed suicide. China’s short-lived foreign minister, Qin Gang, also suddenly disappeared and was replaced without explanation this summer.

There is no evidence, to be clear, that any of these officials were engaged in or suspected of espionage. The more likely explanation is old-fashioned corruption. The persistent rumour in China is that the PLA Rocket Force generals had taken money Xi handed them to expand China’s nuclear arsenal and pilfered it instead. Li, who previously ran the PLA’s equipment procurement department, may have been involved. But it seems plausible that the current atmosphere of extreme suspicion regarding foreign infiltration and subversion contributed to these officials’ exposure and removal, with Xi now no longer trusting the reliability of anyone, especially in his national security apparatus. Corruption itself can, after all, open the door to foreign intelligence services willing to wield blackmail or simply offer additional cash.

This distrust is particularly clear in Qin’s case. The ex-foreign minister disappeared after a Phoenix TV reporter strongly hinted that he’d had an extramarital affair (and fathered a secret child) with her while they were both previously stationed in Washington, DC. Since many Chinese officials have mistresses without facing any repercussions, and because Qin was previously considered personally favoured by Xi, some suspect that it was the fact that he’d engaged in his covert indiscretions only a few miles from Langley that was of greater concern. Naturally, the online rumour in China is that the TV reporter, Fu Xiaotian (who has also disappeared), was in fact herself an MSS agent deployed to Washington undercover.

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Whatever the truth of these specific salacious cases, it is absolutely clear that Xi is quite convinced that the West and its agents are hell-bent on infiltrating China and subverting Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. Because Western countries “have always regarded China’s development and growth as a threat to Western values and institutions”, he thundered at an assembly of top party leaders in 2016, these countries “have not for a moment ceased their ideological infiltration of China”.

In this, he was merely echoing a long series of similar declarations, as in 2013, when he warned that said “hostile forces” were “doing their utmost to propagate so-called ‘universal values’” with an aim to “vie with us [on] the battlefields of people’s hearts”, split up China “overtly and covertly”, and ultimately “overthrow our socialist system”. For Xi, China is engaged in an “extraordinarily fierce” global ideological struggle with Western liberalism that, “although invisible, [is] a matter of life and death”.

Western leaders don’t necessarily disagree. President Joe Biden regularly describes the United States as engaged in a global “battle between democracy and autocracy”. Former President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, went so far as to insist while in office that the United States must “engage and empower the Chinese people” to enact regime change, because, he asserted, “if the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us”. British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, for his part, this week vowed not only to improve security but to “defend our democracy” — implying that undermining it must be Beijing’s actual target, rather than mundane intelligence gathering.

Both China and the West, therefore, not only suspect infiltration by the agents of their foreign competitors, but demonstrably view this as part of a much wider, more threatening, and more enduring struggle between rival systems. The hard truth, then, is that, in a very real sense, we’ve all been thrust back into an era much akin to the Cold War, when constant spying and attempted subversion were simply geopolitical facts of life. It may be best for leaders in Westminster, and indeed in capitals around the world, to come to terms with this not-so-unprecedented reality, and to move forward with open eyes: prepared, serious, and without naivety about what’s happening — but also without any undue shock and outrage. Surely the nation of James Bond, at least, can manage to carry on with good cheer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In some ways, this picture is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading. When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but becoming more alike, with both superpowers converging on the same not-yet-fully-realised system of technocratic-managerial governance.

This system, described by James Burnham and George Orwell as “managerialism”, is the product of a new class of professional managers bound together by a shared self-interest in the expansion of technical and mass organisations, the further proliferation of managers, and the drawing of society into the meddling embrace of managerial expertise. At its heart is a conviction that all things — even the complexity of society and Man himself — can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine with sufficient scientific technique.

It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.” China is just a bit further down the path towards this same totalitarian future. The West is following.

To get a sense of but one aspect of this ongoing convergence, we should travel back to Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”), once a picturesque little township in China’s Zhejiang province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), but I’m afraid it is not a tourism package. Rather, in the Sixties, Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao Zedong. While usually Communist Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements”, in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “Not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with,” as a report from the town informed Mao.

Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

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Today, Xi has revitalised and modernised this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. Traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control, also known as “social governance”, have been combined with internet-wide mobilisation and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s blossoming social-credit system. The system intends to assign each person, company or organisation a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behaviour and other “risk factors”, the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy”. Those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments, such as losing access to the financial system, being prohibited from buying luxury goods or real estate, or having their children denied admission to certain schools and universities.

Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialled incorporating social-credit scores. Most significantly, since having too many relationships with low-scoring people risks lowering one’s own ranking, people avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society. The goal of this gamification of the mind is to create a “New Man” to fit into its managerial machine; this is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism’s obsession with control.

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Such social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how, when I visited China as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, everyone used to jaywalk to cross the street. It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism. Today, nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because if you do, your identity is captured by a facial recognition camera, your face, name and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitudes have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine.

This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies. In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by 10 other banks. Internal “reputational risk” documents obtained by Farage soon after showed Coutts’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: he had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts, given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; being “anti-Net Zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some second-hand rumours.

In this case, caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was forced to apologise and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West; in the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’s CEO, CFO, their spouses and all of their children. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

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Much debanking is politically motivated. Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Yet banks are not the only ones involved; online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe, for instance, seized money donated to the truckers through its platform. PayPal, meanwhile, in one of the more symbolic instances of its prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance”. PayPal also attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors” — they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state much like China’s, where an oligarchic elite class seeks to preserve its rule. Critically, there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” really means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line.

In a society as digitised as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked — and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks — they are cut off from participation in almost every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job; they cannot buy property and may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from buying everyday goods offline as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed. Debanking therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is, of course, the point.

This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Indeed, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a Chinese-style social credit system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.

In fact, we can see transparent steps towards the construction of something like a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Major financial institutions wield them to vocally conform to specific social and ideological practices required to access capital. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions programme also threaten those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and de-platforming.

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t eventually be applied to every other sector of our economy and society. We shouldn’t be surprised if someday soon apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from travelling, or people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online. This will simply be the behaviour of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

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New technologies such as AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control easier. A few months ago, an American man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist. Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can; and so, under a managerial regime, they must. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

Such is the very Weltanschauung — the whole way of seeing and believing — of the managerial mind. As more and more powerful technology comes within the grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For, as C.S. Lewis understood, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well”.

Today, as Orwell predicted, the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilisations”, there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilisation in a river of blood, then crystalised into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China.

This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

In reality, however, China produces more than enough rice, wheat and maize to feed its human population. So why the sudden rush? Xi Jinping, it seems, is preparing for war.

At present, China relies on colossal imports of soya beans, maize, wheat and other cereals to feed its pigs, cattle, chickens and ducks — more than 120 million metric tons last year. These are supplied by the daily arrival of bulk carriers into Chinese ports from Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States. If war were to break out, these imports would quickly dry up.

In China, there is no spare land for crops, leaving Beijing little choice but to uproot the trees recently planted by its costly and much-admired reforestation efforts — even though China’s forests are mostly on slopes, and new crop plantings are often swept away by the first serious rain. Local party officials executing Beijing’s orders  know this perfectly well, but disobeying means instant demotion at best.

After the colossal Yangtze River floods of 1998 destroyed 13 million homes, drowned thousands and swept away highways and rail lines, the CCP recognised that the floods had been made worse by uncontrolled deforestation. Orders were issued all across China to stop logging and to plant trees instead, with vast funding allocated to add up to roughly 90 billion trees over the next decade. Thousands of tree nurseries were established, and an army of tree-planters set to work on the bare deforested slopes, with local farmers hired to nurture the new trees. As a result, China became visibly greener in satellite images, as forest cover increased from 12% in 1998 to 24% in 2020 to then increase further — until last year. No figures have been published, but what has happened since greatly exceeds the rate of the Amazon’s deforestation, even though the West’s environmentalists have so far remained entirely silent.

There are no further forests to uproot; all that is left are the very small fruit orchards cultivated by individual farmers. And so, to the horror of the elderly peasants who planted each tree by hand, a local Party official will arrive one day with the People’s Armed Police in camouflage uniforms, and cut them down. Sometimes, this is not enough: many farmers raise ducks in their backyards to supplement their income, which the police then club to death, issuing orders to plant cereals instead. Even room-sized pigsties are destroyed to free up the few square yards of soil underneath.

Local officials know that it is madness to destroy so many livelihoods to produce a few truckloads of cheap cereals, but they have no way of changing Xi’s policies — especially when each official has juniors ready to denounce him in the hope of taking his place. It was this dynamic that produced the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were ordered to melt down their pots and pans to make steel in backyard furnaces, with the promise they would instead eat in the dining rooms of the promised new “communes”; they were also told to melt down their animal ploughs because new tractors were arriving. In a mere four years from 1958 to 1962, at least 30 million died of hunger — some to be eaten by those who survived — and hardly any usable steel was produced.

Now, there is no question that China has very little arable land, having lost some 4 million acres to urbanisation and industry between 1957 and 1996 — an average loss of 100,000 acres per year, which jumped to more than 1.5 million acres per year from 1997, with China’s explosive economic growth that followed the opening of the US and world markets. As a result, China now has less arable land per inhabitant than India.

But why should this matter? As a very successful exporter of increasingly advanced and costly manufactures, China can certainly pay for all its food and animal feed imports easily enough. And this is how we arrive at something much worse than the destruction of China’s new forests and the human tragedy of its destroying orchards and ducks: the reason for it all.

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The crescendo of Xi Jinping’s “rice bowl” speeches came on 21 June, when he claimed it was imperative to prepare for “extreme circumstances”, having previously warned on 6 May that China must be prepared “for worst-case and extreme scenarios” to survive “high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms” — all transparent codewords for “the danger of war”. He returned to the topic on 6 July when, on a visit to the Eastern Theater Command, whose jurisdiction includes the Strait of Taiwan, he called for increased “training under real combat conditions to raise the capability to fight and win”.

Xi’s incessant calls for “combat readiness” may mean that he actually doubts that Chinese military forces are ready for real combat. Its navy, after all, is brand new and inexperienced, while the air force is greatly inferior in its technology, mostly relying on Soviet jet engines, radar-evading “stealth” that is not really stealthy, and inferior missiles. But more importantly, Xi’s intense bellicosity and intense calls for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese people” suggests motives that we cannot even imagine. No, not Taiwan, which China could have had for the asking by merely treating Hong Kong’s freedoms with demonstrative respect, making “one country, two systems” very attractive to the Taiwanese.

Much more likely is his personal sense of shame that China’s history is a long sequence of defeats at the hands of badly outnumbered invaders — the Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian Jurchen tribespeople, and then the Japanese who might still be there if they had not attacked the US. As with Mussolini, then, Xi’s real aim may well be to turn his unwarlike people into warriors.

So far, China’s future war might appear to be all talk, but preparations are well underway. Already, catastrophic deforestation is harming all humanity while the destruction of orchards and the mass killings of ducks are impoverishing tens of millions. That is not just talk.

On the eve of last week’s trip, Hipkins declined to follow Joe Biden’s lead in calling Xi Jinping a “dictator”, awkwardly claiming that he couldn’t offer an assessment because he hadn’t met him yet, before adding that if the Chinese people wanted to change their system of government, then “that would be a matter for them”.

While in China, Hipkins was fêted by his host, who praised the “great importance” of the relationship with its “friend and partner”, and remarked that other countries in the region were following the visit closely, a not-so-subtle dig at the more combative Australian approach to the relationship. Hipkins returned the favour by toning down his criticism of the human rights situation in the country, especially the treatment of the Uyghurs, sparking criticism from advocacy groups.

Be that as it may, using the kind of megaphone diplomacy employed by the likes of Australia or America is questionable for a small country like New Zealand, which has little to gain and a lot to lose from openly antagonising Xi. With almost 30% of the country’s exports — primarily agricultural products — going to China, New Zealand has been anxious to avoid becoming the “New Australia”, which has seen its goods hit with tariffs in response to its calls for an international inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Accordingly, Hipkins has played a straight bat, remarking that “trade is a centrepiece for the trip”, bringing 29 business executives with him, and signing new deals on trade, agriculture, forestry, education and science and innovation. As he remarked, such deals are “bread and butter” for a trading nation like New Zealand.

This is certainly a change from his predecessor, Jacinda Ardern, who was hailed as the conscience of the world during her prime ministership, not afraid to tackle big moral issues on the global stage. This was always a bit of a misconception: commercially astute when it came to trade deals, Ardern was careful to tread a fine line between its traditional security partners in the West and its biggest export market. Her government resisted Western pressures to securitise the relationship, and urged Australia to “follow us and show some respect” to China.

Nevertheless, the contrasting tone between Hipkins and his predecessor is not an accident. Since taking over in January, he has been conscious of toning down the inspiring rhetoric, and switching the focus onto issues preoccupying Labour’s more traditional working-class base. Unpopular initiatives, such as water governance reform, mandating bio-fuel usage or stopping the merger of the public broadcasters, have been thrown on the “policy bonfire”, while the minimum wage has risen and government payments to middle and lower-income households were increased by $2 billion.

Not yet six months into his premiership, Hipkins has constantly emphasised a single-minded focus on “bread and butter issues”, such as fixing the economy. And New Zealand’s economy certainly needs fixing. Like the rest of the world, the country has been struggling with inflation, which averaged 7.2% in 2022 and 6.7% in the first quarter of 2023. In response, the country’s hawkish central bank moved rapidly to raise rates, from 0.75% at the start of 2022 to 5.5% today, above even the 5% rate in the US. While the Federal Reserve still hopes to engineer a “soft landing” by cooling price rises without sparking a recession, New Zealand’s economy has already crashed. GDP contracted 0.8% in the December 2022 quarter, and a further 0.1% in the following three months.

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And while unemployment remains low for now, the prognosis isn’t good as consumers rein in their spending and businesses start defaulting on their loans, with experts predicting the recession might well continue into the middle of next year. Even New Zealand’s housing market, long-rivalling Australia’s for wild price rises, has taken a hit, with house prices dropping by 18% since November 2021, wiping more than $6 billion from household wealth.

This cycle of post-Covid inflation and rate hike-induced recession is not unique to New Zealand, with many other Western states experiencing similar scenarios. However, these come in the context of problems that have plagued the country for decades. Consider the housing market. New Zealand is the sixth-least affordable country in the world to buy a house, with an average household taking almost 12 years to save for a deposit, and spending around half of its gross income servicing their mortgage.

Restrictive planning regulations, insufficient rates of housing construction and a tax and regulatory regime that favours property investors over owner-occupiers have all created this crisis. And on each of these factors, successive governments have failed to conjure remedy. As a result, young people are priced out of the market, and a record number of citizens — almost 1% of the population — are homeless. Meanwhile, the top 10% of the population control 50% of the wealth, while the bottom 20% hold 1%. No wonder some commentators are warning that New Zealand is becoming a country of “the landed gentry”.

New Zealand’s problems are not limited to housing. The country experiences shamefully high rates of child poverty, its health system struggles with perennial staffing shortages, its infrastructure faces a $210 billion funding deficit, and its waterways are among the most polluted in the developed world, with nearly 60% of rivers carrying pollution above acceptable levels. The persistent failure of the country’s leaders to address these problems led to Ardern’s election in 2017, as she promised to tackle these deep-seated sources of disadvantage; her failure to do so spurred her already declining popularity before she resigned earlier this year. Once Hipkins took over, many hoped his back-to-basics approach would finally see some progress, and he was initially rewarded with a boost to his, and his government’s, popularity.

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However, six months later, this glow is fading. Labour is essentially tied in support with the centre-right National Party, ahead of an election due in October. Undoubtedly, tackling the deep-seated problems plaguing the country is a long-term task — but so far it is not clear whether Hipkins will fare any better than his predecessor, his “working-class” persona notwithstanding.

Indeed, perhaps his greatest source of strength is the uninspiring state of New Zealand’s opposition. Only recently, National Party leader, former businessman Christopher Luxon, was caught on tape complaining that New Zealand is a “very negative, wet, whiney and inward-looking country” that has “lost the plot”. And amid rumblings about a potential challenge to his leadership, only 18% of voters describe him as their preferred prime minister.

On the policy front, meanwhile, the party offers little more than a reheated version of its usual agenda: tough on crime, miserly on spending and beating up on beneficiaries. Failing to grasp that these are the same policies that contributed to the country’s current malaise, exasperated National supporters have taken to blaming the media or denying the polls are accurate to explain their low levels of support.

In this context, Hipkins’s straightforward approach might be just enough to get him across the line in October. Either way, it doesn’t look like New Zealand’s problems will see any solutions any time soon. Six months later, the post-Ardern boom is yet to materialise.