Is our foreign policy being dreamt up by the James Bond screenwriters?

If there’s one thing that the James Bond films has taught us it is that the Chinese are not our enemies. We should perhaps remember this as President Xi Jinping polishes his heels on our red carpets this week. Our enemies are cold war Russians, jewel-encrusted North Koreans, ex-Nazi rocket scientists, fat Europeans obsessed with gold, and, of course, bald Polish-Greek crime lords called Ernst with a love of bob sleighs and white cats.

The imminent release of the twenty fourth Bond film is a handy reminder that if we’re looking for threats, we should really look closer to home. What little we know of Spectre‘s plot suggests that it’s another Bond film that avoids mention of China, as befits the career of a secret agent who rarely ventures East despite his first in Oriental languages from Cambridge. You Only Live Twice is still the only film entirely to take place in Asia or, at least, a strange parody of Asia in which Sean Connery thought he could pass for Japanese by simply wearing his wig backwards.