What happens when Facebook pays for news?

The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the need for coexistence. Commenting on the government’s new ‘integrated review’, he says we must fight back with technological innovation and stronger alliances but avoid a second Cold War. He advocates ‘One Planet: Two Systems’ — a globalised echo of the Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong Agreement by which Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 under the principle of ‘One Country: Two Systems’. Sir Alex’s is an interesting analogy, but the important thing to note about ‘One Country: Two Systems’ is that China adhered to it only for 20 years and is now trashing it. Could the same problem take over the world?

Meanwhile, a small example of Chinese soft power. A scientific professor at Oxford writes to tell me about Chinese pay to British academics. Sometimes dons harmlessly earn small sums (£150, say) to lecture to Chinese students for summer cultural enrichment programmes.