China

The Chinese Communist party (CCP) is spooked by Halloween. In Shanghai, police have rounded up people gathering in costumes that included a Donald Trump with bandaged right ear, Spiderman, Deadpool and Batman. A man dressed as Buddha was also shown being escorted away in videos posted on Chinese social media, but quickly deleted by online censors. The aim seems to be to prevent a repeat of last year’s celebrations, when revellers used the occasion to take a tongue-in-cheek poke at the CCP, and costumes included a surveillance camera and hazmat suits (a swipe at Covid lockdowns). It has at times been like a game of cat and mouse The online

David Lammy is in China on a mission to reset relations with Beijing. But the Foreign Secretary has also pledged to raise some difficult subjects with his hosts. For a politician who heavily criticised the Conservatives’ approach to China, it’s not clear that Lammy is coming up with anything new now he’s in office. Lammy has talked up the difficult issues he will raise with Beijing When Lammy was shadow foreign secretary, he was brave on China. Only last year, he agreed that China’s actions in Xinjiang were genocide and pledged to ‘act multilaterally with our partners’ to pursue a legal reckoning for Beijing. A few months later, he lambasted

In the coming days, Foreign Secretary David Lammy will visit China and Chancellor Rachel Reeves is eyeing up a visit early next year for economic and financial dialogue. Whilst engagement is important, it’s not unreasonable to expect an understanding of the government’s strategic position on such a defining relationship before ministers board their flights. Does the government believe in deepening and expanding cooperation with China, or does it believe – as it appeared to in opposition – that China is a threat and must be dealt with as such? We are simply left guessing. As Starmer marks his first 100 days in office, the fact that there is little-to-no clarity

The Foreign Secretary David Lammy will touch down in Beijing next week to pay his respects. Next year, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to do the same. We haven’t seen this level of deference to the Chinese Communist party since 2019. Back then, Philip Hammond heaped praise on his hosts. He endorsed their Belt and Road initiative – of Chinese-funded infrastructure spanning the globe – and promised British co-operation ‘as we harness the “Golden Era” of UK-China relations’. The calls from Tory China hawks to label Xi’s empire ‘a systemic threat’ hold little sway with the new regime That was the high-water mark of Anglo-Chinese collaboration. George Osborne and

Ten years ago this week, a sea of yellow umbrellas filled the streets of Hong Kong in what at the time was the largest mass campaign for democracy in the city. In what became known as the ‘Umbrella Movement’, the people of Hong Kong courageously showed the world their desire for freedom – and their determination to fight for it. For 79 days, crowds occupied major streets in the centre of Hong Kong, demanding genuine multi-party democracy. The protests were preceded by demands by civil rights groups in an unofficial referendum for universal suffrage in elections for the city’s chief executive (effectively, the mayor) – a right promised in Hong

It was presented as a bold stimulus to boost China’s ailing economy – but while it excited stock markets in Asia, Western economists were underwhelmed. At a rare press conference in Beijing on Tuesday, the usually gnomic governor of the People’s Bank of China, Pan Gongsheng, unveiled a range of measures designed to ‘support the stable growth of China’s economy’ and see that it hits this year’s target of five per cent growth. There was a time when such measures, which included an interest rate cut and more funds to support the stock and property markets, would have quickened the pulse of investors. But this is unlikely to reverse their

So China wants to make the world more ‘safe, reasonable and efficient’ by training thousands of police officers from across the globe to ‘help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities’. The offer came this week from Wang Xiaohong, China’s minister for public security, at a police forum attended by officials from 122 countries in the eastern city of Lianyungang. There were few details, but then few are needed. Authoritarian countries will see China’s frequently brutal approach to law and order, coupled with its zero tolerance for dissent, as rather appealing – and many will already have invested in the technical side of China’s surveillance state. However, even

I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of architectural master’s students: ‘Who wants to be an architect?’ Not one hand was raised. This was not the typical reticence of Chinese youngsters; this was a class of architectural students who have given up on architecture. They are all hoping to escape architectural education, so that they might progress to classes in AI, digital transformation or some other hi-tech sector where they believe jobs exist. For them, architecture is a dead end. As my Chinese students are discovering, there are too few jobs in the sector, the pay is low

New Zealand’s most important trading partner is also the nation’s biggest security headache, according to a new risk-assessment report produced by the country’s security intelligence service, or SIS. The government agency sees espionage activities orchestrated by Beijing as a ‘complex intelligence concern’ for a country that has become highly dependent on China for its economic health. The baleful assessment appears in the SIS’s latest annual security threat environment report. While the 48-page briefing highlights a raft of other related issues such as Moscow meddling in the lives of Russian-born New Zealand residents or else officially banning local journalists (including this writer) from travelling to the Russian Federation, a lion’s share of

Elon Musk revels in the role of ‘free speech absolutist’. Last week, for instance, he jumped to the defence of Pavel Durov, the head of the messaging and social media app Telegram, after he was arrested by the French police. But while Musk claims he is a defender of free speech, he frequently kowtows to the Chinese Communist party, for whom the concept is alien. Musk is now the CCP’s favourite western capitalist. So although he is eager to tell his 196 million Twitter followers that ‘Britain is turning into the Soviet Union’, he has avoided antagonising China. He has echoed CCP talking points on contentious issues, such as Taiwan

On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’ that would ‘continue for many years’. Russia’s trade with China has more than doubled to $240 billion since the invasion, buoying the Kremlin’s coffers with oil money and substituting goods sanctioned by the West. Moscow and Beijing have also stepped up joint military exercises. Last month, Chinese and Russian long-range bombers were spotted patrolling together

Relations between China and Russia are going from strength to strength – or so they say. In reality, the strain is beginning to show. ‘Against the backdrop of accelerating changes unseen in a century, China is willing to further strengthen multilateral coordination with Russia,’ said Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency after a meeting on Wednesday in Moscow between premier Li Qiang and Vladimir Putin. Far more intriguing, though, was what wasn’t said, and which suggests a growing tensions in their ‘no limits’ partnership. First there were the cyber spies. A few days before Li arrived in Russia, Kaspersky, a Moscow-based cyber security company, suggested that Chinese state-linked hackers had