China

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

Lord David Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the British lawyer who sits on Hong Kong’s highest court, needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. The territory’s court of final appeal has upheld verdicts and prison sentences against some of Hong Kong’s leading pro-democracy activists for taking part in a peaceful protest in 2019. The court ruling has been decried as ‘unjust’ by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong before the territory was returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The court unanimously agreed to uphold the convictions of seven activists who participated in the the unauthorised 2019 protests, during which 1.7 million people took to the streets

The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that it has revived plans to build a spanking new ‘super embassy’ – ten times the size of Beijing’s current outpost – on land it owns in the heart of the capital, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London.  This isn’t any old exercise in replacement of one piece of real estate with another. What

Four Chinese warships were spotted off the coast of Alaska last weekend. According to the US coast guard, the ships were in the Bering Sea around 124 miles from the Aleutian Islands. They were inside America’s exclusive economic zone, which extends to 200 miles, but within international waters. ‘We met presence with presence to ensure there were no disruptions to US interests,’ said a coastguard commander, as he monitored their progress. The Chinese were within their rights to be there, but the uneasy standoff was another example of Beijing boosting its presence around the Arctic. One of Russia’s leading Arctic scientists, was arrested and charged with treason This time they

Zhang Biao, Beijing’s man in Scotland, warned earlier this month that a proposed friendship agreement between Edinburgh City Council and Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung would ‘hurt the feeling[s] of the Chinese people’. The people of China, from Shenzhen to Harbin – all 1.4 billion of them – can sleep easy tonight: the proposal has been pulled from the council’s agenda. Whether it will reappear is unclear. The city’s leader, Cammy Day, has announced that ‘more discussion is required before taking this agreement forward’. Discussions which could presumably, if necessary, go on indefinitely.  Edinburgh Airport feared the agreement could harm work to increase the number of direct flights to China Anyone with

‘There is only one China in the world,’ Wang Wenbin, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, declared at a press conference late last month. ‘Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.’ The previous day, on 23 May, Beijing carried out major military exercises around the island under the title ‘Joint-Sword 2024A.’ The Chinese Communist party (CCP) said it wanted to practise how to ‘seize power’ in Taiwan, and to ‘punish’ its new leader, Lai Ching-te, and his supporters in the US. J-16 aircraft and Type 052D destroyers – some of China’s best military assets – led the exercises, surrounding Taiwan and practising bombing runs. In recent months, as China’s

Thirty-five years ago today, China’s leaders ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square to disperse a student encampment. The death toll was never made public; it is likely that several thousand people were killed.  June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom The brutal suppression of the pro-democracy protesters came as a shock and was an aberration. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Communist regimes toppled one after another, mostly peacefully. Only Tiananmen spoiled the celebratory mood.  June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom.

Attending a business summit in Shanghai earlier this year, I was struck by how downbeat the mood was. China’s stagnant economy, in particular the slow-motion meltdown of the property market, had clipped investor confidence across a number of industries. One Italian businessman told me the event had many fewer international attendees than previous years. But the apprehensive mood was cut through by the bolshiness of one senior executive from a leading Chinese electric car company: ‘America, Europe, Japan and South Korea are our high-potential markets’, the exec beamed as he set out a plan for what seemed like world domination. His optimism was not misplaced. In post-pandemic China, electric cars