China

Thursday

Michael Tanner

What’s love got to do with it?

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is probably his greatest opera, certainly the one in which his characteristic strengths are on display. Pondering on them inevitably leads one to think about what the operas lack, too, and it turns out be quite a lot. Unlike the finest opera composers, of whom there are regrettably few, he can’t create complete characters: what he is interested in is characteristics, especially — or perhaps only — obsessions, even if the obsession, as with Eugene Onegin, is with not being obsessed with anything, until close to the end. In The Queen of Spades the anti-hero Herman is doubly obsessed, though Tchaikovsky and his librettist brother

Thursday

The Spectator

China syndrome

The Chinese government is unlikely to give Theresa May a panda in the near future. This week the country’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, left no one in any doubt that President Xi Jinping takes a dim view of Mrs May’s decision to review the deal for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset — a deal through which China General Nuclear, the state nuclear-energy company, would have a one-third share. The Prime Minister was told that Anglo-Chinese relations are at a-‘critical historical juncture’. So she’d better play-nicely and approve that power station — or risk the wrath of Beijing. This is a far cry from the

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Lord Mandelson issues stark warning to Theresa May over Hinkley Point

Yesterday, it was the Chinese ambassador threatening Theresa May over Hinkley point. Today, it’s Lord Mandelson’s turn. The Labour grandee said that for the Prime Minister to ‘stretch out’ the Hinkley hold-up any further than the end of September ‘would be a mistake’. What was remarkable about Mandelson’s warning on Today just now was its similarity to that issued by China’s ambassador Liu Xiaoming. Xiamong didn’t mention the ‘B’ word – Brexit – but it was the elephant in his piece in the FT yesterday when he suggested that at such a ‘historical juncture’ Britain needed China. Mandelson went somewhat further to say the referendum was an important factor in

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

China threatens Theresa May over Hinkley Point delay

It was already clear that Theresa May’s decision to review the Hinkley Point power plant had not gone down well in China. The nuclear plant upgrade is backed by billions of pounds of Chinese money and is also intended by Beijing as a key opportunity to showcase the country’s nuclear technology. So when the delay to giving the go-ahead was announced in July, China responded to suggestions its technology could not be trusted with a veiled threat saying its government would not ‘tolerate’ such accusations. Today, that veil has been lifted even more as the country steps up its pressure on Theresa May to give the £18bn project the green light. China’s

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Top tips for UK-China trade: grab the cheque and sup with a long spoon

There are reasons why Theresa May might harbour doubts about the Hinkley Point nuclear project — chiefly its unproven French technology and the high probability of time and cost overruns — but the fear expressed by her aide Nick Timothy that ‘the Chinese could use their role to build weaknesses into computer systems which will allow them to shut down Britain’s energy production at will’ sounds — even to a Sino-cynic like me — far-fetched. As I wrote here during President Xi Jinping’s visit last year, ‘The least sinister thing about the Chinese is their money. A ten-digit cheque… even from China National Nuclear Corporation… does not carry a ‘backdoor’ listening

Thursday

Simon Barnes

What wasps do for us

Dom Perignon, Pimms, Carling Black Label, Coca-Cola — one’s as good as the other, so far as they’re concerned. Even if they don’t manage to drown in the stuff, they spoil the taste for drinkers by creating panic out of all proportion to their size. They destroy the ardour of al-fresco lovers in an instant. They are the joy-killers: the destroyers of summer, determined to prove that the wild world is a plot against humanity. Is there anything good about wasps? Is their sole purpose in life to harass humans seeking the fleeting joys of summer? Does this black-and-yellow air force exist only to ruin the few fine days reluctantly

Thursday

Harry Mount

Worlds apart

Classics is a boastful subject. Even the name — classics — has an inner boast; as does the classics course at Oxford, Literae Humaniores (‘more humane letters’), and the course’s second half, Greats. Michael Scott, a classics professor at Warwick University and a telegenic media don, tries to put an end to the boastfulness in this book. It has always understandably annoyed him that, in the field of Greek and Roman studies, book titles often include the words ‘Ancient World’ — as if there were only one ancient world, and it only included Greece and Rome. And so he attempts an ambitious reordering of ancient worlds — thus the book’s

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

We are where we are, clinging to the life raft of cliché

My column calling Brexit campaigners ‘hooligans’ and ending ‘Reader, I voted Remain’, caused quite a stir — coinciding as it did with The Spectator’s eloquent call for Leave. ‘Pathetic,’ spat a famous columnist encountered in the street. ‘Your words and Farage’s poster resonated so much that I (reluctantly) voted Remain,’ emailed a broadcaster who had previously given me a talking-to on the virtues of freedom. ‘I quite like being a hooligan,’ declared a Leaver on Facebook, alongside a selfie with the Boris-bus emblazoned ‘We send the EU £50 million a day.’ ‘Did someone else write your last paragraph?’ growled a veteran politico a day before the poll. ‘We thought you

Monday

Kerry Brown

What China’s pragmatism teaches us about the Brexit debate

Dr Johnson said that if anyone truly wanted to understand themselves, they should listen to what their enemies say about them. And whilst China is not an enemy of the EU, it is certainly highly critical of it. Why then did China’s President Xi Jinping wade into the Brexit debate and call on Britain to stay put? What would possibly make him support something that criticises his country on human rights, trade issues and market access? One reason is simply because, for all their differences with western democracies, Chinese leaders and policy makers are very pragmatic. They view Europe predominantly as an economic actor, not a security one. And as

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The great pretenders

There is fakery in the air. And maybe the French are done with deconstruction. A drone operated by a French archaeology consultant called Iconem has been languidly circling Palmyra, feeding back data about the rubble with a view to reconstructing the ruins and giving the finger to Daesh. Cocteau said he lies to tell the truth. Iconem flies to tell the truth. In April, an exhibition called The Missing: Rebuilding the Past opened in New York which examined ‘creative means to protest preventable loss’. It was timed to coincide with the temporary erection of a frankly underwhelming two thirds-scale replica of the Palmyra Arch in Trafalgar Square, London. It goes

Thursday

Karen Yossman

Death metal

With its loud guitar riffs and even louder fashion, heavy metal has always been ripe for ridicule. In its mid-1980s heyday, it was epitomised by the fictional rock group Spinal Tap prancing on stage next to an 18-inch polystyrene model of Stonehenge while clad in ball-crushingly tight trousers and floor-length capes. In some parts of the world, however, metal is no laughing matter. In the Middle East, for instance, the potential punishment for wearing all black while wielding an electric guitar is death. These days, against a backdrop of authoritarian suppression in countries such as Iran and China, heavy metal’s trademark theatrics and widdly guitar solos have become less an

Will Nicoll

The bane of Albania

In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from German invaders on the 28 November 1944. The Hoxha who had entered the city as a communist partisan was now a weak old man. He was often confined to a wheelchair, had to be hoisted on to his podium using a custom-built lift and was only prevented from falling by camouflaged safety rails. The dictator was deeply vulnerable but still formidably powerful. In a characteristically rousing sign-off, lip-synced over a pre-recorded speech, he urged those gathered to safeguard all that we have achieved like the apple of our eye and

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

What was the Queen meant to say about the Chinese officials?

A retired diplomat I know had no doubt about where the blame lay for the Queen’s Very Rude episode. ‘Sounds as though the officials let her down badly – twice – in filming private conversations and then not vetting them,’ he observed acidly. And certainly it does seem as though the broadcasters’ cameraman at large – representing the BBC, ITV et al –  may have to have his right-to-roam licence revoked for any social gathering involving HM. The reason, I’d have thought, why he was let loose at cocktail and garden parties was that the Palace thought he, or rather his bosses, could be trusted with the content. More fool

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 21 April 2016

Safe keeping? Sir: James Delingpole will be relieved to hear that not everyone follows the fashion for demanding repatriation of historical treasures (‘Give thanks for the tomb raiders’, 9 April). When presenting my ambassadorial letters of credence to the President of Haiti, René Preval, in 2010, I mentioned in passing that a rare (possibly unique) copy of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence had recently been discovered in our National Archives at Kew. At this point Preval’s foreign minister leaned forward and suggested that Her Majesty’s Government might wish to repatriate the document. Preval laughed at the suggestion. ‘No no, ambassador,’ he said with rueful acknowledgement of Haiti’s troubled past and precarious

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 21 April 2016

   Laikipia I sip my Tusker beer on the veranda, staring at the elephant. He’s not the elephant in the room. He’s the elephant on what should be my croquet lawn. I thought he might go away, but he hasn’t. Instead he’s brought his friends — more and more of them as time goes by. They say the elephant will become extinct within a few years. Across Africa, poachers are decimating elephants — just not here, where they apparently feel safe enough to crap on my sward. Today, the fashionable argument promoted on Twitter, and followed by princes and prime ministers, is to burn all stockpiles of seized ivory in

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Shakespeare400

The feeding frenzy over the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death has reached its peak. Recently we’ve had Shakespeare’s complete works performed through the puppetry of kitchenware. On books pages, you can read about everything from Edward Wilson-Lee’s Shakespeare in Swahililand (surprisingly beguiling) to Simon Andrew Stirling’s Shakespeare’s Bastard: A Life of Sir William Davenant (he wasn’t). Meanwhile, the Royal Mail is launching a set of stamps emblazoned with snappy quotations. And it’s this glib series that encapsulates the anniversary problem. Shakespeare’s beauty lies not in his maxims but in the complexity of every line; the power of context, character and plot to suggest myriad meanings, each one undercutting the

Thursday

The Spectator

Power failure | 31 March 2016

A fortnight ago, the energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a target of reducing net carbon emissions to zero. ‘The question is not whether but how we do it,’ she told Parliament. It is now becoming painfully clear how this target will be reached: not by eliminating our carbon emissions but by exporting them, along with thousands of jobs and much of our manufacturing industry. This week, Tata Steel announced that its entire UK business is to be put up for sale. That came after Stephen Kinnock, whose South Wales constituency includes Tata’s giant plant at Port Talbot, joined a union

Thursday

Peter Frankopan

A devilish instrument of war

‘China is a sleeping lion,’ Napoleon reportedly remarked. ‘When it wakes, the world will tremble.’ There is no need to fear China, its current leaders are quick to stress — with President Xi Jinping claiming that the country’s rise will be ‘peaceful, pleasant and civilised’. Such words are of little comfort to hawks in the United States who watch the Asia-Pacific region with a growing sense of alarm — even if the Chinese economic slowdown of recent months has made it more likely that we will hear a growl rather than a blood-curdling roar as the lion awakes. This interesting new book asks why it is that China has been

Thursday

James Bartholomew

Communism kills

I went to Budapest last year and did the usual touristy things. I climbed up the hill to the fantasy castle walls in Buda. I took a boat ride. I went to the Turkish baths — edging cautiously into scalding hot water and then summoning up the courage to tip a bucket of cold water over myself. Finally, I reached the grim end of the tourist trail: the so-called House of Terror. On the outside, it looked like every other Hungarian house on the boulevard. Inside, it was a museum set up in the actual place where first Nazis, then communists, inflicted imprisonment, terror and murder. Visiting it was a

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The City says it’s for staying in but I wonder what the big beasts think

‘The City is in no doubt that staying in Europe is the only way ahead,’ declared Mark Boleat for the City of London Corporation. Likewise Chris Cummings of the lobby group TheCityUK praised David Cameron for delivering ‘a really special deal’. The official Square Mile is squarely for ‘remain’, confident that the Prime Minister has secured safeguards to let the UK keep control of a thriving financial sector in a multi–currency EU. But with all due respect, I wonder what the real players think. The economists Gerard Lyons and Ruth Lea are two other respected City voices, and they warn that those safeguards won’t be worth much as Paris, Frankfurt