China

Monday

Cindy Yu

Why is the BBC’s latest ‘documentary’ on China fronted by someone who doesn’t know anything about China?

The BBC’s latest pretty young face is Billie JD Porter. The 23-year-old is entirely lovable. With her brown roots proudly showing, that unmistakably London accent, and a chirpy personality, Billie is the latest in a string of young presenters who the corporation hopes will win back the younger generation. The result? Secrets of China, a three-part documentary series that barely scratches the surface of the country, let alone uncovers its ‘secrets’. Of the Chinese language, she knows little – she can say ‘boyfriend’, ‘beer’, and ‘thank you’. Of the culture, she knows even less. Billie frequently treats the project as a gap yah – using her subjects as the butt of her jokes. You might as well send any

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Cheer up: we’re robust enough to withstand a shock from China

Home from the hot Aegean, huddled by the fire as rain ruins the bank holiday weekend, I’m thinking: what gloom has descended since I’ve been away — and doesn’t it call for a round-up of cheerful news? So here goes. The UK economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the second quarter and a respectable 2.6 per cent over the past year. US growth has been revised sharply higher to 3.7 per cent, scotching our claim to be the fastest growing western economy, but George Osborne can still say convincingly that ‘we’re motoring ahead’ — and weak first-quarter performance can be seen as a blip rather than the revelation of doom

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Sorry, but I can’t join in the China panic

 MS Queen Victoria, 38°N 19°E I’ll do my best, but I’ve got to be honest: being surrounded by shining Ionian waters and convivial Spectator cruisers isn’t helping me channel the panic that has gripped global markets. So forgive me if this dispatch doesn’t have the apocalyptic tone you’re expecting. I’m as irritated as anyone that contagion from China’s share-gambling epidemic has knocked my modest interest in FTSE100 stocks back to where it stood in late 2012, but ask yourself: do you know anything about China or the global economy today that you didn’t know a month ago? Markets have overreacted, on relatively thin mid-August trading volumes, to a long-anticipated slowdown

Tuesday

Martin Vander Weyer

I can’t join in the China panic (especially not while I’m on a cruise)

MS Queen Victoria, 38°N 19°E I’ll do my best, but I’ve got to be honest: being surrounded by shining Ionian waters and convivial Spectator cruisers isn’t helping me channel the panic that has gripped global markets. So forgive me if this dispatch doesn’t have the apocalyptic tone you’re expecting. I’m as irritated as anyone that contagion from China’s share-gambling epidemic has knocked my modest interest in FTSE100 stocks back to where it stood in late 2012, but ask yourself: do you know anything about China or the global economy today that you didn’t know a month ago? Markets have overreacted, on relatively thin mid-August trading volumes, to a long-anticipated slowdown

Elliot Wilson

Even China can’t buck the market

Some years ago, I sat with an old China hand in a Beijing teahouse sipping oolong. An American director at a local education firm, his face was grey, creased by decades of pollution and office politics. But when talk turned to the country’s first spacewalk, recently completed, his brow furrowed. ‘Have you ever noticed that the government is trying to do everything the United States did, but 50 years later?’ He ticked off a list of the mainland’s aims and achievements, from manned space travel, to plans to place a Chinese citizen on the surface of the Moon. But the comparisons don’t end there. For all of its trumpeted exceptionalism,

Monday

Elliot Wilson

China’s ‘Black Monday’ is just the start

One-party states are rarely any good at admitting to any form of blunder. It is certainly the case with China’s prickly political leaders, who love to flood domestic media with jolly tales of fashion shows and bamboo-chomping pandas – anything to divert people’s attention from a flagging economy and rising unemployment. This makes today’s main headline on China Daily‘s website all the more arresting: ‘Stocks plunge most since 2007 as state support measures fail’ the state-run newspaper blared, after the Shanghai Composite share index lost 8.5 per cent in a single day. The wider world followed China’s lead: all major Asian stock indices fell on Monday, with oil tumbling to a six-year low.

Thursday

Niru Ratnam

Ai Weiwei

In September, the Royal Academy of Arts will present a solo exhibition of works by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. This follows his installation of porcelain sunflower seeds in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a solo show at Blenheim Palace and two solo exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery (which represents him). Peculiarly, the Royal Academy’s press release claims that Ai’s work has not been seen extensively in Britain, which might suggest that its press team doesn’t get out much. He has certainly been exhibited here more than other key Chinese contemporary artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Yang Fudong or Gu Wenda. Ai transcends the art world, particularly since his arrest by

Jonathan Mirsky

Monster of misrule

Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in 1976. Even today his giant portrait gazes down over Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 his successors massacred hundreds of students and workers. After so many years and books and articles, can anything new be said about him? Although Andrew Walder, a Stanford sociologist and leading China scholar, writes that his comprehensive and deadly analysis is primarily for non-specialists, he has made me think. President Xi Jinping, who will make a state visit to London in October, speaks highly of Mao. Such praise, concludes Walder, requires ‘highly selective historical memory and

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 August 2015

Home The Metropolitan Police encouraged people to celebrate VJ Day despite reports in the Mail on Sunday (picked up from an investigation by Sky News) of plans by Islamic State commanders to blow up the Queen. The RMT union announced two more strikes on the London Underground for the last week in August. Network Rail was fined £2 million by the rail regulator for delays in 2014-15, many of them at London Bridge. A tanker carrying propane gas caught fire on the M56 motorway near Chester. England won the Ashes series after beating Australia by an innings and 78 runs at Trent Bridge; Australia had been bowled out for 60

The Spectator

Podcast: Big trouble in Big China

Forget Greece; China’s economic slowdown is the biggest story of the year, says Elliot Wilson in this week’s issue of The Spectator. China’s long boom may finally be ending and the consequences for the world will be profound. Elliot joins Isabel Hardman and Andrew Sentance, Senior Economic Adviser at PwC and a former member of the Bank of England MPC, to discuss the implications of China’s slump on the British and global economy. With the Labour leadership contest still snoring along, there is plenty of discussion about what each contestant will bring to the party. But there’s one thing they are forgetting to discuss, says Isabel Hardman in her column this week: how

Elliot Wilson

Exit the dragon

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3″ title=”Elliot Wilson and Andrew Sentance discuss China’s economic slump”] Listen [/audioplayer]I stood alongside the chairman of the board of a state-owned enterprise in eastern China. The factory floor, partially open to the elements, stretched out far in front of us, littered with towers and blades designed for some of the world’s largest wind turbines. It was an impressive sight, one to which regular visitors to mainland factories are accustomed: China as the workshop of the world. But something was missing: workers. ‘They’ve been given the day off,’ the chairman said with a slight cough, as we stared out over the vast compound. On a Wednesday? It was hot

Thursday

Roger Alton

Champions of absurdity

Jumping the shark isn’t yet an Olympic sport, but if it were the International Olympic Committee would be a shoo-in for gold. And silver and bronze too. Amid some low-key hoopla last week, the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing. Yes, that’s the same Beijing that staged the 2008 Olympics and in a couple of weeks will put on the World Athletics Championships. The 2022 bidding boiled down to a two-horse race between Almaty, Kazakhstan, which at least has some snow; and Beijing, which doesn’t. The previous front-runner, Oslo, withdrew its bid last autumn after all the main political parties rejected the funding plans for the Games. It

Monday

Rod Liddle

British teachers could learn a thing or two from the Chinese

‘Rude, bone idle… and cosseted by the welfare state! Chinese teachers’ damning verdict on British children after spending a month in UK classrooms. Yes – just about right, I reckon. Except, of course, the English head teacher at the school thinks the Chinese are completely wrong and that their teaching methods are boring. And that we need to show the kids respect, m’kay? My suspicion is that we show the kids too much respect and that teachers are not there to be clownish entertainer, to pander.

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

Lost horizon

Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I was there once in April, when the sky was cornflower blue. When Britain withdrew from India the last ‘Chogyal’, or king, battled for his country’s independence, but Mrs Ghandi won the war, and Sikkim is an Indian state now. It’s a sad story, as Andrew Duff’s subtitle suggests, but one representative of 20th-century geopolitics. This dense book — Duff’s first — places Chogyal Thondup Namgyal at the centre of the story and focuses exclusively on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Sikkim’s strategic position is crucial, particularly as

Thursday

James Walton

Serial thriller

For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country to the West has had consequences that he’s unlikely to have foreseen. He probably couldn’t have predicted, for example, that one day a former Bond girl would travel the country finding almost everything ‘thrilling’. Or that a bloke who made his name in a British makeover show would proudly explain to a group of Chinese journalists that ‘I’ve got the sunglasses, I’ve got the big hair — all [sic] of these things are what you’d expect from a celebrity.’ The Bond girl in question was Joanna Lumley, who began Joanna

Thursday

Sean Mcglynn

The hardest man of all

From the unpromising and desperately unforgiving background that forged his iron will and boundless ambition, Temujin (as Genghis Khan was named at birth) rose to build an empire that was to range from Korea and China, through Afghanistan, Persia and Iraq and eventually to Hungary and Russia, constituting the largest contiguous land imperium in history. His was an extraordinary, epic story and Frank McLynn does it full justice in a vivid, page-turning biography. The author portrays well the extreme hardship of the nomadic life for Genghis as boy and man on the arid Mongolian steppe, where temperatures range between 100 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 43, and where ‘one can be

Wednesday

William Dalrymple

In the footsteps of Marco Polo: the journey that changed William Dalrymple’s life

This is the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of William Dalrymple’s first book, In Xanadu: A Quest At the end of the windy, rainy April of 1986, towards the end of my second year at university, I was on my way back to my room one evening, when I happened to trudge past my college notice board. There my eyes fell on a bright yellow sheet of A4, headlined in capital letters THE GAILLARD LAPSLEY TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIP. It hadn’t been a good week. I was 21: broke, tired of revision for exams and already longing for the holidays. But stopping to look closer, I found that the notice was an announcement concerning

Thursday

Hilary Spurling

Only the lonely

This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase, let alone unpack it. It closes at the opposite end of the social scale with a small girl squatting on a plank over a village cesspit, watching the maggots seething and squirming far below as they struggle to climb the sides of the pit towards the light. The cesspit was the only place where a child of five could find refuge from back-breaking labour in the fields. ‘Granny said girls who don’t work get no food,’ she tells Xinran, who meets her two decades later as a student working for

Thursday

Mark Cocker

To Hell in a handcart — again

Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent’s environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the world’s ecosystems. The case he lays bare with moving clarity in the opening chapters is compelling stuff. Essentially he argues that the world of wild creatures, plants, trees and whole habitats — you name it — is going to Hell in a handcart as a consequence of what he calls ‘the human project’. The cultural

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

One foot on the catwalk

St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion world before his suicide in 2010. It opens with a mysterious stalker, Dahlia, breaking into McQueen’s Mayfair home and demanding that he make her a dress. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shrieks but she placates him and they embark on a surreal odyssey to his childhood haunts where they meet his mentors past and present. A pretty clunky start. Who is Dahlia? A dramatic ploy, a figment of McQueen’s imagination or a real person? We don’t know so we don’t care about their relationship. Still less about her flipping dress.