Chinese communist party

It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by certain communities to be given vast cash payouts for things that happened before they were born, to people they never knew, by people they never met. I am talking about the need of the citizens of the world to be given reparations by China for what it did to us all this year. Before proceeding further, perhaps it is worth putting a few things in perspective. Delivering his spending review before the House of Commons last week, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak cited figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility explaining

Those of us who spent our formative China-watching years reading Chinese Communist party publications learnt early on that the word ‘basically’ was a synonym for ‘not’. ‘The party has basically succeeded in…’ meant that there was a problem. Hong Kong is basically an autonomous region. Xi Jinping is satirised by liberal Chinese as the ‘Accelerator-in-Chief’, whose policies are hurtling the CCP’s regime towards collapse. This could be wishful thinking on their part. Certainly, he has sped up the demise of the ‘one country, two systems’ concept. Article Five of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, promises ‘50 years without change’, implying that the city would be governed differently from other

Chinese leaders love to use the phrase ‘win-win’, but they actually hope to win twice and leave other nations in positions of relative disadvantage. The Chinese Communist party’s behaviour during the Covid-19 crisis is a case in point. In the midst of the global pandemic, the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security have conducted cyber-attacks against hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and medical research facilities developing Covid-19 therapies and vaccines. Triumphing in the race for a vaccine would help China emerge from the crisis in a position of relative advantage economically and psychologically, while reinforcing the idea that China’s authoritarian mercantilist system is superior to democratic free market systems.

The fate of Hong Kong should make us worried about Taiwan. China’s introduction of a new security law for Hong Kong — which hollowed out the spirit of the ‘one country, two systems’ notion — is a powerful reminder of the importance of sovereignty for the Chinese Communist party. We should ask whether Taiwan is next on the list. In the past few months, as the world battled to control the Covid-19 pandemic, Beijing indulged in increased military activity across the Taiwan Strait. The purpose was to remind the newly re-elected Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, that Taiwan is an inherent part of China and that there is no alternative to

The UK doesn’t have a China strategy. We have not had one since George Osborne declared a ‘golden era’ of Sino-British relations on a trip to Beijing in 2015. In hindsight, Osborne’s ‘era’ looks more like an ‘error’. Yet, Covid-19 makes clear that the UK needs to adopt one. The death and destruction caused by the coronavirus are partly a result of the bullying and lies that characterised the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to cover up the initial outbreak. Not only has China sought to dodge the blame for the pandemic, but it has also sought to take credit for dealing with it. Throughout Western capitals, long overdue assessments are

Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the suffix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair. But back in 2012, flush with recently acquired power and optimism, David Cameron and a man called Nick Clegg went to see the Dalai Lama while he was on a trip to London. Whether Cameron and Clegg knew what they were getting into wasn’t clear. The pair had a short meeting with the Lama at St Paul’s Cathedral — or at least in one of those bland conference ante-rooms English cathedrals constructed in the last century to atone for the splendours next door. Looking like a couple of travelling salesmen