Xi jinping

Monday

Cindy Yu

Corruption, power and the truth about my wife’s disappearance – with Desmond Shum

43 min listen

In the early 2000s, Desmond Shum and his wife, Whitney Duan, were among the richest people in China, with fingers in various real estate, infrastructure and hospitality projects. They also had some of China’s most powerful people on speed dial – including the family of then-premier Wen Jiabao. But that all changed in 2017 when Whitney was disappeared by the Chinese state. Desmond now lives in the UK where he published a memoir in 2021, Red Roulette, and is now an analyst and commentator on Chinese politics. On this interview, we discuss why Shum thinks Whitney was the victim of a power struggle involving Xi Jinping, the reality of politics and

Tuesday

Ian Birrell

The new alliances dedicated to destroying democracy

After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by promising to tackle the inequality that scarred it so badly and take on the oligarchs enriching themselves through favours and nepotism. Western celebrities, journalists and politicians, from Sean Penn through to Jeremy Corbyn, started flocking to South America to hail their new progressive hero supposedly fighting for social justice. As Venezuela slid to ruin, Russian

Thursday

Cindy Yu

What Xi wants in Europe

On a quiet street in Belgrade, a bronze statue of Confucius stands in front of a perforated white block, the new Chinese Cultural Centre. This is on the former site of the Chinese embassy which in 1999 was bombed by US-led Nato forces during the Kosovo war. Three Chinese nationals were killed. The Americans said the bombing was an accident, but the deaths allowed China and Serbia to share a common anti-Nato grievance. This week, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the bombing, Xi Jinping visited Belgrade and talked about the Sino-Serbian ‘bond forged with the blood of our compatriots’. He had been expected to visit the embassy

Thursday

Nigel Inkster

The Xi files: how China spies

Most states spy. In principle there’s nothing to stop them. But China’s demand for intelligence on the rest of the world goes far beyond anything western intelligence agencies would typically gather. It encompasses masses of commercial data and intellectual property and has been described by Keith Alexander, a former head of America’s National Security Agency, as ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in history’. As well as collecting data from government websites, parliamentarians, universities, thinktanks and human rights organisations, China also targets diaspora groups and individuals. Chinese cyber intrusions have targeted British MPs and stolen population-level data from the UK Electoral Commission database. In the US, meanwhile, Congress has just cracked

Saturday

Boris Ryvkin

Xi Jinping is acting like Stalin

The General Secretary of China’s Communist Party is a different kind of leader. Now in his third five-year term, Xi Jinping believes that time is running out for him to secure his legacy as Mao Zedong’s true successor. He spent a decade dismantling the technocracy and politburo consensus government ushered in by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death, rolled back the authority of local party nomenklatura in favour of more centralised control from Beijing, and worked to subordinate China’s economy to the Communist Party’s (meaning Xi’s) political priorities. In abandoning the ‘to get rich is glorious’ social contract of the post-Tiananmen Square era, Xi has come to bury Deng and not

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti

After his trip to Moscow, Xi Jinping still holds all the cards

After his arrival in Moscow on Monday, President Xi Jinping said that China is ready, along with Russia, ‘to stand guard over the world order based on international law’. This statement came closer than ever before to articulating his view that a normative struggle is going on between a western-dominated order, and one more suited to Beijing’s interests. As he departed yesterday, he went further: ‘Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.’ Having positioned himself as a potential peacemaker, Xi clearly believes the war in Ukraine presents him with a win-win situation ­­­–

Monday

Cindy Yu

What Beijing wants out of the Russian invasion

52 min listen

As Xi Jinping visits Vladimir Putin in Russia this week, this episode of Chinese Whispers is returning to one of the missions of this podcast series – to look at things as the Chinese see them.  My guest today is Zhou Bo, a retired Senior Colonel of the People’s Liberation Army whose military service started in 1979. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. He’s an eloquent and informed advocate of Beijing’s perspective. On the podcast, we discuss why China hasn’t criticised Russia more, despite its purported support for sovereignty, to what extent it really means its peace plan, and

Friday

Angus Colwell

Xi’s nuclear warnings are a coup for Scholz

Checks and balances on Vladimir Putin don’t come from inside Russia. The people around him supported forced mobilisation, pushed his plans to annex eastern Ukraine, and wanted more nuclear posturing. Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, of China and India, can do a much better job at constraining Putin. They’re the only two leaders of major powers that haven’t completely ostracised the Russian leader. He needs them to keep his struggling economy afloat. The pair are putting pressure on the Putin to avoid nuclear conflict. This morning, Xi warned Putin off using nukes for the first time, after saying in February that China and Russia’s friendship had ‘no limits’. In a joint

Friday

Lawrence Freedman

The US knows the main threat is China

China’s President Xi Jinping opened the CCP’s 20th party congress by doubling down on four key issues: no let up on zero-Covid; no renunciation of force when it comes to Taiwan; a promise to build up China’s military strength; and no tolerance of any opposition to his rule. As he enters his third term, the most important new challenge he has to address are the export controls announced by the US on the eve of the congress that threaten to undercut China’s ability to develop semiconductors and supercomputers. Xi remains defiant: he promised to ‘resolutely win the battle in key core technologies.’ Yet Xi must be worried that the US

Charles Parton

How to counter China

When another country does something to upset the Chinese Communist party, it gets accused of ‘a Cold War mentality’. This is psychological projection, in Freudian terms, a defence mechanism which projects onto others the negative aspects of one’s own self. But the CCP is right in a way: we should have more of a ‘Cold War mentality’ or at least a ‘values and systems war’ mentality. China is not the Soviet Union. We never co-operated with the USSR on trade and investment or science and technology. We do with China. Indeed the CCP sees itself as fighting a ‘values and systems war’. Xi Jinping, in his first speech to the

Monday

Ian Williams

Joe Biden has jolted China

The chip war between China and America is heating up, with an increasingly assertive Joe Biden battling with Xi Jinping as he enters his third term as Chinese leader. The US last week further restricted China’s access to advanced American know-how, in what were some of the most stringent export controls for decades. Xi didn’t mention semiconductors in a speech on Sunday marking the opening of the Communist party’s twice-a-decade congress in Beijing, but he did pledge that China would ‘resolutely win the battle in key core technologies’. To compete with the US, China will need better tech. These new export controls will make Xi’s vision much harder to achieve. Joe

Sunday

Francis Pike

How long will Xi Jinping rule China?

For some time now it has been assumed that in November the National Congress will rubber stamp Xi Jinping’s continued role as China’s supreme leader for a third five-year term, which would make Xi the first Chinese leader for a generation to serve more than two terms. Just a year ago his position as one of China’s three pre-eminent leaders was confirmed when the 400 members of the Central Committee passed the third ‘Historical Resolution’ in the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year history. The previous two were organised by Mao in 1945 and Deng Xiaoping in 1981. The resolution highlighted the concept of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ as a historical equivalent to

Saturday

Ian Williams

Xi Jinping and the Chinese rumour mill

The Beijing political rumour mill has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, seizing upon every nuance and reading between every line for signs of the impending downfall of ‘Xi dada’ (Big Daddy Xi). All kinds of stories are being circulated about President Xi Jinping’s health, with reports over squabbling over his likely successor. Chinese premier Li Keqiang is being tipped. The predicted replacement of Xi by Li has its roots in differences on the economy and Covid-19, so the rumours go – and there does appear to be a split of sorts. In his public pronouncements Xi has doubled down on zero-Covid above all else. He has made little mention

Tuesday

Cindy Yu

Is China’s zero Covid game up?

Omicron has broken through China’s Covid wall. On Tuesday, the country saw a record-high of more than 5,000 cases, the highest number since the original Wuhan outbreak. To Brits (and most people around the world), that might sound like a laughably small number – but, as you might expect, China’s zero Covid machine has jumped into action, leading to a disproportionate, severe response. In the most afflicted areas like Shenzhen and Changchun, public transport has been suspended, non-essential businesses closed, residential compounds locked down. People can leave their homes to take part in compulsory city-wide mass testing (social media is flooded with videos of lengthy unsocially-distanced queues at test sites)

Tuesday

Ian Williams

Unmasking ‘panda diplomacy’

The star of the Beijing Winter Olympics wasn’t an athlete: it was Bing Dwen Dwen, the spacesuit-clad panda mascot. It was deployed to cover the harsher political edges of the games, and was romping around on the ice at the closing gala. Bing Dwen Dwen is only the latest example of China’s use of ‘panda diplomacy’, so successful over recent decades. The Chinese Communist party has long used them as envoys to potential partners. A bill now wending its way through the US Congress strikes at the heart of panda diplomacy. If it passes, it will keep American-born giant panda cubs in the US, which would break China’s monopoly on

Monday

Cindy Yu

Is an anti-Xi resistance emerging?

From the 1980s to 2017, at least every five years, China’s National Party Congress would be a moment of intriguing flux in the usually staid public politics of the Chinese Communist party. Rising stars are promoted, the old retired and, every other Congress, a new Secretary General would be appointed. Beforehand, a flurry of papers and opinion editorials would be published as various factions jostled for influence. This year’s Congress wasn’t meant to be exciting. Having abolished term limits, this is the moment when Xi Jinping is meant to be affirmed in his third term. There are few viable successors on the horizon. Nevertheless, an opening salvo in the pre-Congress war of

Tuesday

Ian Williams

China breaks new records in the Surveillance Olympics

Never before have the participants in a major sporting event been so closely monitored as in this Winter Olympics in Beijing. The 1980 Summer Olympics in Soviet Moscow were nothing in comparison. Athletes are competing under a blanket of observation, ostensibly to keep Covid at bay, yet imposed by a paranoid Communist party for whom critical words or thoughts are as dangerous as any virus. Everyone attending the games, including athletes, support staff and media, must install on their phones an app, My 2022, which harvests a wide range of personal data. It has the ability to censor and track its users, according to cybersecurity experts who have examined the

Friday

Ian Williams

China could be more dangerous than ever in 2022

Twenty twenty-two is the year that Xi Jinping plans to seize power for life, but it is not going according to script. He is retreating further into his bunker – a self-isolation that is amplifying the Communist party’s arrogance and insecurities. Challenges are mounting at home and abroad, which will make for a bumpy year in China’s growing rivalry with the West. Xi’s most immediate problem is Covid-19, where he has backed himself into an increasingly untenable ‘zero tolerance’ cul-de-sac, just as most of the rest of the world is learning to live with the virus. Just before the new year, gun-toting police in the city of Jingxi paraded four people

Wednesday

Cindy Yu

The rise and fall of Jack Ma

Jack Ma used to give rock star performances for his employees at Alibaba, Asia’s biggest online commerce company. He once dressed as Michael Jackson. But those halcyon days are gone. Over the last year, China’s richest man has had his wings clipped by the Chinese Communist party. The flamboyant Ma has only made a handful of public appearances (prompting rumours of a ‘disappearance’ at the hands of the CCP). This week, it transpired that Alibaba has almost halved in value — losing a record $373 billion over just the last 12 months. Ma’s downfall can be traced back to a misjudged speech he made in Shanghai this time last year.

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti

There is no Russia-China axis

You should be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it, so the old cliché goes. In diplomacy at the moment, it seems you should be careful of the threats you prepare for, because you may end up producing them. There is a growing trend in the West towards treating Russia and China as some single, threatening ‘Dragonbear’ (a reference to the two countries’ national animals). This underrates the very real tensions between Moscow and Beijing, but risks pushing them even closer together. The most recent case in point was Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg’s interview in the Financial Times, in which he criticised ‘this whole idea that we