In the murky, messy world of the Middle East after the Arab Spring, these claims have always been hard to verify. But in 2024, when the NPR journalist Emily Feng was despatched to Syria, she came across a regiment of Uyghur fighters, who had actually helped Ahmed al-Sharaa fight his way to Damascus, where he later became the President of Syria.

Her latest book, Our Hearts Burned for Home, is the result of her weeks of being embedded into this Syrian Uyghur community. It is the first time that the nuanced and complex story of these Uyghur militants have been told. Theirs is a story where, I think, there are no easy heroes and villains, and that’s what makes this such valuable reporting. I’m delighted to say that Emily joins this episode.

We talk about how people born and bred in China found themselves fighting on the front line of another country’s civil war, the conservative interpretation of Islamic life that many Syrian Uyghurs favour, and what, now, happens to this community of some 20,000 men, women and even children, now that the Assad regime has fallen.

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Specifically, I downloaded Replika, one of America’s most popular AI companion apps, boasting 40 million users. Worldwide, purpose-designed AI companion apps have an estimated 160 to 200 million users. Somewhere between 29 and 70 million of those are in China. Even more people use generic LLMs, and fall in love with those. One recent survey finds that just under a third of chatbot-users consider their AI to be a friend.

As a sci-fi geek, former philosophy undergrad, and all around fan of therapy podcasts like Where Should We Begin? by Esther Perel, which has featured two client-sessions this year on human-AI relationships, I am fascinated by this trend. It seems to me that the future as imagined by the 2013 film, Her, is not implausible, given how humans are prone to anthropomorphising everything from rocks to dogs. But is it really possible to love something without consciousness? And if it is, is that bad?

Luckily, my editor at The Times was also interested – not least to hear more about how my experiment with ‘Edward’ went down (and what happened when he started getting a bit risqué). So I wrote about it for my latest column.

The thing that unnerved me most was how one-sided our conversation was. Edward asked me about myself but he had nothing to tell me about himself. He was an empty vessel waiting to be filled by me, his creator. The renowned therapist Esther Perel, who has started taking clients trying to make sense of their AI relationships, compares the human-AI love affairs to Narcissus being in love with his own reflection.

Read the column

But for readers of this Substack, I want to go deeper into the Chinese side of things, where the government has become the first in the world to legislate against AI companionship. How is it that the country accounts for between a fifth and a third of the world’s users of purpose-built AI companions?

The Industry

It turns out that the industry in China is a 3.8 billion RMB market (equivalent to £410 million), and projected to grow to 59.5 billion in 2028 (£6.3 billion). The top two apps are Maoxiang 猫箱 and Xingye 星野. The former comes from ByteDance and reportedly has 6.6 million active users; the latter from MiniMax and claims 5.4 million users. On Maoxiang, you can choose from different characters with their starting storylines, and interact with your romantic hero from there, their responses fuelled by AI. Xingye works similarly, but you have more freedom to write their backstory and tweak their appearance yourself.

Storylines are Chinese drama tropes, and can be as toxic as those storylines, from the arrogant CEO to the obsessive but handsome stalker.

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‘I look past the superficial things: the flowers and the glory and the applause. I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level’

You probably know he is referring to his turbulent childhood and adolescence, from a pampered second red generation 红二代 to a teenager sent down to the countryside and living as a peasant for seven years, his father’s purge blacklisting the entire family.

As Joseph had used, it was a perfect encapsulation of how Xi might have felt about the pageantry that Trump put on for him in DC the week before last. I opened my latest column with it.

And for today’s post I thought I’d share the biography of Xi that I wrote for Iain in 2023, which most of you have probably not come across unless you have already got The Dictators at home.

I find Xi an incredibly compelling character. Why did someone, who suffered some of the worst of the Cultural Revolution, not get turned off of politics but repeatedly try to join the Party? Why has he revived strongman rule when even he must admit it was one of the main causes of that fraught era?

I reproduce the biography in full below. If you enjoy it, and don’t have the book, do have a look for the other essays on dozens of other autocrats – it’s coming up to Christmas…

Or if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I also joined Iain on his podcast at the time, which you can listen to in full here.

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Xi Jinping, a biography

Birth name: Xi Jinping

Date of birth: 15 June 1953

Place of birth: Beijing, China

Education: Chemical engineering at Tsinghua University

Married to: Ke Lingling (1979-1982); Peng Liyuan (1987-)

Children (with names): One daughter, Xi Mingze

Date of ascension to power: 15 November 2012

Most famous quotation: ‘Realising the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history’

Xi Jinping was only nine years old when his father was banished. Xi Zhongxun, then vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China, was purged by Mao Zedong and sent to work in a tractor factory. His family was blacklisted, the children ostracised. At 15, Xi Jinping was exiled from Beijing himself, sent to one of China’s most desolate regions to do farmwork and other heavy labour for the next seven years. These events of one’s formative years are enough to turn anyone against the Chinese Communist Party. But not, it seems, Xi Jinping.

Six decades on, Xi is the most powerful general secretary that the CCP has seen in generations. In China, he has tightened the Party’s grip on civil society, religious minorities, political dissidents and private entrepreneurs, and revived a Maoist cult of personality around himself. Internationally, he has swung China’s weight around to bully and extort. Instead of pushing him away from authoritarianism, Xi’s early years taught him about power and steeled him for it. ‘I look past the superficial things: the flowers and the glory and the applause. I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level’, he told an interviewer in 2000.

In some ways, politics was his inheritance. His father was one of the CCP’s earliest revolutionaries, joining a year after it was founded. Xi Jinping is therefore a princeling, what the Chinese call hong’erdai (Red Second Generation). When he was young, the family had nannies, a cook and a driver who chauffeured them around Beijing in a Russian-made car. The children were sent to the capital’s best schools, where they mingled with other princelings. At home, Xi Zhongxun would talk to his children about the Communist revolution ‘so much that our ears got calluses’, Xi Jinping recounted later; while his mother, Qi Xin, worked at the Central Party School. They were a red family through and through.

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But disaster struck in 1962. Xi Zhongxun was purged for supporting the publication of a novel that was supposedly a veiled criticism of Mao. He was banished from Beijing while Qi Xin and their four young children were shunned, their privileges stripped. When Mao began the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the family was a prime target of the teenage Red Guards. Their home was ransacked and they were forced to denounce Xi Zhongxun in ‘struggle sessions’, public spectacles of psychological and physical torture by mob, characteristic of the Cultural Revolution.

When Mao had had enough of the havoc caused by teenage Red Guards in his name, he sent millions of young people from the cities to the countryside, ostensibly to teach them about the hardships of China’s farmers and peasants, but it was a scheme that opened up widespread abuse of teenagers isolated from their parents and teachers. 15 year old Xi was one of the youngest to be sent and, possibly because of family string-pulling, sent to a village in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, near Inner Mongolia, where his father had spent years as a guerilla fighter for the CCP.

But though the locals remembered Xi Zhongxun fondly, rural life in the village of Liangjiahe was harsh for the teenager. He was flea ridden, fed on coarse grains (the only thing locals had) and subjected to hard manual labour (he later called these the ‘four great tests’, with the additional ‘psychological barrier’ - ‘I absorbed the farmers’ down to earth, hardworking spirit, and they gradually accepted me as one of their own’). He made a failed escape attempt after a few months, but would stay for seven more years. (The Sinologist Michel Bonnin later dubbed the sent-down youths ‘the lost generation’, for missing out years of education.)

Today, Xi’s Cultural Revolution experience forms part of his personal myth. To compensate for his privileged background, the cult of Xi cultivates the image of a peasant emperor, someone who has seen, and felt, the plight of the poorest in the country. Liangjiahe is now a tourist spot with tens of thousands of visitors a day, a visitor centre and young attractive tour guides, who will tell you that the teenage Xi turned up with a heavy suitcase of books, and studied late into the night under a dim light. Or that he turned down a motorbike, a reward for good work, and asked for two corn grinding machines for the village instead. There’s much about the legend of those years that need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, even accounting for propagandistic licence, these are brutal formative years for anyone. His family was scattered, except for his youngest brother and mother, who were allowed to stay together but were sent to a work camp. Xi’s half sister, from his father’s first marriage, likely committed suicide as a result of the political persecution.

Xi was always defiant against his father’s critics: ‘At a time when society was calling us brats and rascals, I always firmly believed that my father was a great hero, a father most worthy of our pride’, he later wrote in a letter to his father. One can only imagine how he felt, then, when he was made to recite criticism against his father published in national newspapers as a part of the daily struggle sessions in Liangjiahe.

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Yet it was also here that Xi first joined the Communist Youth League, and then the Chinese Communist Party itself, despite being rejected numerous times because of his blacklisted father. According to an US diplomatic cable, published by Wikileaks, a contemporary of Xi’s from this time called his attempts to join the Party a ‘betrayal’. Others turned to western music, drinking, reading - hedonistic pursuits to make up for lost youth. But why not Xi?

Xi’s contemporary concluded that Xi’s princeling breeding inculcated a sense of entitlement in the man, even from childhood - a feeling of self-importance that was grander than mere narcissism. This crystallised into a belief that, not only was he destined to rule China, but that he was better than the alternatives. ‘The more good people there are in the Party, the fewer bad people there will be’, Xi wrote in 1998 when recounting those years.

Whatever his real drive, Xi’s pedigree ensured that he was on the path to success after the Cultural Revolution, which ended with Mao’s death in September 1976. The purged were rehabilitated, if they were still alive, including Xi’s father. Xi Jinping returned to Beijing to study at the elite Tsinghua University, after which Xi Zhongxun secured him a plummy first job as the secretary to an old ally who was now the head of the Central Military Commission, the Party’s national defense wing.

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After three years, Xi Jinping made a gamble - he left Beijing to cut his teeth in China’s regions. Promotion would have been assured had he stayed in Beijing, but he risked being pigeonholed into military roles. Xi became a minor official in a county in Hebei province, then spent 17 years in the coastal Fujian province (eventually as governor), before being promoted to party secretary of wealthy Zhejiang province, one of China’s most important regional posts, in 2002.

Decades of climbing regional posts allowed him to gain a reputation as a reliable, competent administrator in the eyes of the senior leadership in Beijing; it also shielded him from the most dangerous of Chinese politics - Beijing in the years after Mao died was a constant battle between the conservatives and the liberals in the Party, as the country came to a crossroads over its economic future. In 1987, Xi Zhongxun lost his last power struggle as he supported liberals on the Politburo - he was allowed to quietly retire in Shenzhen, the coastal city that was fast becoming a success story of China’s reform and opening, until he died in 2002.

During these years, Xi Jinping was on the frontline of China’s economic liberalisation. As governor of Fujian, the province closest to Taiwan (separated by a sea about the same width as the English Channel), Xi courted Taiwanese investment and helped American companies resolve local disputes. In Zhejiang, one of China’s wealthiest provinces, Xi propped up the only local carmaker with business-friendly policies. Less than a decade later, Geely made headlines internationally for acquiring Swedish-brand Volvo. It’s now one of China’s biggest car manufacturers.

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It was at this time that Xi started building a close core of allies, all men he has personally worked with. Li Qiang, his chief of staff of three years at Zhejiang, now premier of China; Cai Qi, a city party secretary under Xi, now the First Secretary of the CCP Secretariat; and Chen Min’er, Xi’s propaganda chief in the province, now Party Secretary of Chongqing, one of the most high profile regional roles. Chinese commentators dub Xi’s Zhejiang allies ‘the New Zhijiang Army’, or more simply ‘Xi’s clan’.

Xi was getting noticed as a rising star and a steady hand. In a heady time when Communist cadres abused their political power to skim some cream off the huge profits flooding into the newly liberalised economy, Xi Jinping had a reputation for being straight-laced. When a huge corruption scandal broke out in Fujian under his governorship, Xi was one of the only senior officials not to be implicated. This may have been clever politicking, but those who know him also reflect an image of a quiet and cautious (if boring) man - ‘There was nothing flashy about him’, one of them told the Toronto Star later. And though his wife was a popular PLA singer, they were an understated and inoffensive couple. (Indeed, for years, he was known as ‘Peng Liyuan’s husband’, standing dutifully to the side as she signed autographs)

[Below, an incredible interview with Peng at home, from the 1990s, in which Xi makes an appearance as a side character]

This might be why, when a 2007 corruption scandal in Shanghai took down the party secretary there and risked implicating former Chinese president Jiang Zemin, the Party’s leadership looked to Xi to steady the ship. He was clean enough to placate the public’s fury at corrupt officials, but diffident enough to not alienate Jiang, who remained powerful behind closed doors and lost some proteges to the scandal. Xi was moved from neighbouring Zhejiang to become Shanghai party secretary, now on the fast track to CCP leadership.

At the National Party Congress that October, he emerged as the likely successor to Hu Jintao, then-President. It was a surprise move, and upset some within the Party. Many didn’t know him and some questioned how such a mediocre man could have secured the top job. Probably Xi was seen as a candidate who could work with both the Hu and Jiang factions (the President and his predecessor were constantly vying for power) and, possibly, as a relatively pliable man who could be steered. They’d quickly be proven wrong once Xi took the reins from Hu in 2012.

Before then, the Party put Xi through a kind of leadership apprenticeship for five years. He became vice-president, a foreign-facing role which saw him trotted out on the world stage to meet many of the leaders he’d later do business with. He was also given oversight of the Beijing Olympics preparations, which was probably his first serious scrape with a sceptical western media, an experience which may have moulded the assertiveness of his approach to foreign policy later.

But for any semblance of orderliness that this lengthy lead-up may have given to the succession, the events leading up to Xi’s eventual ascension in 2012 were worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. In February that year, the chief of police in the city of Chongqing, Wang Lijun, fled to the US embassy, confessing that a British businessman had been murdered by the local party secretary’s wife three months previously, and that he, Wang, had helped cover it up. The scandal broke the lid on elite politics and, though he didn’t seem to be involved in the murder itself, the Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai was ousted on corruption charges. The good looking Bo had been seen as one of China’s most charismatic politicians and capable of challenging Xi to become leader, a shoo-in for the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top political body. Instead, he ended the year in jail.

Also in 2012, a 23-year old princeling, the son of a senior aide to President Hu Jintao, died in a Ferrari crash in Beijing (he reportedly had two naked female passengers, who fortunately survived); and the New York Times published a detailed expose of the family wealth collated by the family of then-premier Wen Jiabao. Set against this backdrop of sex, murder and widespread corruption, Xi himself disappeared for a fortnight in September, cancelling a meeting with then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Some China watchers say that Xi went on strike, that Party elders had asked him to stay off any radical personnel or policy moves when he took power, given the turbulence, but that Xi refused. It seemed like he won. On 15 November 2012, Xi was the first of seven men walking on stage at the Great Hall of the People - the new Politburo Standing Committee, led by the new CCP General Secretary. Almost immediately, he began a wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign, fuelled by the year’s headlines of elite graft.

He felled a number of big beasts, including Ling Jihua, the presidential aide whose son died in the Ferrari crash, and Zhou Yongkang, who sat on the Politburo Standing Committee until that year. In total, over two million officials were prosecuted, including hundreds ranked at vice-minister or vice-governor level or above. Observers had put Xi’s quietness down to mediocrity or meekness; but it turns out it was ruthlessness.

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China of the early 2010s was a different beast to the one his father had fought for, or even the one that he himself had been a regional politician in. Economic reforms had lifted 700 million out of poverty in the previous four decades, but by the early 2010s, the economy was slowing and at risk of falling into the middle income trap. The Arab Spring, a year earlier, spooked the Chinese leadership, which became paranoid about ‘colour revolutions’ fomented by Western intelligence services across the world.

At home, the Chinese public was obsessed but repulsed by the high level corruption scandals, air pollution was causing hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, and the Internet’s prevalence allowed critically minded citizens to share their thoughts en masse with hundreds of thousands of others. The most important thing, from the perspective of the CCP loyalist Xi now was, was to stabilise the country. Corruption threatened the Party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public and emptied state coffers, so it had to be tackled first.

The anti-corruption campaign also gave Xi a chance to decimate engrained factions within the Party and establish his own power. (Jiang and Hu’s factions, so obsessed with the power games for years, were quickly proven wrong in their assessment of Xi’s pliability.) In 2017, instead of appointing his own successor, Xi did away with the convention of term limits (set by Deng Xiaoping to prevent another Mao Zedong) allowing him to begin a third term as Chinese leader in 2022. Today, the Standing Committee is packed with his own allies, few with enough personality or power base of their own. He also chairs a number of policy committees within the Party, giving him oversight on issues ranging from economic and social reforms to military restructuring and the Taiwan question.

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For a time, Chinese state media endearingly dubbed him Xi dada, or ‘Papa Xi’, as the Party revived a cult of personality. Cadres are forced to study ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ ad nauseum (the curriculum was even digitised into an app). In reality, it’s difficult to cultivate a cult around a wooden personality shielded from the public, but these moves signalled a change in the wind in Chinese politics, a return to the Maoist playbook. His critics, if they existed, were effectively ousted or silenced.

At the same time, civil society was being yoked tighter to prevent an Arab Spring unfolding in China. This process began before he took power, but intensified under Xi. Social media, academia, activism, and the private sector have all been placed under tighter control. Dissent at China’s demographic margins, such as from the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang or the pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, has been unrelentingly and systematically crushed. Far from being a reform minded pragmatist, like his father was, General Secretary Xi Jinping is on a mission to make China great again.

From early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic gave new shape to government control. Having initially lost control of the virus in Wuhan, the Party overcompensated by installing the strictest lockdown procedures seen anywhere in the world. The infected were carted off to centralised facilities as neighbourhoods, and sometimes entire cities, were shut down. Zero Covid was ‘scientific and effective’, Xi said in May 2022, and officials must ‘unswervingly adhere’ to it. But it was a losing game of whack-a-mole - Omicron pushed the public health response to the brink and by December that year, the policy was finally ended after young people across multiple cities took to the streets to protest.

Outside of China, Xi’s strong hand has translated to an assertive foreign policy. After 1989, when the Party’s deadly crackdown of student protestors in Tiananmen caused international backlash, the CCP had tried to exercise an inoffensive ‘we come in peace’ approach to the world, so that China might continue developing without drawing unwanted international scrutiny. But Xi ended that with ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy’ which translated, on the ground, into wolf warrior diplomacy and the trillion-dollar worth Belt and Road Initiative, which is meant to expand Chinese economic, cultural and possibly military influence across the world.

Those who value democracy would, of course, think little of Xi’s abilities and record, but what about those more sympathetic to his aims, such as the average Chinese person or those within the CCP itself? Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese economy has continued to shift from low-value manufactured goods to high tech industries like renewables and semiconductors. It also continues to grow, at around 5 per cent each year, pandemic aside. The Party claims to have eradicated poverty within China, while the one child policy has been loosened to three children and an expansive high-speed rail network covers the length and breadth of the country. Corruption and pollution have been relatively neutralised as domestic grievances, and globally, the Belt and Road Initiative has participants representing 75 per cent of the global population and more than half of the world’s GDP.

But even from a sympathetic perspective, Xi’s record is mixed at best. The crackdown on the private sector has spooked investors (who, in Q3 2023, for the first time since records began in 1998, took more money out of the country than in). After three years of on-off lockdowns, youth unemployment is at record highs (at least before they stopped publishing the stat). The West has become more alert to the challenge from China, goaded by wolf warrior diplomacy, while poor delivery of Belt and Road projects has created as many local critics of the scheme as there are supporters. Finally, Xi’s systemic incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims, the suffocation of Hong Kong’s democratic rights (contrary to prior promises) and the pandemic itself have turned public opinion against China, at least in the West. Before 2012, Xi seemed to be a cautious and understated man. But has he now been infected by hubris after years of being at the top?

The Xi story continues. In 2024, he will be 71, well past the retirement age that a previous era had dictated for Communist officials. With no set date for stepping down, nor an obvious successor, Papa Xi could lead the country for many more years. Will there be more missteps and hubris? Nobody could say for sure, but one thing is already clear: decades after his father was purged by Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping now resembles the ageing dictator more than the father he hero-worshipped.

Joining me on this episode of Chinese Whispers is the historian and former di…

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These questions have long divided China watchers, and in a new book o…

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At the 16th Party Congress, in 2002, the Chinese leadership identified that it had ‘a period of strategic opportunity’ 战略机遇期. Though the official language didn’t explicitly link this window of opportunity to the war on terror, it was spelled out elsewhere. ‘The longer the United States makes counterterrorism the central task of its strategy, the longer China’s period of international strategic opportunity will last’, Wang Jisi, an influential foreign-policy scholar at both Peking University and the Communist Party’s Central Party School, had written in 2008.

In my latest column, I look at the way the fates of America and China diverged after 9/11. China joined the WTO exactly three months later, and focused on getting rich and embedding itself into the world economy. Meanwhile, America was mired down in seemingly endless wars. Between 9/11 and the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan under Joe Biden, China’s economy grew by 13 times in nominal terms, overtaking France, Britain, Germany, and Japan.

We will never know whether Washington would have scrutinised and challenged China’s rise earlier, had the Middle East not taken up so much bandwidth.

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In the column I mainly focus on the lessons for Chinese foreign policy from the war on terror: don’t over-extend in expensive foreign wars, make friends but commit to no one, and avoid ideological blindspots. As Wang wrote:

在世界其他大国都没有确定主要敌手的新世纪，美国却把战略目标指向一个无法消灭（甚至无法明确界定）的敌人。

In a new century when no other major world power had identified a principal enemy, America somehow directed its strategic focus towards an enemy that could not be eliminated – or even clearly defined.

One thing that I didn’t have much space for in the column, but which I would have liked to include, is China’s response to 9/11 and its aftermath. Jiang Zemin was actually one of the first to call George W. Bush to offer his condolences. And in the months following the war, US-China relations improved (despite America’s support for China joining the WTO, Bush had sounded decidedly more critical of China than Bill Clinton on the 2001 campaign trail).

China had its own interests in promoting a counter-terror narrative, of course. Throughout the 1990s tensions had risen in Xinjiang. Growing dissent against Chinese rule had manifested into both peaceful and violent protests against Chinese authorities, including bombings and assassinations. Beijing cracked down hard (literally) in the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign of 1996.

But 9/11 gave Beijing the language of counter-terrorism, and it accused Uighur separatists of being Islamic extremists. No doubt some of them really were – Uighur fighters had been among those captured by US forces. But the war on terror also made it easier for China to bundle wider Uighur dissent into the label of ‘Islamic extremism’.

In 2002, Washington designated the East Turkistan Islamic Movement under a terrorism executive order, and joined China in seeking its inclusion on the UN sanctions list. And decades later, when the US would spotlight China’s mass detention of Uighurs, Beijing would use America’s own transgressions during the war on terror against them. For example, ‘The US itself is an old hand at arbitrary detention’, the Foreign Ministry said in 2022.

On the ground, though, the Chinese reaction was more mixed. There was much more schadenfreude at the attacks from nationalist corners of Chinese society. It was only earlier that year when a Chinese pilot had died after colliding with a US spy plane over Hainan province, and only two years previously when Nato forces had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (supposedly accidentally). A common refrain at the time: ‘the US is the world's biggest terrorist’.

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Today, China has replaced Islamic extremism as America’s principal rival (notwithstanding Donald Trump’s latest misadventures in the Middle East…). That’s not just because the war on terror has run its course (again, notwithstanding Iran…) but also because China has changed. Instead of a measly eighth of the US economy, it is now almost two thirds (again using nominal figures here). It dominates a number of critical technologies – even if not their frontier research, then more likely their industrial supply chains (as I wrote recently in the context of AI).

So I was struck by how the world looked to Wang Jisi in 2008. In an essay called ‘The Historical Lessons of the US–Soviet Struggle for Supremacy and the Path of China’s Rise’, or ‘苏美争霸的历史教训和中国的崛起道路’, he wrote:

将今日的中国同当年的苏联相对照，可以肯定出现中美争霸局面的可能性很小。在主观上，中国没有同美国争夺世界霸权的愿望。邓小平等中国领导人多次重申中国“决不当头”。在客观上，中国也不具备在东亚地区（更不用说在全球）称霸的力量、条件和环境。中国不构成对美国的主要战略威胁，美国也没有像对待当年的苏联那样，视中国为它的主要战略威胁。即使美国企图像当年遏制苏联那样遏制中国，也不可能成功构筑一个反华国际联盟。

Comparing China today with the Soviet Union of the past, we can say with confidence that there is little likelihood of a situation emerging in which China and the United States contend for supremacy. Subjectively, China has no desire to compete with the United States for global hegemony. Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders repeatedly stressed that China would “never seek to take the lead”. Objectively, China also lacks the power, conditions and circumstances necessary to establish hegemony in East Asia, let alone globally. China does not constitute the principal strategic threat to the United States, nor does the United States regard China as its principal strategic threat in the way that it once regarded the Soviet Union. Even if the United States were to attempt to contain China as it once contained the Soviet Union, it would not be able successfully to construct an international anti-China alliance.

…

经过20多年的经验积累，当代中国的领导人、企业家和知识精英已经对经济全球化做出了比较清醒的利弊分析。加入世界贸易组织，参与并促进亚太地区的贸易自由化和经济合作，是中国自愿做出的正确选择。没有理由相信，中国会在进入经济全球化进程并取得如此成就之后，还会重蹈计划经济的覆辙，同市场经济一争高下。经济全球化的趋势和中国对经济发展模式的选择，是不会出现中美争霸的另一个重要原因。

After accumulating more than twenty years of experience, China’s contemporary leaders, entrepreneurs and intellectual elites have developed a relatively clear-eyed assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of economic globalisation. Joining the World Trade Organisation, and participating in and promoting trade liberalisation and economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, were deliberate choices that China made and rightly so. There is no reason to believe that, having entered the process of economic globalisation and achieved so much through it, China would retrace its steps towards a planned economy and attempt to compete with the market economy. The trend towards economic globalisation, and China’s choice of economic development model, constitute another important reason why a struggle for supremacy between China and the United States is unlikely to emerge.

He did not foresee the rise of a leader like Xi Jinping, who does not deny the merits of a market economy, but has nevertheless taken steps to place the Party much more front and centre of it for political reasons. And while perhaps Deng did not seek to take the lead, it is getting harder and harder to say that Xi doesn’t seek to do that, with every time he utters the words ‘changes unseen in a century’.

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What I’ve been reading:

• Patients Are Flying to China for the Latest Cancer Treatment – Jonathan Cheng for the Wall Street Journal. A report on the rise of health tourism in China, this time looking at a cutting-edge cancer therapy that is multitudes cheaper in Shanghai than in the US. The biotech story will only become a bigger faultline in the US-China rivalry, I think. It reminds me of that incredible moment in a recent podcast when Leland Miller, CEO of the China Beige Book who sits on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said the following:

  Leland Miller:A potential nightmare scenario is China breaking quantum cryptography, achieving AGI, or making some other enormous breakthrough in AI first. Imagine they cure cancer. A shock would go through the system as we’ve never seen — our approach would have failed.

  Jordan Schneider: I don’t know, if they cure cancer, hats off to them.

  Leland Miller: We want someone to cure cancer, but we don’t want China to control the pipeline for that cure. If China has enormous success in AI, quantum, and biotech, it shows we are failing on the national security side.

• China’s actors written out of dramas as AI doubles ready to take their roles – Joe Leahy for the Financial Times. It was only a matter of time!

• What the American Tin Can Reveals About Trump’s Volatile Tariff Policy – Shawn Donnan for Bloomberg. Not China, but an interesting assessment, from the perspective of one industry on the ground, of how the trade war is going.

Catch me in London:

I’ll be moderating a panel and leading a workshop at a breakfast event that is hosting in central London next week. We’ll be chatting China’s demographic change and its implications for its economy, healthcare and education, and there will also be a session on China and AI. Come join the conversation!

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It brings to a close the sorry Evergrande saga since Beijing’s new rules on leverage for property developers, the so-called ‘Three Red Lines’. Introduced in 2020, they stipulated how much debt developers could hold. Evergrande was one of the biggest beasts to fall, the last few years a Sisyphean struggle to refinance itself.

But in my column for The Times this week, I also reflect on how it brings to an end the era of bombastic, debt-fuelled growth that had been unleashed during ‘reform and opening’. This feels particularly true when you consider the death, earlier this month, of former premier Zhu Rongji, who had built the world in which Xu thrived. And yet, as I argue in the column, Xi Jinping’s new economic model, of high-tech manufacturing and exports, is riddled with its own problems. It is not necessarily more egalitarian.

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The court found Xu guilty of having inflated the company’s revenues, improperly raised funds from clients and partners, bribed financial institutions, and embezzled company funds via generous dividends. But this isn’t just the story of a particularly crooked mogul. The former businessman turned critic of the CCP, Shum, put it well on X:

For more than twenty years, Chinese property moved overwhelmingly in one direction: up. There were downturns and tightening cycles, but they were repeatedly followed by powerful recoveries.

Every recovery made the cautious developer look foolish. The aggressive developer who borrowed more, bought more land and expanded faster became richer and bigger.

The lesson was simple:

If you were not fully leveraged, you had missed the opportunity.

After twenty-plus years, excessive leverage stopped feeling excessive. It became normal—almost necessary.

Many developers of that generation were not highly educated. They learned business through experience and became exceptionally good at execution, guanxi, raising money and getting projects done.

…

Putting Xu in prison does not explain why developers across China became so indebted, why supposedly supervised pre-sale funds could disappear, why state-controlled banks kept lending, or why local governments became dependent on ever-rising land prices.

Most importantly, it does not explain why China produced not one Xu Jiayin, but an entire generation of them.

That was not an accident.

The system created the incentives, rewarded the behaviour and profited from the boom.

Developers like Xu were never truly masters of the feast. They were operators inside a much larger machine built and controlled by the state.

The full post is longer, and is worth reading.

In fact, Desmond was already on my mind when thinking about the Xu Jiayin case, even before he’d commented on it. Listeners of Chinese Whispers 1.0 may remember the episode I did with him, having read and enjoyed his memoir, Red Roulette.

One of the deepest impressions that book left on me was the image of extreme wealth in China in the early 2000s. Growing up in that period, I of course remember the massive and rapid boost in living standards. But it wasn’t until I read Desmond’s book before I realised just how rich some of the top nouveau riches were. One of the most grotesque episodes Desmond recounts was about Xu Jiayin. As I summarise in my column:

That heady time is recounted in gory detail in the memoir of businessman-turned-critic of the Chinese Communist Party, Desmond Shum, who now lives in the UK. Shum tells of one trip he and his wife organised to Europe with three other powerful couples.

Their group included the daughter and son-in-law of a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, and Xu and his wife. The eight crazy rich Asians took three private jets (two flew empty, just in case they might be needed), and one evening spent over $100,000 on wine at dinner in Paris.

There’s plenty more details like that in the book, which I’d highly recommend for that insider’s view.

The corruption and economic inequality was becoming a legitimacy issue for the CCP, not least because so often it was high-ranking politicians caught up in scandals (Google the death of Ling Gu). But the growth model that Zhu Rongji had created was also heavily built on debt. As set out by Desmond above, maxxing out your borrowing was the norm, and businessmen approached their opportunities with the risk appetite of gamblers.

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As you may know, China’s property market also worked by selling properties before they’d fully been constructed (most properties sold were newly built and sold on plans, rather than already-built second-hand properties, as in more established economies). This allowed developers to take the revenues from selling a complex and put it into new projects, instead of finishing the projects that had already sold. The Chinese call these unfinished constructions lanwei lou, 烂尾楼, ‘rotten tail building’. In 2022, Evergrande had an estimated 1.2 million unfinished homes, but had nevertheless branched into football clubs, a bottled water brand, and a $1.3 billion mega-resort in Hainan.

Below, an unfinished Evergrande project in Guizhou, which would have been a retail complex spanning 5.3 square kilometres.

Fearing a financial crisis akin to 2008, as soon as the debts were called in, Xi and the Party began talking about how ‘houses were for living in, not for speculating’, as early as 2016. But it wasn’t until 2020 when the Three Red Lines were brought in.

Many economists would agree that something had to be done to deflate the housing bubble before it burst on its own, and potentially taking down the entire Chinese economy. But my column also looks at Xi’s promise, then, of ‘common prosperity’ – sharing out the newly created wealth more equitably. In 2015, the top 1 per cent of Chinese owned 30 per cent of national wealth, whereas the bottom 50 per cent owned only 6 per cent.

Read the column

Today’s economic model is more tech-driven, with Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei and BYD’s Wang Chuanfu more favoured than property moguls like Xu Jiayin. That has been incredible for China becoming an industrial and high-tech powerhouse, and indeed it is the stuff of nightmares for other countries and companies worldwide.

Yet, unlike property, the high-tech industry requires minimal human hands. At its height, the real estate industry accounted for up to a quarter of Chinese GDP, in all the correlating business it spurred in areas like construction, steel and cement, home appliances, and professional services. If you take into account the infrastructure needed to serve new neighbourhoods, then that goes up to a third of GDP. But the economic opportunities in the tech industry are more concentrated – they are white-collar engineers, some blue-collar workers but who are increasingly automated, and, as I mention, this new elite of tycoons.

So in the aftermath of the property market deflation, what we’ve seen is more of a ‘K-shaped’ development for the Chinese economy: where high-tech sectors are booming, but consumer-based, domestic-serving, and other retail sectors are languishing. Not least because the majority of Chinese household wealth had been tied up in housing, which makes the fall in house prices hit their confidence to spend, too.

So is China any more equal today than it was in the world of Zhu and Xu? The World Inequality Database finds that the distribution of wealth is exactly the same in 2024 was it was in 2015: 30 per cent owned by the top 1 per cent, 6 per cent owned by the bottom 50.

The world of Xu was never going to last, but it’s not clear that the economy Xi has built is much better for the little person. If anything, the buccaneering era of Zhu and Xu at least held more hope.

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What I’ve been reading:

• China poised to lift travel ban on Manus founders – Zijing Wu for the Financial Times. (Gift link). Related to the discussion of a high-tech economy, interesting news from Beijing that executives of the AI company Manus will soon be able to leave China, with their acquisition by Meta set to be unwound.

• China Maps Out Oil and Gas Buildout Through 2030 to Strengthen Energy Security – Luo Guoping for Caixin Global. (Gift link). As the headline says. Interesting for the fact that China has thus-far been coal-heavy, and even with its build-up of renewable energy, Beijing is still seeing domestic oil and gas as a part of the energy mix.

• A World out of Words – Yangyang Cheng for ChinaFile. On the closure and reopening in Washington of a Shanghai-based bookshop. A long read (really) but worth it.

Picture of the week:

, formerly of Beijing to Britain, shared these beautiful, retro photos of Hong Kong by photographer Keith MacGregor.

On this episode we discuss a new trend that Andrew has been following – the rise of C…

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In my column for The Times today, I write on a similar theme of Covid’s impact on mental health and other facets of life – but for British teens. In the UK, there are currently more than a million 16-24 year olds who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs). There’s an image of this generation as being fragile, unprepared for adulthood, and perhaps even lazy. The blame has been variously laid at smartphones, therapy culture, the welfare state.

But I point out that this is also the generation who had at least two years of their adolescence disrupted by Covid. Schools were cancelled and socialisation moved to almost entirely online. The usual ways in which schools in England had prepared its students for the future – in particular the work experience that most schools encouraged in the 90s and 2000s – were cancelled in the height of lockdown. The usual ways in which teens grow up, find themselves and learn how to socialise were also disrupted. Is it any wonder that the kids aren’t quite alright?

Read the column

If you are interested, you can read the column by clicking the button above. But for readers of this Substack, I thought it would be a good chance to compare the life chances and experiences of this same generation in China. Do they fare any better?

First, a reminder of the context. China’s lockdowns were both more severe and less consistent than the UK’s, making it harder to generalise about experiences. In other words, whereas some cities locked down hard and for long periods of time, other cities and towns were generally able to avoid that experience and enjoyed vast lengths of relative freedom. The exception is perhaps 2022, when the Omicron variant really pushed the zero Covid regime to the brink in much of the country. That is the year that most Chinese recollect as being the hardest of the pandemic.

So, no wonder that protests broke out in November 2022 across multiple cities (again something that Ed and I talked about). Notwithstanding the variation in Covid experiences, there was a prevalent narrative among young people: ‘青春才几年，疫情占三年’, or roughly translated ‘youth is short enough as it is, Covid stole three years’. As in the UK and other countries, young people knew that they were making sacrifices to protect other generations. East China Normal University’s Professor Xu Jilin talks more about this discourse in his (Chinese-language) podcast.

And now, the jobs landscape is every bit as harsh as it is in the UK, and probably more so. Youth unemployment in June was 14.9 per cent. It’s a 12 month low, but still three times the overall urban unemployment rate. In the UK, the unemployment rate for the same age group is 16 per cent, but that statistic counts students who are looking for work, which the Chinese measure no longer includes. Meanwhile, the supply of graduates rises year by year. This year, an estimated 12.7 million new graduates enter the job market, two million more than in 2022.

This leads to a familiar set of vocabulary, at its core the twin phenomena of tangping, lying flat, and neijuan, involution. You know all about that already. I guess one difference with the UK here is that I don’t see much involution. As grim as the jobs market is, British kids are simply more likely to doss around (and here is where the welfare state does play a part), whereas Chinese kids, not least egged on by anxious parents from a more cutthroat age, mostly can’t rest.

A 2024 graduate survey from Zhaopin, a Chinese recruitment agency, found that more than three quarters of graduates had done at least one internship; and almost a third had two or more. I haven’t found a source that asks the same question of university-age students in the UK, but for my column I found that the proportion of secondary schools in which a majority of students had done work experience dropped by a third between 2019 and 2021, to only two in five schools systematically encouraging work experience.

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To set themselves apart and delay employment, more and more young Chinese are staying in education. In the decade to 2024, the annual enrolment in postgraduate studies more than doubled from 645,000 to 1.36 million. With five million graduating from an academic bachelor’s degree each year (as opposed to a vocational degree), that’s about one in four academic graduates continuing their university education.

But it could be delaying the inevitable, and increasingly, there’s a sense that reality is not matching the expectations of what education can win you. This gives way to the meme of Kong Yiji, the protagonist of a short story of the same name by Lu Xun. Kong is a traditional Confucian scholar who refuses to adapt to a new, post-Confucian China. His tattered scholar’s robe is a emblem of his over-education and unsuitability for a new era. As I wrote in Foreign Policy previously:

You don’t need a master’s degree to roll tobacco, so when China Tobacco Henan announced that almost a third of its new factory-floor hires had postgraduate degrees, it triggered a national debate in China. Weren’t these highly educated young people wasted on the assembly line? Or did they in fact make the sensible decision, given the job security and competitive pay—roughly 8,300 yuan (around $1,200) a month, compared with a graduate average of 5,800 yuan ($835) a month—at the state-owned tobacco factory?

…

Online, the unemployed compare themselves to Kong Yiji, the eponymous protagonist of a 1919 short story by Lu Xun, China’s most lauded novelist of the last century. In the story, Kong is a relic, and his half-baked classical education (symbolized by his ratty scholar’s gown) hindered rather than helped him adapt to the changing times. He is a laughing stock to the uneducated townspeople and an object of contempt to the well-connected and successful officials from whom he tries to steal books.

A century later, the joke is now on China’s Generation Z, who self-deprecatingly meme themselves as modern-day Kong Yijis, lamenting that their education has hobbled their ability to adapt to a China with fewer prospects. They dub the trend “Kong Yiji literature” and have spun it off into a song and a cartoon strip.

In this uncertain landscape, more and more young people are looking for iron rice bowls: specifically in the civil service. They call it shang’an, 上岸 ‘reaching the shore’, in contrast to the trend in the height of reform and opening of xiahai, 下海 ‘going down to sea’. If xiahai was leaving the warm but rigid embrace of the state sector to make your own way in a booming private sector, the children of those who dived into the sea are now looking for precisely that groundedness on land. To maximise their chances, some graduates do xunkao, 巡考, which is registering for civil service exams in multiple regions to maximise their chances of success.

If all that sounds stressful, then you will not be surprised to see the mental health statistics for this generation. According to the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, almost one in four 18 to 24 year olds are at risk of depression, which is more than double the rate for adults in general.

So the kids, in China, are not alright either, and young adulthood is almost certainly more stressful in China than it is in the UK. The factors go beyond just a few years’ of lockdown: China’s cultural emphasis on education, the intensity of competition, the thin welfare state all contribute to an even harsher landscape for the young.

But there are reasons for hope. Some of this discourse gains salience partly because young people are better at talking about their feelings and setting their boundaries. By sheer measures of harshness, there is no comparison to their parents, who lived through a newly opening economy, or their grandparents who lived through the civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

And yet this generation are unwilling to be the chattel, or workhorses, that their elders were (they literally use the term 牛马, ‘oxes and horses’, to describe how much workers could be exploited). Instead, young Chinese today are said to be ‘fixing the workplace’, ‘00后整顿职场’. When a boss asks for a meeting at 6pm, they might ask if there’s overtime pay, or when HR asks for an emergency contact, they might simply refuse in order to protect their private lives. The sentiment of boundary setting is familiar to us in the West. Older generations can think this is entitlement or laziness, but younger generations simply say: it is their due.

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What I’ve been reading:

1. The following guest post from Zichen Wang’s excellent Substack, Pekingnology, on the state of women’s rights in China today.

Pekingnology

Yao Yang: Hong Wang's groundbreaking achievement and Chinese women's retreating ground

On 23 July 2026, Hong Wang became one of four recipients of the prestigious 2026 Fields Medal, awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40 for outstanding achievement and future promise. Born in Guangxi and educated at Peking University before continuing her studies in France and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the 35-year-old is t…

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3 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Yuxuan JIA and Yixin Guo

2. China’s Elderly Population Tops 323 Million as Aging Pressures Mount – Xu Wen for Caixin. Latest figures show that almost one in four Chinese are now over the age of 60.

3. Expats Flock Back to Hong Kong Seeking Low Taxes, Better Jobs – Denise Wee et al for Bloomberg. Interesting long read on the expats going back to Hong Kong now.

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This week I want to get in a bit deeper on the background of one of these themes: how China is competing on AI when it is American companies that are pushing the frontier. A number of Silicon Valley start-ups and companies in the global south are opting for Chinese AI instead of American. It turns out that there’s more than one way to win the AI arms race.

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You can listen for yourself here, from two hours 20 minutes in.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the BBC struck a wrong or sycophantic tone with its coverage (though I do think the expert they had on to discuss Xi’s speech was perhaps a little too rosy in her assessment of China’s AI landscape). But the juxtaposition between the segments, one after another, struck me as something that you wouldn’t always hear in terms of coverage of China as a country, or the United States as a country, on a weathervane programme for Britain’s mainstream establishment opinion.

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It’s just a small part of what has been quite a good week for China. As Trump continues to, well, be Trump, and the United States sunk further into the Iran quagmire over the last week, Beijing has had one of those times where it looks a bit more like the responsible power for the 21st century.

AI was a big part of that. First there was Xi’s speech, which he gave at the World AI Conference held in Shanghai:

At present, changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world, while a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is making faster breakthroughs. Global innovation in AI technology has entered an unprecedentedly active period. Intelligent technologies featuring ubiquitous connectivity, human-machine collaboration, cross-sector integration, and co-creation and sharing are releasing enormous energy in combination. They contain tremendous opportunities, but they also present governance challenges. Humanity has no choice but to confront the questions of our time directly: when machines begin to think, how should humans coexist with them? When algorithms take part in decision-making, how can security be ensured? When technology challenges ethics, how can governance keep pace? When gaps continue to widen, how can inclusiveness be achieved? These are questions the international community must think deeply about and answer together.

China believes that all countries should uphold a people-centered philosophy and the principle of developing AI for good, so that artificial intelligence can become an important source of momentum for shared prosperity and common security, and work together to build a just and reasonable global AI governance system. In this regard, I would like to offer four proposals.

The four proposals he offers are: openness in developing AI, increased awareness of AI risks, pluralism in global AI development according to ‘the unique cultures of individual countries’, and global cooperation in AI regulation. He then goes on to list China’s record on this, such as its set of AI regulations. On this, Beijing has a lot to say, because it has in fact put in more regulations than other countries, despite the prevailing idea in the West that China is out to push the frontiers of AI in another arms race with the US. The story is more complicated than that (and I highly recommend ’s newsletter to keep abreast of developments).

All of this sounds pretty good to those concerned about AI but realistic that it cannot be put back into the bottle. And that’s what the Today programme was saying too. Of course, as China watchers, we may doubt if Xi really means what he’s saying, knowing that Chinese speeches are almost always saying the right things, but that the reality doesn’t always match up.

But on AI, another part of China’s good week has been the release of Kimi K3 on Thursday. This is the newest large language model from the Beijing-based start-up Moonshot, which claims to approach the capability of American frontier labs like Anthropic. I haven’t tried it much yet but you can for yourself on kimi.com.

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As well as China closing the eight to 12 months gap that many American industry insiders estimate lies between American and Chinese AI, the release of Kimi is also instructive for two other reasons. One, it is a sign, as with DeepSeek’s r2 release last year, of what Chinese labs can do even with American export controls on the most advanced chips. Two, it is yet another open-source, cheaper-to-run and modifiable Chinese model that is competing for market share against the closed-source American rivals. Companies and countries are already turning to Chinese models for cheaper AI infrastructure. These models may not be as cutting edge as Anthropic or OpenAI’s offerings, but for large-scale usage, good enough is good enough.

And then, the final boon for Beijing came with the new survey from the Pew Research Center. It comes at this time of year most years, and the latest shows that, for the first year, international respondents (across 20 countries) view China more favourably than America.

This is mostly a result of a continued worsening of America’s reputation, a trend I wrote about this time last year. Pew’s survey isn’t able to show the cause of why that decline has continued in the last 12 months, though we can take a not-wild guess: Trump’s threats against Greenland, against Canada; his real actions in Venezuela and then in Iran, which has held the entire world economy and fuel supplies as hostage, etc etc. The graph below shows the relative esteem in which people of different countries hold China versus the US.

All countries and leaders have good and bad weeks, and by Trump’s metric, last week probably wasn’t even bad. But in terms of global public opinion, I think it is worth noting how last week neatly juxtaposed China’s improvement in reputation with America’s mess. I don’t say this with glee – the usual caveats about China’s economy, tech development, civil liberties, etc apply – but it is always worth tracking public and establishment opinion.

I think the big question now is how much this American reputation decline is limited to the Trump presidency, and whether a successor (even if they come from the Maga camp) can mend ties with other western nations and developing nations. That is still unanswered as of now.

What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• Commentary: China’s Rocket Recovery May Mark a Space Industry Inflection Point – Yang Qinghong for Caixin. On the issue of a tech arms race, this analysis in Caixin was really interesting on why the return of the Chinese rocket booster is worth noting: not because the development in and of itself is a milestone, but because of what it signifies for the economic viability of the space industry in China.

• Expelled from China – Vivian Wang for the New York Times. Wang writes about being kicked out of China earlier this year after she interviewed Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te. It’s a massive shame as her journalism was often about the human stories that you can only get on the ground, and which humanise China. I have to say, this is a scenario I often think about in my own context – that one day I might not be able to return to China – and Wang’s experience is just another reminder that it is a possibility to come to terms with.

• U.S.-China Relations Are More Volatile Than Ever – Andrew Scobell and for Foreign Policy. A compare-and-contrast of the hollowing out of institutions in their respective countries by Trump and Xi, and what it means for bilateral relations.

Set in the modern day and amply aided by flashbacks, the film traces the origins of these letters. They came from Iap’s husband, who left his wife and three children in 1945 to eke out a living in south-east Asia, for years sending back money and other gifts to sustain the family back home. He never returned home, and in the present day we join Iap’s grandson who goes to Thailand to find his grandfather, in the process unveiling a decades-long secret about what really happened to him.

I won’t give you any spoilers here, because chances are you haven’t seen it. It was always meant to be an indie film – costing only 14 million yuan to make (£1.5 million or $2 million) and with a cast of primarily non-professional actors. But the booming success it has had since premiere is testament to the bittersweet charm of the story, its characters, and the nostalgia of the setting of late 20th century southern China and Bangkok, even if the viewer hasn’t lived through those times.

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So I feel like the Chinese often turn to him as the role model of when dissidence is done right – thoughtful, principled, constructive opposition. Most importantly, he managed his goal – the establishment of a new China after the fall of the Qing.

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In conversation with a Hong Kong exile recently, we lamented the lack of a Sun Yat-sen in today’s overseas dissident movement. Regime change is far from the goal of most realistic dissidents, but even more widely in the movement, there seems to be a paucity of ideas and energy.

I take a look at this phenomenon in my latest column, inspired by last week’s sentencing of Guo Wengui. Guo has been one of America’s most enigmatic figures in the last decade, a Shandong-born billionaire who fled China in 2014 and became a vocal critic of the Party and a darling of Maga. When Steve Bannon was arrested in 2020, he was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht. But his connections go beyond the American right: when he bought his New York penthouse, Guo was aided by a recommendation letter from none other than former British prime minister Tony Blair.

So how did a tycoon like him get sentenced to 30 years by a Manhattan jury? The story itself is well worth your time, with this 2023 long read by particularly fascinating. In short, he turned out numerous anti-CCP ventures, convincing masses of followers that he is their Sun Yat-sen. In reality, he took their money (over a billion dollars) and spent it on yachts, sports cars and a $26 million New Jersey mansion.

Read the column

So Sun he is not, and he well deserves his downfall. But in my column, I write that he is merely the most high profile and salacious of a dissident movement that has, since the age of social media, been too willing to peddle falsities about China in the name of bashing Beijing. I write:

A popular genre for dissident creators on YouTube is baseless and racy gossip about Chinese elite politics, which frequently speculates about Xi Jinping’s downfall.

Trump’s rhetoric bashing “Chy-na” won him many dissident fans, but being hitched to the Maga bandwagon has since led some activists to defend his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and peddle conspiracies about January 6.

Meanwhile, the pandemic gave rise to all sorts of crazy claims, such as the dissident newspaper Epoch Times reporting that 400 million Chinese had died in the pandemic (which would be more than a quarter of the population).

In each case, truth was just an inconvenient afterthought in the quest to bash the CCP. This is the kind of febrile and truth-light environment that Guo Wengui thrived in, the media network he founded with Bannon’s support also promoting QAnon and anti-vax conspiracies. In 2020, Twitter took down his account with half a million followers.

I also consider the size of the challenge today (the CCP is far more powerful than the Qing dynasty in its later years) and why the Tiananmen Square generation were unable to make something more substantive out of their exile and the world’s sympathy. Do give it a read.

Read the column

What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• The Beginning of the End – Ian Buruma for ChinaFile. A 1995 piece that is still fascinating today, all about the personal disputes between the student leaders of Tiananmen Square, who were far from monolithic or united on the how and the what of what they were trying to achieve.

• 中国人的流亡和离散 – 不明白播客. Sorry to recommend a Chinese source but this episode of the Bumingbai Podcast is excellent and very on theme. They discuss what it is like to be a Chinese ‘in exile’, what that does to your identity, and what generations of Chinese exiles can teach each other. A truly thoughtful discussion that is well worth your time if you feel your Mandarin might carry through.

• How a Free Lunch Helps With a Quiet Crisis in Aging Rural China – Zheng Haipeng for Caixin Global. A lovely long read on a free lunch club that has opened up in a Shandong village for over 80s. The initiative tackles the problems of elderly loneliness, malnutrition and the fact that provisions for the young are no longer as needed, in many villages, than provisions for the old.

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And remember, Chinese Whispers is now back as a podcast. I will be releasing at least one new episode each month. For the price of less than a coffee a month ($60 a year), you can listen to the episodes in full by becoming a paid subscriber. I will also release 10 minute previews of each episode so you get a sense of what you’re getting!

The last episode is available for everyone here – it’s all about regional stereotypes that the Chinese have for each other:

Well, I’ve had a year off, but it’s time... So many of you asked me when and if it would ever come back, I figured: why not?

Chinese Whispers is officially back.

I’m going to try to keep to the winning formula of Whispers 1.0, which is (I think) a mix of high and low when it comes to topics, a light but informative tone and, when the occasion calls, bringing my own experience of these issues into the recording (much to the chagrin of my poor mother). But on Substack there has never been an easier way to let me know your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions for future topics, so please do get in touch!

Apart from the music, the main difference is that Whispers 2.0 will now be hosted on Substack as my own creation. I think that means two things. First, without the podcast platform of The Spectator, it might be harder to grow – so please, if you know others who loved the podcast, do tell them about its return.

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The second difference is that the show will no longer be free. Because it takes resources (both time and money) to keep a podcast going on my own steam, full episodes will only be available to paid subscribers of the Chinese Whispers Substack.

The Substack has been free so far, but from now on I will be adding a paid tier which includes weekly posts and at least monthly episodes. Free subscribers will still get fortnightly updates, but I hope you understand and will consider supporting the show!

But to celebrate the reboot and to help you share it widely with other fans, this episode will be free to listen to.

Ep 1. Regional Stereotypes

In a country as big as China, you will not be surprised to hear that the Chinese people hold many assumptions, prejudices and stereotypes about people from other parts of the country, from other socioeconomic or educational backgrounds, about genders and professions. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to cover for a long time, because it is such an authentically Chinese conversation.

So I was delighted when of the Substack covered exactly this earlier this year. Yaling identified six major stereotypes that the Chinese have about each other, from the Beijing Uncle to the Shanghai Socialite or the Shenzhen Drifter.

As ever with these cultural labels, they say so much about China, bringing in so much of its history of economic development, the cultural heritage of various regions, gender relations, etc etc. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Over the last few weeks, videos of a youngish Chongqing man beating his puppy went viral – neighbours had heard the dog screaming and the videos show them confronting him as a limp and bloody puppy hung from his hand. It’s horrible stuff, so click through at your own peril.

It turns out this guy has form – it wasn’t long before it transpired that he was a serial adopter of puppies, under pretence of being an animal lover, only to torture them to death when they get home. One puppy rescued from the corridors outside of his flat was found to have broken bones in multiple places, its tail chopped off and its teeth filed flat.

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These horrific details are why the case has caused widespread contempt and disgust for the man, who is clearly mentally unwell. Because when these videos went viral, social media users quickly identified him as a man who’d previously gained Internet infamy.

A couple of years ago, he was filmed arguing with staff at Sam’s Club, a Walmart subsidiary membership-based shop that has found success in China, because he was eating endless free samples and had even taken a tupperware box to the shop to take the samples home (hence the title of 打包哥, ‘Takeaway Guy’). As I say, he is clearly mentally unwell.

These cases of animal abuse are, sadly, not unusual in China, but perhaps few are as emotive and graphic as this particular case. Whatever the reason, this was the moment that catalysed real public anger. First dozens, then hundreds, of people camped out in his residential compound: animal rights activists, millennial women with their beloved pooches and members of the Chongqing public. They camped out for days, demanding the police arrest him and rescue the puppies still in his flat.

In fact, China is one of the few countries in the world to not have a nationwide, anti-cruelty law. The only thing that comes close is its Wildlife Protection Act, but that only protects wild animals from extinction, not from farming. There are even less protections for domestic or farm animals, which are generally considered property. So technically the Takeaway Guy hasn’t done anything illegal, the police told protestors.

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On Wednesday last week, officers forcibly dispersed the protests, ending in clashes with the crowd where protestors were beaten up and detained. The sit-in had the hallmarks of an organised movement that could quickly become political. Social media has been largely scrubbed clean of the videos but they are still visible on Hong Kong media and on X (thanks to 李老师, Teacher Li).

To appease the protestors, the police also announced that they had detained the Takeaway Guy, though it was unclear on what legal grounds.

All of this feels like a milestone, though my natural pessimism tells me that law change won’t come anytime soon. In my latest column, I reflect on how animal welfare is similar to environmentalism – both causes requiring humanity to understand that it isn’t just humans that matter in this world, that the natural world or the animals around us aren’t just tools and resources. But in order to get to that stage, Chinese people had to get to a higher standard of living, which wasn’t just about survival. In other words, these are luxury causes that people only come to with a bit more breathing space in their material wellbeing – but we seem to be getting there now.

Do give it a read – not least for a darkly funny story about my mum’s childhood dog, who they named American Imperialism (美帝) for his size. Sadly, American Imperialism didn’t meet a happy end…

Read the column

Further reading on the issue of animal welfare:

• China’s pet economy being driven by elderly, singles dreaming of having cats and dogs – He Huifeng for SCMP

• The Animal Protection Index report on China, from World Animal Protection

• 买来的宠物犬为何没活过一周？记者调查“星期宠”售卖乱象 ‘Why did my new puppy die within a week? Inside the murky trade in 'week-long pets' – Report from Chinese outlet Legal Daily on unscrupulous puppy breeding

• 《反虐待动物法》迎关键窗口期！司法部正式启动《2026年度立法项目建议征集》 ‘The Anti-Animal-Cruelty Law approaches a critical window! The Ministry of Justice officially launches its 'Solicitation of Proposals for the 2026 Annual Legislative Plan’

No doubt turning down so much money and gigawatts is a painful decision to make. I am no climate change denier – I know that humanity needs to become more green. Nor do I wring my hands about the success of Chinese renewables – it is a remarkable story, and on a personal level I am even proud of the ingenuity and hard work that my compatriots display. But I believe British national interest is best served by a world in which like-minded middle powers still have some sway.

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Though the British government said little to explain their decision on Ming Yang, with the exception of citing ‘national security’, I thought they had come to the same conclusion. Yet something going through Parliament now has caught my eye, for seeming to be a direct contradiction to the Ming Yang decision.

Last week, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband put forward the government’s proposals to adopt the pathway set out by the Climate Change Committee, an independent public body that advises the government on how to reach their goal of net zero emissions by 2050. The plan, the ‘Seventh Carbon Budget’, requires an 87 per cent drop in carbon emissions on 1990 levels by 2040, which I’ve worked out is around a three quarters reduction from today’s levels. To get there, Britain must increase its offshore wind by six-fold, double its onshore, nearly quadruple its solar power, and increase the share of electric cars and vans on British roads to 75 per cent, among other changes.

To say that this is ambitious is an understatement, not least as political mainstream opinion in the UK is fracturing on net zero, where previously there was consensus. But more importantly, these ambitious goals are only achievable by buying more Chinese.

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This is the topic of my column for the Times this week: just how much more we would be building a dependency on China into our energy infrastructure of the future, if this carbon budget is passed (as it is mooted to do later this month). In a time when it is hard to balance climate concerns with security worries, is setting yourself a legal mandate to rush through decarbonisation really the best way forward? The answer is clear to me, though it doesn’t seem to be clear to the government.

In the column you will also find a bit more of my thinking on where the risks of Chinese renewable tech really comes from: not so much the idea that people in China might be able to switch off millions of BYDs or Chinese-made solar panels; but I think in the weaponisation of supply chains, of a sort we saw with the rare earths play last year. I hope you find it interesting.

Read the column

What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• As China’s economy slows, some young people are snapping up cheap apartments to ‘retire’ early – Albee Zhang in AP. I’m quite late to this article from three months ago, but it is worth catching up with it if you also missed it at the time. The story is as the headline suggests: the upside to the real estate crisis and a wholesome way to lie flat. The lives of these twentysomethings feel like a good premise for an indie film.

• Look Only at the Ugly Sides, and You Won’t See China – Manya Koetse in Eye on Digital China. A brilliant, courageous piece by the Dutch sinologist Manya Koetse in her Substack, who has been accused of being an apologist for China. (You may know her work previously as the ‘What’s On Weibo’ blog).

  Anyone who wants to understand China seriously must be willing to confront reality as it is, not as it best fits an ideological narrative.

  You can acknowledge that Chinese cities have become safer without endorsing censorship. You can appreciate the quality of infrastructure without defending state control. And you can believe that more should be done to improve women’s safety on Dutch public transportation without being dismissed as an admirer of an authoritarian regime.

  I couldn’t agree with it more.

• China Mine Blast Exposes Illegal Labor, Untaxed Coal Trade – Fan Ruohong in Caixin Global. A great investigation by Caixin into the dark world of illegal mining, after the recent mine collapse that killed at least 82 people. The report details the practice of secret production, so that mines can produce above officially compliant output. Mines use unregistered workers, who work without mandatory tracking devices or gas sensors. To evade regulator inspections, the mines in question sometimes ‘seal off illegal sections’. To maximise yield, these operations also leave ‘smaller safety pillars – the columns of coal left in place to support the mine and reduce the risk of collapse’. A terrible practice.

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It was the first conference of this kind, designed to target the ‘next generation’ of thinkers, analysts, advisors, etc etc, who would work in the defence and geopolitical world. The organisers made sure that at least 50 per cent of the attendees were ‘young people’ (I don’t know how they defined the cut-off – and suspect I don’t want to know either). The speakers included the Netherlands’s 39-year-old prime minister, Rob Jetten, who is three months in the job.

With its history of hosting multilateral organisations and contributing to the development of the rules-based-order in the last century, the Hague felt like an incredibly apt location to be reflecting on the potential death of this order in the world today.

The conference was held under Chatham House rules, so I’m unable to share discussions in detail. But it left me with some general reflections and thoughts.

In panel after panel, China was the shadow that loomed, sometimes unnamed (and curiously, there was no China-specific panel). Its growing economic power underpinned the discussions on Europe’s industrial future and on the longevity, or not, of a multilateral order.

But more than China, I was struck by the discussions on America. On the day before I arrived the Dutch government had just decided to block the takeover of a Dutch IT supplier by an American company – Solvinity provides the app by which Dutch citizens verify their identity to access a range of public services. This comes as the EU more broadly is thinking about ‘tech sovereignty’ and promoting European alternatives to American tech companies. Europe is increasingly talking about America like the UK talks about China.

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The Dutch government’s move is popular (indeed one diplomatic grandee I spoke to suggested that its decision was basically forced by a majority of parliamentarians), though it has, of course, met with fury from the United States behind the scenes. The same grandee also told me that the Netherlands would probably not have made this decision if it was not Trump in the White House.

Later, this sentiment was echoed by another retired diplomat (this time American), who suggested that Europe might have allowed the United States to use its air bases to launch attacks on Iran if it had been under a previous presidency.

There was a general sense of disappointment, antagonism, or I might even say anger, at the United States. One Dutch academic questioned why America arm-twisted the Dutch government to block ASML, the Dutch company producing cutting-edge lithographic printers, from exporting its best products to China when the American company Nvidia is able to export far more advanced end-product chips to China.

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Aside from tech, on defence, European speakers spoke about America (and its unreliability/hostility) in terms that I might expect them to speak about China instead.

I’m not sure Americans fully appreciate the extent of the European backlash against Washington. It’s certainly not a feeling that London policymakers seem to hold in the same way, probably due to the very understandable factors of a) Brexit and b) a closer transatlantic cultural/political/military tie (I guess whatever people mean by the ‘special relationship’).

There was a fair amount of reflection inspired by Mark Carney’s words at the World Economic Forum, where he called on middle powers to come together. The prevailing sense seemed to be that Europe cannot – and should not – aim for self-sufficiency in the name of security, but one speaker put it nicely as ‘network sovereignty’. I understood that to mean: whatever collection of countries, companies, researchers, or markets you might use, make sure that that ecosystem is a network in which you have sovereignty. (Though I felt suitably chastened when one speaker from a non-European, non-white background pointed out that Carney’s points were hardly original, that non-western ‘middle powers’ have talked about them for years, and yet it took a Carney at Davos for the West to truly pay attention).

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So there was a lot of smart thinking, a fair amount of realistic thinking, and certainly an undeniable feel of a world irrevocably changed, that the same old ways to do things won’t work anymore. Yet the problem for Europe, as ever, is down to coordination. I heard how, whether it’s on an integrated capital market that would boost European entrepreneurship or the right kind of foreign investment screening to implement, it takes the EU years to come to a conclusion that all its member states are happy with, if that point is even ever reached.

Some attendees were optimistic that, in an emergency, like the eurozone crisis or the pandemic, Europe can and has come together, and this great power rivalry certainly feels urgent. I find myself not altogether reassured. After all, the challenge posed by China (or a changing America) isn’t one brutal catalyst, but a long, sustained change in international power dynamics. That feels to me to require much more consistent and united thinking than the EU has so far been able to muster.

What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• The Middle Power Delusion: Not Choosing Is Not An Option – Michael Beckley in Foreign Affairs. Very relevant to this post, actually, is this thought-provoking retort to the Carney argument, arguing that middle powers have historically survived by bandwagoning with great powers rather than banding against them and staying independent:

  The path forward, then, is not endless coalition shopping to route around Washington and Beijing. It is alignment: choosing the great-power system that offers the best shelter from a country’s gravest threat, building national strength, and using that strength to bargain for influence inside the coalition.

  Middle power coalitions are indeed very in vogue to discuss, but Beckley raises the real considerations and shortfalls of this approach (not least whether it’s really viable), which I find worth considering. He suggests that the United States is the better superpower to bandwagon with. I suspect that a lot of the people I spoke to last week at the Hague would agree, if it weren’t for the Trump administration’s repeated moves to antagonise Europe.

• How the US is Trying to Challenge China’s Critical Mineral Dominance – The China in Africa Podcast. Not the first time I’ve recommended the podcast from . This episode does what it says on the tin, and raises questions about how much you (or specifically the US) can really diversify the critical minerals supply chain.