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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.

The Transcript

With the help of AI, I can now provide full transcripts for episodes going forward. Scroll back up to find a tab that should say ‘Transcript’.

Please bear with any transcription mistakes and typos – the best experience, probably, is still listening to the conversation!

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.

  Thanks for reading Chinese Whispers! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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.

But it was ‘for research’, I told myself; and that was also why I had to binge all 62 episodes of a stupid period plot about a jilted wife who takes revenge on her husband and his new concubine. Because the micro-drama is one of the richest hunting grounds for a Chinese cultural phenomenon that I’ve been fascinated with for years: that of the xiaoxianrou, ‘little fresh meat’ (小鲜肉).

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This is the name that the Chinese give to the pinnacle of male beauty in the eyes of many young (and older) Chinese women today. The clue is in the name: these men are delicate, pale, pretty, their handsomeness a boyish teenage twinkish sort. And yet they have become such popular ideals of masculinity that they dominate the Chinese entertainment output, whether it’s in micro-dramas or longer form TV, film, or music. The photo above is of the 28 year old actor Zhang Linghe, who is the protagonist for this year’s hottest C-drama, Pursuit of Jade (I’m also quite a few episodes into that for, uh, research).

It’s always been curious to me that this is the kind of masculinity that so many women yearn for – not broad, tanned alphas who might protect you, but men who are genteel, soft, ‘girly’. In fact, in Pursuit of Jade and other shows, this allows, or leaves, the female protagonist to take the lead in the pursuit of their romance.

Anyway, the phenomenon is hardly new – any fans of Japanese manga and K-pop will know that this aesthetic has been popular for years. But almost as long-lasting has been the Chinese state’s disapproval of this androgynous type of masculinity. As early as 2018, Xinhua blasted the ‘sissy men’, niangpao 娘炮.

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Since then, every year or so something will happen to confirm the state’s continued disapproval. Lately, it was the People’s Daily that hit out at a fresh-faced young actor in a touristy historical village in Jiangxi province, ‘Little Yellow Fish’ Xiao Huangyu，小黄鱼, who took his fresh meat aesthetics one step further – his gimmick was flirting with tourists, feeding them lollipops with his mouth. ‘Crass’ and ‘lacking in cultural value’, the People’s Daily said.

So this is the central question of my latest Times column: why, despite the state’s anxieties about its young people not sticking to gender norms, are the xiaoxianrou still everywhere to be seen?

Read the column

In the column I explore reasons such as how this softer ideal of masculinity is less threatening to women, especially those who already live in a patriarchal society (as much of East Asia still is). Also grateful to have given Leta Hong Fincher, the authority on Chinese feminism, a call about it all.

I hope you enjoy the piece. I certainly enjoyed the ‘research’.

What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• Will Taiwanese accept Xi Jinping’s version of ‘One China’? Lev Nachman and Wei-Ting Yen for Brookings. Interesting analysis featuring new polling data on Taiwanese public opinion about the 1992 consensus and the idea of Beijing ruling Taiwan via ‘one country, two systems’. Particularly standout to me was that ‘almost half of Taiwanese voters (47%) say they are unclear about the meaning of the 1992 Consensus’.

• 从小粉红到普利策获奖记者，一位美国记者在中国的经历 – 不明白播客. For Mandarin speaking readers, if you haven’t come across Bumingbai Podcast 不明白播客 then you’re missing out. It is the best Mandarin-language political podcast out there, hosted by New York Times’s Li Yuan. On this episode she interviews Associated Press’s Dake Kang, whose team has just won a Pulitzer prize for their reporting on Chinese surveillance.

Picture of the Stack:

I don’t always have good photos to share with you, but this one was a no-brainer. It’s a photo of Jiang Zemin in a sombrero. Enough said. (And if you click through to the X post and follow the quoted tweets, you will see more pictures of Jiang in different hats).

That was Donald Trump’s retort to Fox News’s Bret Baier when Baier asked him whether the US would help defend Taiwan in the event of war. It didn’t sound exactly supportive of Taipei.

The entire interview is worth a watch. This conversation, along with some other remarks made on Air Force One upon leaving China, has led to alarm bells ringing in Washington and Taipei. Has Trump been so charmed by his ‘old friend’, Xi Jinping, that he has imbibed the CCP leader’s worldview when it comes to the status of Taiwan?

I write on this in my latest column:

It would be well within character for him to treat Taiwan as he has Ukraine, where it is Putin the strongman he favours and Zelensky the victim he disdains.

Read the column

I was grateful to speak to the China historian Julian Gewirtz (), who served under the Biden administration, and the insightful Bonnie Glaser, head of the Indo-Pacific Programme at the German Marshall Fund, for the piece. Both were deeply concerned that Trump does not understand the full scale of Taiwan’s importance to American security/power in the region (there are echoes here of Trump’s disregard of Nato).

But I also issue a word of cautious optimism:

We only have a few short post-summit interviews to parse, like reading a precious few tea leaves. Remember too that this is the president who followed his 2017 visit by triggering a trade war with China, even after Xi had cleared the Forbidden Palace for him. It is too soon to know what Trump will do next.

There is also a point here that ‘strategic ambiguity’, the attitude that has informed the US’s Taiwan policy since the 1970s of neither confirming nor denying US support for Taiwan in the event of war, cuts both ways. It is both intended as a warning to Beijing not to risk American retaliation, and as a warning to Taipei to not do anything stupid out of overconfidence that America will definitely be on hand to help (like declaring independence).

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On this issue, President Lai Ching-te has been much more provocative than his predecessors, even the last DPP President Tsai Ing-wen, in his rhetoric. He has referred to China as a ‘hostile foreign force’ 境外敵對勢力 and likes to drop the ‘Republic of China’ from his references to Taiwan. These may seem like obvious and rather anodyne descriptions, but to the hypersensitive ears of Beijing, they are treading dangerously close to declaring Taiwan as independent.

Joe Biden’s repeated confirmations that he would indeed support Taiwan in war, together with Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022, took the strait closer to crisis than at any point in the previous 26 years. So when Trump refuses to answer the question of whether he’d come to Taiwan’s defence, it is worth remembering that he is actually sticking closer to the tried-and-tested policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’. As blundering as Trump can be, on this refusal to answer the question, he is actually sticking to the script:

The real test is not some comments he gives to interviewers, but what he does in real action to support Taiwan. Because if he doesn’t want to go to war on the other side of the world, then deterrence is the best defence. This administration has already signed off on $11 billion worth of arms sales to Taiwan, more than under Biden. There is another $14 billion deal sat on Trump’s desk, which he should now approve.

Read the column

What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• Why China Waits – Amanda Hsiao and Bonnie Glaser in Foreign Affairs. Relevant to this discussion, this is a fascinating long read on Beijing’s latest calculations when it comes to Taiwan, and why it might wait. Much has been made of a supposed 2027 deadline. I was always sceptical of that (and no surprise that US intelligence has now walked it back), because these dynamics against war were always at play. The most remarkable revelation in this article is that support for Taiwanese independence has fallen among young Taiwanese. That overturns a long trend, and puts into perspective what I’ve previously written on pro-China, Gen-Z influencers in Taiwan.

• China’s first use of Blocking Rules against U.S. sanctions on Chinese refineries – Stephenson Harwood. I don’t tend to link to (or read) blogs by law firms, but this analysis was incredibly illuminating on an underreported and relatively technical story of recent weeks. Before the summit, China’s Ministry of Commerce triggered anti-sanctions rules for the first time in reaction to the US sanctioning five Chinese refineries using Iranian oil. The upshot is that this is a pivotal moment in China’s response to being sanctioned. Rather than just taking it, Mofcom’s new rules allow Chinese entities to pursue third party companies (for example, insurers in the UK or banks in Singapore) in Chinese courts for following US sanctions.

• China cover-up after pilot killed 132 by flying plane into mountain – Charles Bremner in The Times. This is a terribly sad story that we now have evidence that the passenger plane which crashed in Guangxi in 2022 was a murder-suicide by the pilot. It is totally predictable that Beijing would cover this up, as they have been repeatedly threatened by the spate of ‘revenge on society’ attacks of recent years. The former CCTV journalist Wang Zhi’an 王志安 did a good explainer on YouTube about this tragedy.

You might also enjoy my recent appearance on Channel 4’s podcast, The Fourcast, discussing the Trump-Xi summit as things were on Thursday last week.

Half a million Chinese students is still a massive number, but this decline had me wondering about the reasons why.

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It’s no accident that 2019 was the high point – the pandemic the next year disrupted university students everywhere, especially those Chinese students enrolled overseas. No doubt the higher inflation in the West and the slower economic growth in China since then has restricted people’s spending habits too, which will include foreign study.

But I think there’s a deeper question here, because once upon a time a British or American education was seen as vital for any middle-class family who could afford it. Whereas now, the conversations I am having with Chinese relatives is about whether a western education is worth it, even when they have the sufficient financial wherewithal.

In my latest Times column I pinpoint the reason as being the decline of the West’s soft power in China:

The China I left in the 2000s put the West on a pedestal. From beauty and architecture to music and food, whatever was western was whatever was popular. Even McDonald’s managed to reinvent itself in China as the place to be for middle-class kids’ birthday parties.

Chinese tour groups became as ubiquitous at European landmarks as gelato stands, while Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, recreated these landmarks in the company’s Disney-esque main campus (truly a mind-boggling place). British exports held outsized sway: Burberry, Harry Potter, Downton Abbey, Teletubbies and, of course, the royal family.

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But that is no longer the case. The rise of guofeng, 国风, which you might roughly translate as ‘Chinese style’, has been happening for a while, from the popularity of hanfu, 汉服, being worn by Gen Z girls on the streets to revived traditional Chinese architecture. In China, domestic brands are no longer seen as lower status than western brands.

Besides, with more exposure to the West, the fantasy has been punctured by the reality of democratic politics and crime levels, just to give two examples.

The scrutiny on Chinese students in the West in recent years has been one of my bugbears, because I’ve always found it a cruel and reductive way to talk about what are essentially teenagers and twentysomethings with their own desires and ambitions. The handful of cases of spying or theft are hardly representative of the millions of Chinese who have studied abroad since 1978 (almost 10 million, according to Caixin). People will believe all sorts of things about how much Beijing can control these students.

But as much as I’ve disagreed with the discourse, I’ve been impressed by the pragmatism and stoicism of the students I’ve talked to – they are largely unfazed by the hawkish discourse, though it might make them seek solidarity within their own community on foreign campuses even more.

And yet the irony in this latest development is that we may very well have reached peak Chinese students in the West. Those who found their presence a source of angst will breathe a sigh of relief. But is it really a good thing to lose soft power? I can’t help but feel Brits too easily take this rare and much-coveted power for granted, just like how (I imagine) a fish doesn’t know it’s in water. This is the kind of invisible influence that governments like China’s work hard and struggle to recreate; and yet, at the heart of the cultural empire, we are blind to its appeal and instead question the motives of those who do come.

In my research for the column I found some other interesting bits and bobs that I couldn’t fit in, so will share with you here:

• Mainland Chinese student numbers in Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong are rising. Hong Kong is now the second most popular destination.

• 87 per cent of those who left for studying since 1978 have returned to China. As you may know, they are dubbed haigui, 海归, ‘overseas returnee’, but which is a play on word of 海龟, ‘sea turtle’.

• Return numbers were up 29 per cent last year compared to 2023.

• But the salary premium they once commanded has collapsed. The average annual salary for a returning graduate fell from 268,200 yuan in 2020 to 204,500 yuan by mid-2023.

• While the average study-abroad budget has hit a 12-year high – 605,000 yuan, over £60,000.

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What I’ve been reading/listening to:

• Why 3 African States Said No to Taiwan – The China in Africa Podcast: I’ve added ‘listening to’ in this section this time, mainly because of this brilliant podcast. The series is fantastic in any case and I highly recommend it to any listener who wants to find out more about, well, China in Africa. But this particular episode was illuminating for its going against the grain of the usual reporting on Lai Ching-te’s botched visit to Eswatini. The received wisdom is that China used economic coercion to force Mauritius, the Seychelles and Madagascar to withdraw approval for Lai’s plane. This episode explains why that is not quite right.

• Academics demand apology for scientist investigated for China ties but never charged – Nature: The harrowing story of Jane Ying Wu, a professor of neuroscience at Illinois’s Northwestern University, who committed suicide after being pursued by the China Initiative. This is the second such case I’ve read about this month, after the death of Michigan’s Danhao Wang, a postdoc researcher, who was also questioned by investigators.

• Computing Shortage Forces Chinese AI Firms to Ration Services – Caixin Global: A very important and interesting, but underreported story in Caixin. The paper reports that ‘A severe shortage of computing power is forcing major Chinese artificial intelligence model developers and cloud service providers to throttle services, ration access and hike prices as demand outstrips chip supply.’ All of this, of course, is right at the crux of the question over the AI race between China and the US right now: does denying China compute, via export bans on semiconductors, help or hinder China? This suggests limiting compute is a worthwhile pursuit. (Incidentally, let me recommend another podcast: Dwarkesh Patel’s April interview with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. There’s a lot of heavy tech chat at the beginning, but the debate over Nvidia’s exports to China is genuinely interesting (and a little uncomfortable to listen to at times!))

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Image of the Stack is this oil painting of Emperor Qianlong by none other than Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian Jesuit missionary of legendary fame in China (and better known there as Lang Shining 郎世宁). I saw this on X.

But what struck me about these conversations was how little people were concerned for the impact of war on their own lives; their interest in it was mainly academic. By comparison, on my western news apps, I could see discussions of jet fuel shortages, petrol price hikes, household heating bills rising in the UK and elsewhere. The war was being discussed as a political issue for the British government itself, at a time when it has already battling for its survival. At one point there was even fear that Iranian missiles might even be able to strike London.

This relative nonchalance jarred with a narrative I was also seeing on X and elsewhere: that the war was ‘all about China’. The theory, and I paraphrase, seemed to go something like this: China buys over 80 per cent of Iran’s oil. By taking out Iran, President Trump’s war is a masterstroke in denying Beijing crucial energy supplies, and especially coming after Venezuela (three quarters of whose oil went to China last year). And in any case, everybody knows that Iran and China are allies, and this war tries to take out a cornerstone of the anti-American ‘axis’ that Beijing is building (also consisting of Russia and North Korea).

This theory is what the kids call ‘cope’ – some desperate grasp at rationalising an obviously undesirable situation. The truth is we now know, from reporting in the New York Times and elsewhere, that China featured little in the pre-war discussions (which were more about Jerusalem than Beijing). And the way the last seven weeks have turned out show that China has been one of the lesser victims of the war.

I take a look at the impact of the war on China in a long read for the latest Sunday Times, and how the Chinese government’s long obsession with energy security has prepared it well for this kind of external shock:

About 85 per cent of the energy consumed in China comes from within its own borders, insulated from external shocks (compared with the UK’s 57 per cent or, say, Japan’s 15 per cent). China has the world’s largest crude stockpile, which could last up to four or five months. Prices at the pump have risen, from about seven yuan per litre (76p) before the war to more than nine yuan per litre now (£1), but household energy largely comes from coal-fired plants and other domestic sources, so bills have not been hit.

…

While Beijing is the main buyer of Iranian oil, of China’s total energy consumed, only 15 per cent comes from overseas, with most of the country’s energy fed by domestically produced fossil fuels (mainly coal), nuclear and renewables — and Iranian oil is a tenth of that 15 per cent. So Iran accounts for less than 2 per cent of China’s total energy consumption. Taking out the regime would have been uncomfortable for China, but hardly existential.

Diversification as a strategy means diversifying the sources of imports, as well as diversifying the sources of energy in general so as to rely less on imports altogether. As I’ve written before, this drive for security is what explains China’s seemingly paradoxical pursuit of renewables while continuing to burn coal, and one of the reasons Beijing keeps Moscow sweet even as that friendship drives a wedge in its relationship with Europe.

I also spoke to Professor Jonathan Fulton, a China-Middle East expert affiliated with the Atlantic Council and based in Abu Dhabi. He is the author of , which has been following events closely. One massive problem with the axis narrative is that Beijing’s economic interests in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are actually ‘on a much broader scale than anything that China does with Iran’, he tells me.

More on all of this in the essay, including the depletion of America’s arms stockpiles (over 850 Tomahawk missiles used on Iran already) and what that means for Taiwan. I hope you have a chance to read it.

Read the essay here

Or if audio is more your thing (true Chinese Whispers fans!) I also joined the Times’s The Story podcast on precisely this topic too, where I also mythbust the famous Zhou Enlai quote about the French Revolution…

Listen to The Story

Read the column

But seeing as this is a Chinese-focused Substack, I’ll use today as a chance to share some nice photos and reflections from my latest China trip.

I spent most of March there. This time I took myself off the typical Tier-1 city route and lived in a village in Anhui. Over the course of the week, I met local retirees, business owners, and historians – a remarkable handful of people deeply fascinated by their own past. I got a sense of what successful rural revitalisation, something Xi Jinping has been talking about since 2017, could actually look like in practice.

Bishan (碧山) sits in Yixian county in Anhui province, in the foothills of the Yellow Mountain. It’s a village of around 3,000 people, transformed from the early 2000s, when – like so many other Chinese villages – it was home almost exclusively to the very old and the very young, the working-age population long since gone to the cities.

Its revitalisation began in 2014, with the opening of the Bishan Book Bureau (碧山书局), the first rural outpost of the Nanjing-based bookshop chain Librairie Avant-Garde (先锋书局). Its owner, Qian Xiaohua, is a true believer in bringing life back to the countryside. ‘Some people said I was an idealistic madman,’ he said.

Today, Bishan is home to dozens of artisan shops, cafes, and guest lodges. On weekends, it fills with well-heeled visitors from nearby cities, arriving in shiny SUVs.

But revitalisation has its limits. The Chinese urban-rural divide – where average urban incomes remain more than double those in the countryside – is still very real, even here. I couldn’t understand much of what one friendly octogenarian said to me; standardised Mandarin, the version of spoken Chinese rolled out under later Communist-era education, and he could only speak the local dialect. But his dress and his home were like relics from a previous era.

Elsewhere, more reminders of the twentieth century. On one doorway, the slogan ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ was still just visible beneath the Chinese New Year decorations.

I have a piece for The Times that I hope will come out soon, more about Bishan and the project of rural revitalisation in general.

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I ended the trip in Shenzhen – very much a culture clash. But then again, a clash that hundreds of millions of Chinese villagers who left home to become urban workers have felt for decades. Many of their ‘villages in the city’ (城中村), or what we might call urban slums, have been tidied up now, but there are still neighbourhoods that carry the memory of an older factory era.

For a couple of days, I volunteered at a feminist migrant NGO, helping make tote bags out of waste denim donated by local factories. I’m not entirely sure the women I worked with knew quite how radical the message on those bags was.

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I also visited a mosque. It was quiet the day after Eid, and I found some of the kitchen staff resting after a busy month of serving the community. One of them had only been in Shenzhen a few months but was already plotting his return home. The congregation, from what I could gather, is largely made up of Hui Muslims and foreign visitors – traders from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia among them. One local Muslim mentioned that the dome had been covered up last year. You can just about make it out behind the barrier on the roof.

To round off the trip: a visit to Shenzhen’s Reform and Opening Exhibition, first opened in 2018 to mark forty years of reform in the city where it all began. The early rooms were essentially a shrine to Deng Xiaoping and Xi Zhongxun, who served as provincial party secretary at the time. Later rooms were dedicated to his son, Xi Jinping, with the emphasis shifting from free markets to China’s technological prowess.

And among the photographs on display: a young Xi, shadowing his father at work.

This issue will be about the tricky issue of Ming Yang, 明阳智能, the Guangdong-based company that is China’s largest private turbine manufacturer and the world’s third biggest. Since 2022, the Scottish government has been in conversations with Ming Yang about investing in offshore, helping Scotland achieve its target of 40GW offshore wind by 2040, not least by rolling out a new type of deep-sea turbine – floating rather than fixed-bottom, opening up much more maritime terrain for future wind farms.

The deal, which has been waiting for approval with the UK government in London for over a year, is for a £1.5 billion investment to revitalise an old oil and gas port in the Highlands into a Ming Yang factory. Ming Yang says that 1,500 jobs will be created. Developers at Green Volt, an offshore wind farm off of Peterhead in Scotland, would like to use Ming Yang’s turbines, which are a third cheaper than European rivals and can scale up in a way that they cannot right now.

Tick tick tick tick. On the face of it there seems little wrong with the deal. But the government in London, last week, said that they couldn’t support it going ahead, citing ‘national security’. They’ve explained little about what exactly the problem could be. Over the last week I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. Ultimately, I think I agree with the decision to block, as I’ve written in my latest column.

Read the column

I’m less concerned by the classic cybersecurity arguments against Chinese connected technology: the idea that software could be taken advantage of, giving Beijing a way to remotely control the tech, whether it’s electric cars or turbines. Technical experts disagree about how much of this is an issue, and how much these vulnerabilities couldn’t be mitigated. I don’t know so much about that, but what I do know is that for Beijing to be taking such an action, which would require it to basically instruct a private company to disrupt its clients and destroy its reputation (essentially corporate suicide), is highly unlikely. We’d probably be in a war situation already. Still, I’m sympathetic to the argument that, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t want this option even to be in Beijing’s toolkit.

I’m more persuaded by the economic argument. It’s easy to forget that Europe once had a solar industry. When Chinese rivals came in the 2010s, it didn’t take long for these companies to outcompete European manufacturers and drive the continent’s suppliers to extinction. No hard feelings there – Chinese competitiveness speaks for itself (and I even think subsidies is fair game – why not?). But fair or not, we know now that manufacturing power is an essential part of hard power. Not only because supply chains of other countries come to be reliant on it, but also because it can pivot towards a war footing if, God forbid, we do get there. China gets that better than anyone.

In the wind industry a very similar story is unfolding right now, with Chinese manufacturers accounting for eight of the world’s top ten turbine companies. Denmark’s Vestas and Germany’s Siemens Gamesa are hanging on by a thread. Should the Ming Yang factory have gone ahead, the UK would have become the company’s first overseas factory, a key node in its expansion of its supply chain globally. British wind farms would have been among Ming Yang’s first customers, with Europe possibly to follow. That would have embedded China into British wind energy, and helped the downward slide of Europe’s still fighting wind champions.

I don’t think London should be in the business of doing that.

And on a literal level, the EU is currently drafting new legislation to protect its indigenous producers, including on wind. The new regime will come with subsidies and local content regulations. If post-Brexit UK can still be considered a ‘trusted partner’ of the scheme, then British firms won’t be penalised in the EU’s local content regulations and may well be eligible for these subsidies. In blocking Ming Yang, London is choosing Europe over China, in a middle powers huddle that Mark Carney might be proud of.

I don’t know if this is the reason behind the government’s decision – they’ve stayed remarkably shtum about their thinking, presumably unwilling to court media attention or Chinese backlash (the SNP, though, haven’t stayed quiet). But it’s certainly the argument that I find most persuasive, and just about tips the balance for me to say, let’s choose Vestas over Ming Yang, for now.

In my column I focus more on what this episode has revealed about the UK’s approach to China – still a muddle, with a decision like this taking over a year, and with its blocking coming four years after the SNP first began conversations. It’s a monumental waste of time, and another argument for a clear set of rules of engagement, communicated not just within Whitehall but across civil society (universities, businesses) and devolved governments. It might save us all a lot of time, and help us think more strategically about China.

What do you think?

Read more here

I’ll leave you with a sneak peek of the China trip round-up I will do soon. I took this photo (sorry, wonky) at Shenzhen’s 40 Years of Reform and Opening exhibition, which first opened in 2018. Pictured is a BYD bus, the K8, on the streets of London. The exhibition had gone from a celebration of Deng and Xi Zhongxun to highlight the high-tech, globalised China under Xi Jinping.

For my latest column I focus on the Chinese side of this question, that side being what I know better. After this latest Spring Festival Gala from CCTV where Unitree robots performed incredibly impressive kung fu, and seeing the creations made by SeeDance 2.0, ByteDance’s newly released AI video generator, I’ve realised that this conundrum will come very quickly indeed – and perhaps quicker than any of us can really imagine.

Read the column

I spoke to , a friend, tech analyst and author of the brilliant Substack :

“China is still in a phase of innocence on technology,” says Afra Wang, a tech analyst and writer of Concurrent, a Substack on AI and China. The country’s rapid economic rise has meant almost everyone is a winner compared with where they were 40 years ago. AI could be the first “divergent moment” where the losers are shaken loose from the winners.

The groups most at risk are the young and the poor. Youth unemployment is already up to one in five, with 12 million graduates joining the jobs market each year (and rising), while China’s hundreds of millions of migrant workers will be exposed to even more automation on factory lines or even in the gig economy (which has served as such a shock absorber in the recent years’ of economic downturn), given the advances in embodied AI in China.

In my column I lay out the options for Beijing: slow down AI progress, roll out much more welfare (something like a universal basic income), or continue to censor and suppress. Or all of the above.

Ultimately, though, as I can’t stress enough: this will be a problem facing all countries, and especially the U.S. which also wants AI supremacy. It’s not clear that anyone else has the answers either.

Read the column

What I’ve been reading:

• Beijing’s Growth Model Is Still Broken – Dinny McMahon (Foreign Affairs) This is a great piece concisely setting out China’s economic conundrum: with the real estate industry’s slowdown, alternative growth should really come from consumption. But boosting consumption requires borrowing to fund a far more generous social welfare and a reform of the hukou system, and Beijing is allergic to that:

  Beijing is not afraid to borrow; after all, it allowed local government to rack up huge debts to fund infrastructure. The difference is that it sees infrastructure as an investment. Even if infrastructure doesn’t pay for itself, it can nonetheless create new wealth and value. By contrast, Beijing sees social spending as a recurring expense and an endless burden.

  (This is of course a relevant dynamic in any discussion of the AI future too: would Beijing really ever go for something like universal basic income?) So instead, it’s export, export, export.

• We had sex in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands – Wanqing Zhang (BBC) An incredible story and a cautionary tale for anyone who travels in China: a man finding that his intimate moments with a partner had been filmed by a secret camera. The BBC finds a labyrinthine system involving disappearing Telegram groups, cameras not picked up by retail camera-detectors, and, presumably, massive profits for the criminals behind them. Really puts into context the advice reportedly given to former prime minister Theresa May to change under her covers when visiting Beijing…!

• The depravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s reading list – Lily Isaacs (New Statesman) Sorry, don’t mean to overload with sex, and not a China piece either, but I defy anyone to not be fascinated/horrified/engrossed by the Epstein scandal, not least as it has brought down a prince and an ambassador in the UK. This is a thoughtful piece on Epstein hiding his depravities in plain sight: lauding the Vladimir Nabokov’s magnum opus, Lolita. Where does literary criticism end and evil begin?

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And finally…

I leave you with not a photo this time, but a video. A documentary, more precisely: the journalist Clive James’s Postcard from Shanghai, filmed in the late 1980s and first aired on the BBC in 1990. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet but a four-minute clip came up on X (there can be joy on that platform!). It was nostalgic, mind-boggling (just think that this was only three decades ago), and CJ’s hilarious commentary alone is worth listening to.

I’ve bookmarked the full version for later watching…

A lot of criticism today that Keir Starmer hasn't secured 'much' for his trip to China.

I see it differently. Imagine if Starmer had come back with a blockbuster, all-singing all-dancing deal, worth billions, vastly important to the UK economy, etc etc...

...would that not leave the UK heralding the beginning of another golden era, mistakenly creating vast new reliances on China? Would critics not then be criticising him for having linked the economies too much?

...and how would Trump feel then? If Starmer came out as if Xi's best friend or the UK was perceived to totally pivot to China? I imagine he'd put the UK on the naughty step, next to Canada.

IMO the goal of this trip wasn't any quick cash or gifts, but to return to the normal pace of diplomacy where leaders of countries meet each other, visit each other.

Dialogue with China is not the be-all and end-all of a new British foreign policy. London needs to work more at building relationships and supply chains with other likeminded middle powers. But that's a medium term thing. In the short term, it's about keeping relations with the superpowers warm - that means China and, of course, the US.

Remarkably, none of the three pieces I wrote for The Times in the last fortnight have been about the visit, thanks to commissions by editors. But if you want to hear more about what I think on the issue, I was back on The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast on Saturday, joined by the excellent (check out his Substack: ):

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My column today was a gear shift: taking a look at the relentless politicking that has dominated Taiwanese politics in the last two years, since the election of President William Lai returned a legislature controlled by the KMT and TPP.

The KMT has a new chairwoman, who seems dangerously optimistic in her analysis of cross-Strait relations. She is against Lai’s pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent by this year and 5 per cent by 2030, arguing that there would be peace across the Strait if only Taiwan’s government recognised the 1992 Consensus once more (that both sides of the Strait recognise there is only one China).

But it seems to me that Xi has proven his ambition and ruthlessness (not least with the latest round of military purges). Should the PLA, one day, gain undeniable military superiority over the military forces Taiwan can muster (and bear in mind today’s ambivalent America), Xi would certainly strike. So slowing the military build-up is a risky gamble to take on Taiwan’s future.

Taiwan’s political parties are in no mood to work constructively together. The last two years have been marked by unproductive parliamentary tussling, back and forth wrangling using legislative tools that remind me of the Brexit forever wars in the UK under Theresa May. I look at this in the column, and end on the story behind the Chinese saying: 鹬蚌相争，渔翁得利, ‘when the clam and the snipe fight, the fisherman wins out’.

As the bird tries to eat the clam, the clam shuts its shell and traps the snipe’s beak. While the two are immobile, stuck in their existential struggle, a fisherman comes by and captures both. If Taiwan’s political parties don’t snap out of it, it will be China that reaps the rewards.

Read the column

And less seriously I’ve written about the extraordinary, bonkers and funny trend of ‘Chinamaxxing’, the latest and hottest Gen-Z trend on TikTok:

Videos of white boys partying in China with the caption “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life”. The 1980s Mandarin love song Yi Jian Mei (One Trim of Blossom) going viral (including an absurd clip of Trump and Biden singing it as a duet, presumably made by AI).

The latest phase of “Chinamaxxing” encourages you to get involved: “becoming Chinese” videos show Americans emulating Chinese life habits, from drinking hot water instead of cold to swapping your shoes for slippers when inside the house. “I don’t even call it Chinatown any more, I just call it ‘town’. That’s how Chinese my mind has become,” one meme says.

It’s the latest sign of a global generational divide on views of China – international polls and those in the UK and US have found that under-30s tend to have more favourable views of China. It’s probably a mix of reasons why: that the China they’ve grown up with has been wealthy and rising; that any country with enough hard power will eventually have soft power too (see Japan, and arguably Chinese soft power’s popularity has been delayed by its politics); that China seems a good mirror to hold up against what these youngsters perceive as dysfunction in western society at the moment.

I personally don’t put much stock in the argument that TikTok’s algorithm is pro-CCP – there has never been hard evidence that the Chinese government has tampered with the algorithm fed to international users via ByteDance. But I do warn about the potential whitewashing of the Chinese government. People like the influencer Hasan Piker (known to his 4.5 million followers on Twitch and YouTube as ‘Hasanabi’) promote only a simplistic, tourist’s view of the country. There’s sometimes only a fine line between love for the culture and apologism for the politics.

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Things I’ve been reading:

• A Slow but Steady Acceleration (The Wire China) – excellent piece about the rollout of robotaxis in China, including details on how local Chinese authorities have dealt with companies whose cars have hit pedestrians. This area will be one to watch for the next Chinese tech success stories – but also the next case study for the dynamic between the citizen, the company and the government in China.

• In Depth: High Blood Pressure Is on the Rise in China’s Grade Schoolers (Caixin Global) – an underrated outcome of tiger parenting and China’s new wealth: record numbers of young children with high blood pressure, largely from obesity.

• The Gaslighting of Parasite (Marginal Revolution) – not a new piece and not an article on China either, but I included this review of Boon Jong-ho’s film Parasite from 2020 because I recently came across it and it very much resonated with me. The reviewer understands Parasite not as a film criticising the wealthy, as is the usual western/Hollywood interpretation, but actually as one criticising the poor. I can believe that such a view exists in South Korea – it certainly does in China, which can often be so socially Darwinian. There’s the phrase: 可怜之人必有可恨之处, or roughly translated: ‘those who seem pitiful have usually done something to deserve it’. In other words, the poor deserve it.

The question has triggered days of debate in China because it’s the name of the year’s hottest app so far – 死了么 (Si Le Me). The app is incredibly simple: every day, you check in with the homepage’s big green button. Fail to check in for 48 hours and it will email an emergency contact that you’d shared at set up. The target audience are young people who live alone, of which there are tens of millions in China. The founders got the idea from online forums in which young urbanites would share their deep fears of dying alone – and undiscovered.

I write about the phenomenon in my latest column, arguing that beyond the practical but bleak service that the app offers, its success also comes down to the sheer genius of its name. It starts conversations, doesn’t it? And especially in a country like China, where it is still incredibly taboo to talk about death (such that the number ‘4’, si, is still often missing from hotel numbers because it sounds similar to the word for death).

But the precise appeal of the app to young people is its subversiveness. I argue that this is just the latest example of the nihilistic sense of humour that characterise Chinese millennials and Gen Zs, where they can but face the pressures of life with a smile:

From an upbringing as only children, the sole vessels of their parents’ misplaced hopes and failed dreams, to a school system that at times resembles battery farming more than preparation for life, to finding that jobs aren’t easy to get or hold on to as they graduate into record high unemployment, it seems to this generation that endless competition is the only way to survive.

…

Humour is one way to highlight these pressures and to help endure them. So when a toy manufacturer, producing horse plushies for the upcoming Year of the Horse, accidentally sewed its smiling mouth upside down, the resulting sad horse went viral for its adorable tragedy. “Cry Cry Horse” was “just like the way I feel at work”, one buyer said.

A few years ago, alternative graduation photos were all the rage, where new grads staged pictures of themselves in gowns and mortarboards face-planted on the steps outside the lecture hall, or chucking their thesis in the recycling. In some ways, this nihilism explains also the popularity of Labubu, the toothy monster toys that took the world by storm last year. Its original appeal lay in its subversive ugliness.

Read on to find out more about the app, its founders and why (I think) it mysteriously disappeared from app stores last week.

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London’s Chinese embassy row

The other thing that’s been on my mind is the continuing row over the new site of the Chinese embassy in London, which has renewed as we get closer to the January 20th deadline that the government had set for making a decision on its approval.

Keen readers will know that I believe, with the security services’ approval as of last year, the embassy should be approved. That’s been a, hmm, controversial take, let’s say. But in the last week two more voices have come out to make the rare argument in support of the embassy: Charles Parton, a former diplomat and security-minded think tanker in London, who you will have heard on episodes of Chinese Whispers before, and Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, a unit of GCHQ.

Charlie speaks to TalkTV below, and has, earlier today, expounded his view in a Substack:

And you can read Ciaran Martin’s assessment in The Times here:

Finally there is concern over communications cables running close to the proposed site. Two points are relevant here. First, the security services (in this case MI5 and GCHQ) will have been asked to make a highly classified assessment of the operational risks and benefits of this particular proposal. It’s now more than five years since I stepped down as the head of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, so I have not seen that assessment. But I can say with confidence that no government would override their advice were they to say the risks were too great. In October, Sir Ken McCallum, MI5’s boss, referred to his agency’s century of experience of and deep expertise in dealing with the national security risks from the presence of foreign embassies on British soil.

Second, the characterisation of this one area of cables as uniquely sensitive and vulnerable is simplistic. There is a huge amount of sensitive infrastructure all over London. Defending the capital’s cables and other infrastructure from multiple threats is very complex, often highly classified work across many parts of the city. Physical access is only one part of the challenge. If anyone thinks that rejecting this proposal and moving the embassy to, say, Belgravia is the key to making London’s cable infrastructure safe, I have a London bridge to sell them.

This is very similar to my argument, which you can read here if you missed previously. I also appeared on The Times’s The Story podcast to discuss at length.

Ultimately, the site will not be without risk. But the question is whether the risk is enough to justify reneging on a sale that went through six years ago that will undoubtedly anger Beijing. And given recent developments stateside, I think it’s more important than ever that Britain is nimble, pragmatic and strategic in our dealings with China – and indeed, the US. That means not burning any bridges unnecessarily as we navigate this new, uncertain world.

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Photo of the week has to be this from Carl Zha – a retro home snap of Xi Jinping with his wife Peng Liyuan, and Xi’s parents. The public images of Chinese leaders are so carefully manicured and protected (and especially the case for Xi) that this is a rare insight into Xi as a son and husband.

He is also the spitting image of his mother!

The world feels like a more dangerous place after that day. Not because the international rules-based order (a phrase I’ve never liked) has ended. That order likely never truly existed.

No, the world is more dangerous today because everybody now knows that the nice warmth of rules and laws is a mirage. If it ever existed, it was like the fairies of Neverland, whose existence depended on enough people believing in it. America – or at least Donald Trump – has now shed the pretence.

So I pivoted my column, looking instead at the Chinese reaction. I summarise them into three emotions: shock, admiration, and vindication.

Read the column

Publicly, the reaction has been as you would expect: shock and condemnation. A Chinese delegation was among the last people to see Maduro as a free man, their meeting full of smiling faces just hours before Delta Force swept in.

Across the government’s official statements, the media reporting and social media discussion, there is ample criticism of American imperialism, 美帝国主义.

But you can bet that behind the scenes, analysts are already poring over how exactly America pulled off the feat. As I write in the column:

For all of China’s military funding and modernisation of recent decades, Donald Trump was not boasting when he said that “no nation in the world could achieve what America has achieved”. More than 150 aircraft took off from 20 locations on sea and land, operating on CIA intelligence of Maduro’s day-to-day movements, secretly gathered since August. Venezuelan airspace defences were disabled electronically and kinetically, as were, apparently, lights in the city.

Beijing will want to answer two questions. First, how well could it counter any similar subversion from the US? And second, how might it be able to exercise a similar level of military and intelligence prowess one day?

In fact, admiration for the display of hard power (and the understanding that China could learn from it) is also apparent on social media. A titbit I didn’t have space to include in the column: people using the emojis for cow (niu) and then beer (pi) as a way to praise the heist as ‘kick-ass’, niubi, 牛逼.

But above all, Trump’s flagrant disregard for international law will vindicate China:

Of course, expect China to emphasise America’s loss of moral authority, to drum up support for itself in the rest of the world. But at the end of the day, Xi Jinping knows as well as Trump that might makes right in international relations.

That’s why, long after the shock has worn off, the enduring lesson for China will be a sense of vindication. Operation Absolute Resolve is a confirmation of what the CCP has always believed — that there is no such thing as a rules-based international order; that it’s a jungle out there.

In my column I also correct the two types of hot takes on Taiwan that have emerged in the last few days: one, that loss of Venezuelan oil will prevent a Taiwan invasion, and two, that Trump’s action gives permission for China to also disregard international law and encourages a Taiwan invasion. I think both takes are wrong.

Instead, after the investments are stabilised and the oil routes renewed (Trump has signalled that he would be willing to sell to China), the enduring lesson for Beijing from this episode – or rather, reminder – is to keep investing in hard power: technology, the military, trade, espionage. That is the only currency that matters.

Welcome to the new world order.

Buy a ticket for a tourist site? Register via WeChat please. Order a coffee at Luckin’ or Starbucks? Scan the QR code please. Going to see a stand-up comedy show? Sign up via Meituan please.

All of these are real examples from my most recent trip to China, last month. For those plugged into and literate on the Chinese digital ecosystem, this makes life incredibly convenient (I was annoyed at myself for only belatedly realising that Alipay had a travel QR code that adapted to each city you were in, so that you could take public transport everywhere relatively seamlessly).

But since the pandemic, it seems to me that these digital transactions aren’t just supplementing everyday processes – but replacing them. Instead of speaking to a barista about my coffee order, she directs me back to my phone where I can order via a code and, five minutes later, a coffee appears on the counter. I can see her behind the counter, but she is not there for me to interact with.

Great, I get my coffee quickly and she can continue to work efficiently, but what about that human interaction? With digitisation spurred by the pandemic, you could probably go quite a long time in a Chinese city these days without actually speaking to a stranger. That is not only exclusionary to those who are not literate in this digital world, but also takes away the everyday, human interactions that are, I think, crucially important for our sense of self, of the collective, and of groundedness.

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This aspect of China’s digitisation has been on my mind recently because I’ve been writing a column on the disconnectedness of millennials and Gen-Z in the West. I write:

We don’t, generally, go to church. Our jobs take us across the country or even the world, living in busy urban centres where we become anonymous, transient renters. We are more connected than ever by technology and yet technology has also made us into hermits, afraid of face-to-face conversations. Our horizons may be bigger than those of previous generations but our connections — to the community and to each other — are probably much shallower.

I was inspired (or, ahem, triggered) to write this piece after an absolutely atrocious carol service I went to in northeast London recently. It was guitar riffs and confetti, but no actual feeling of coming together with a congregation. It got me thinking about how little opportunity people like me and my friends – city-dwelling professionals in our 20s and 30s – have for connection with the local community. It’s not really a piece about China, but I hope you find it interesting nevertheless.

Read the column

Of course, in China, there is a different set of dynamics to the UK: young people, on the whole, are likely to feel a part of a collective much more than the average British young person. Family connections are generally stronger, especially with extended family and certainly with grandparents, if they are still alive. National identity is also stronger, with many feeling pride in being Chinese in a way that many young Brits don’t really feel anything about being British.

But there are similarities in how digitisation has removed each level of face-to-face contact. Ever smarter apps offer more and more convenience to the user, removing that unpredictable layer of human contact. In the West, that has made young people into digital recluses – I have friends who are afraid to pick up phone calls, or would rather Google directions for ages than ask a stranger for directions. I don’t know to what extent that happens in China – I’ve been out of the country for too long – but I can see that the apps are even more advanced, and daily life can be even more cloistered.

So the column is really just a reminder that convenience afforded by tech may be good and irresistibly pleasant, but let’s not lose sight of the human interactions that we all need to feel grounded to our locale, our neighbourhood. That, I think, is a lesson that applies to the UK and to China.

As I write in my column’s conclusion:

So, scary as it is, I’m resolving to try harder next year. It’d be nice to learn the postman’s name, to befriend shopkeepers and baristas, maybe join a local gardening club. Though I won’t be putting my hopes in that particular carol service ever again.

I’m hoping that’s a relatively optimistic note to end the year on. Wishing you all a happy Christmas!