China

Think of the Maldives and you’re likely to conjure up images of expensive honeymoons and golden beaches, but the archipelago is also the focus of an extraordinary spat with India. The Maldives’ high commissioner was summoned by the Indian government last week after three Maldivian deputy ministers published derogatory posts on X/ Twitter, labelling Indian prime minister Narendra Modi a ‘terrorist’, ‘clown’ and ‘puppet of Israel’. One message even compared India to cow dung. The fallout from this imbroglio has been swift. The trio were suspended and the posts have now been deleted. But India is furious: the hashtags #BoycottMaldives and #ExploreIndianIslands have been trending and there have been reports

Taiwan’s voters have defied Beijing’s threats and intimidation and elected as president the most independence-minded of the candidates for the job. After a typically boisterous election, Lai Ching-te of the China-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) declared victory Saturday evening, having received just over 40 per cent of the vote in Taiwan’s first-past-the-post system. ‘We’ve written a new page for Taiwan’s history of democracy,’ he told reporters, after winning by a bigger margin than expected. Hou Yu-ih from the more China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) came second with 33.4 per cent, while Ko Wen-je of the populist Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) received 26.4 per cent. There was no immediate reaction on Saturday from Beijing, which had denounced Lai, 64, as a dangerous separatist and ‘a troublemaker through and through’. The Chinese Communist party

Since the Umbrella Movement democracy protests in 2014, China’s president Xi Jinping has been dismantling Hong Kong’s freedoms – and its very democratic essence – in plain sight. The culmination of the city-state’s metamorphosis from open society to authoritarianism is marked by the trial of Hong Kong entrepreneur, media mogul and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, which began a week before Christmas and resumed on 2 January. Initially the erosion of Hong Kong’s way of life was gradual. But over the past four years, since the imposition of a draconian national security law in June 2020, the destruction has been rapid, far-reaching and comprehensive. Freedoms of expression, assembly, association and of

Why should we care that Beijing has suspended tariff relief for 12 Taiwanese petrochemical products? The move certainly lacks the fear factor which Chinese military manoeuvres around Taiwan generate – exercises which have become more routine and grander in scale during 2023. Yet China’s economic warfare against Taiwan is just as pernicious. It is also premeditated, with moves on this front aligning with key moments in Taiwan’s political calendar and developments in the country’s relationship with the United States. By targeting specific products with restrictions and sanctions, Beijing seeks to punish both the Taiwanese people and their government. What’s more, while it seems unlikely to win the hearts of the former, these punitive

There is something shameful about the government’s reluctance to publicly call for the release of Jimmy Lai, a British citizen and democracy campaigner, held in solitary confinement in Hong Kong. Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, and one of the most prominent critics of China’s Communist Party, has languished in prison for more than 1,100 days. His trial, on national security charges, finally got underway today. Yet it is only now that a British minister has summoned up the courage to properly condemn Lai’s prosecution for the politically motivated sham it undoubtedly is. Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, said he was ‘gravely concerned’ about the trial, and joined the  United

So Yang Guang and Tian Tian are on their way back to China. Rather like a pair of high-profile celebrities, the giant pandas travelled in convoy to Edinburgh airport this morning, with every detail of their last days in the UK scrutinised in dewy-eyed detail. They’re not travelling business class, not quite, but they do have specially constructed metal crates apparently complete with sliding padlock doors, bespoke pee trays and removable screens so the keepers accompanying them can check on them during the flight. ‘I think they’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll have a safe journey,’ said Rab Clark, the zoo’s blacksmith, who built the crates. Arguably the giant panda,

When Rishi Sunak announced that the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars would be delayed by five years, he framed it as a common-sense move. What he didn’t say is that he had been advised that, had the original deadline stuck, Britain’s electric vehicle (EV) market would have been handed over to China. Going green, Sunak was told, would mean going Chinese. At the COP climate summit in Dubai starting this weekend, other leaders will have reached the same conclusion. They’re all a bit late. With little fanfare and a lot of state help, Chinese companies are now world leaders in wind, solar, hydro, lithium batteries and electric cars

Political deaths in China always carry the risk of social unrest. It was premier Zhou Enlai’s death that triggered the ‘democracy wall’ movement of the late 1970s, a student protest that was the precursor for the Tiananmen Square protest ten years later. In turn, the latter protest was triggered by former Chinese Communist party (CCP) leader Hu Yaobang’s death. Last night, the former premier Li Keqiang passed away of a sudden heart attack at the age of 68, so reports Chinese state media Xinhua. A few things will happen now. It’s true that Li was not as well loved by the Chinese people as Zhou, nor was he explicitly associated

Taipei I arrive here shortly after Taiwan National Day, which is 10 October. The day might seem strangely chosen, because the date commemorates the Wuhan Uprising in 1911, the spark for the revolution which overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty and created the Republic of China. At that time, the island of Taiwan did not benefit. It had been ruled since 1895 by Japan and continued thus until Japan’s surrender in 1945. The reason 10 October is the National Day is because the ‘nation’ referred to is the whole of China, not Taiwan. When Chiang Kai-Shek, the Kuo Min Tang (KMT) generalissimo, was defeated by the communist revolution in 1949, he

In the early hours of this morning, Vladimir Putin touched down in Beijing to attend the third forum of the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) at Xi Jinping’s invitation. The trip is clearly important to Putin: it is just the second time that he has left Russia, and the first time travelling beyond the former Soviet Union, since the international criminal court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest in March. Xi invited Putin to attend the forum back in March in a show of unity when the former visited Moscow just days after the ICC issued its warrant. At the time, the visit – during which both leaders were

Only last week, China was pushing itself forward to be the regional eminence grise in the Middle East, the powerbroker driving renewed Palestine-Israeli peace talks. In August this year, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi said that Chinese-mediated detente was driving a ‘wave of reconciliation’ in the Middle East. China’s inflated sense of its influence in the region came to a juddering halt in the light of the horrific attacks on Israel by Hamas militants last weekend. As a self-declared mediator in the region, China refused to condemn the Isis-style barbarity of Hamas, instead choosing to chide Israel for refusing to enter talks. It called for both sides ‘to remain calm

How should Britain handle its relationship with China? That’s an increasingly fraught question inside the Tory party lately, with several China hawks in government and on the backbenches keen to limit engagement while classifying the country as a security threat. Earlier this year, James Cleverly faced criticism after becoming the first UK Foreign Secretary to visit Beijing in five years – a trip he defended at the time as necessary for diplomacy, arguing that disengaging from the country was not ‘credible’. Speaking to Cindy Yu at conference today, for a special edition of the Chinese Whispers podcast, Cleverly defended his position again, saying: ‘Foreign secretary flies to foreign country to have

The Chinese Communist party appears set to kill off its largest economic zombie, while gambling that it can control the fallout. Evergrande, the world’s most indebted developer, first defaulted almost two years ago, as China’s property bubble began to burst. It has since been able to stagger on from one crisis to another, while struggling to restructure its mountain of debt and sell its assets. Now even the CCP seems to have decided this is untenable. The problem for the party is that Evergrande is not the only occupant of China’s economic valley of the living dead, and the impact of its collapse may be impossible to control. The signs

Two down and who knows how many more to go. This week, Defence Minister Li Shangfu became the latest of China’s top leaders to vanish, reportedly caught up in a corruption scandal. He has not been seen for three weeks and his disappearance comes three months after that of foreign minister, Qin Gang, and follows a purge at the top of China’s Rocket Force, which oversees its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal. Li lasted just six months in the job, having been appointed in March. At a security forum in Beijing late last month, one of his last public appearances, Li said the world was entering a period of ‘instability’ –