China

The news was seemingly big but the announcement curiously low key. Earlier this month, China declared that it had discovered what it described as the world’s first large-scale gas field in ultra deep waters and not far beneath the seabed. Lingshui 36-1 contained 100 billion cubic metres of gas, said the China national offshore oil corporation (CNOOC), and the data and plans to extract it had been approved by the ‘relevant government authorities’. It did not give a timescale or the precise location of the field – which it merely described as ‘southeast of Hainan’, China’s southernmost island province. It is easy to see why maritime borders matter to Vietnam The

Lord David Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the British lawyer who sits on Hong Kong’s highest court, needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. The territory’s court of final appeal has upheld verdicts and prison sentences against some of Hong Kong’s leading pro-democracy activists for taking part in a peaceful protest in 2019. The court ruling has been decried as ‘unjust’ by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong before the territory was returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The court unanimously agreed to uphold the convictions of seven activists who participated in the the unauthorised 2019 protests, during which 1.7 million people took to the streets

The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that it has revived plans to build a spanking new ‘super embassy’ – ten times the size of Beijing’s current outpost – on land it owns in the heart of the capital, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London.  This isn’t any old exercise in replacement of one piece of real estate with another. What

Four Chinese warships were spotted off the coast of Alaska last weekend. According to the US coast guard, the ships were in the Bering Sea around 124 miles from the Aleutian Islands. They were inside America’s exclusive economic zone, which extends to 200 miles, but within international waters. ‘We met presence with presence to ensure there were no disruptions to US interests,’ said a coastguard commander, as he monitored their progress. The Chinese were within their rights to be there, but the uneasy standoff was another example of Beijing boosting its presence around the Arctic. One of Russia’s leading Arctic scientists, was arrested and charged with treason This time they

Zhang Biao, Beijing’s man in Scotland, warned earlier this month that a proposed friendship agreement between Edinburgh City Council and Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung would ‘hurt the feeling[s] of the Chinese people’. The people of China, from Shenzhen to Harbin – all 1.4 billion of them – can sleep easy tonight: the proposal has been pulled from the council’s agenda. Whether it will reappear is unclear. The city’s leader, Cammy Day, has announced that ‘more discussion is required before taking this agreement forward’. Discussions which could presumably, if necessary, go on indefinitely.  Edinburgh Airport feared the agreement could harm work to increase the number of direct flights to China Anyone with

‘There is only one China in the world,’ Wang Wenbin, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, declared at a press conference late last month. ‘Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.’ The previous day, on 23 May, Beijing carried out major military exercises around the island under the title ‘Joint-Sword 2024A.’ The Chinese Communist party (CCP) said it wanted to practise how to ‘seize power’ in Taiwan, and to ‘punish’ its new leader, Lai Ching-te, and his supporters in the US. J-16 aircraft and Type 052D destroyers – some of China’s best military assets – led the exercises, surrounding Taiwan and practising bombing runs. In recent months, as China’s

Thirty-five years ago today, China’s leaders ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square to disperse a student encampment. The death toll was never made public; it is likely that several thousand people were killed.  June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom The brutal suppression of the pro-democracy protesters came as a shock and was an aberration. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Communist regimes toppled one after another, mostly peacefully. Only Tiananmen spoiled the celebratory mood.  June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom.

Attending a business summit in Shanghai earlier this year, I was struck by how downbeat the mood was. China’s stagnant economy, in particular the slow-motion meltdown of the property market, had clipped investor confidence across a number of industries. One Italian businessman told me the event had many fewer international attendees than previous years. But the apprehensive mood was cut through by the bolshiness of one senior executive from a leading Chinese electric car company: ‘America, Europe, Japan and South Korea are our high-potential markets’, the exec beamed as he set out a plan for what seemed like world domination. His optimism was not misplaced. In post-pandemic China, electric cars

The visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin to the north-eastern Chinese city of Harbin today was no doubt designed as a symbol of the tightening economic relationship between the two countries. Harbin is a gateway for their burgeoning trade; the Russian leader was there to open a China-Russia expo. In the minds of many Chinese nationalists, though, Harbin has far darker symbolism. ‘Little Moscow’, as the city is sometimes called, was established by Russian settlers at the end of the nineteenth century and was the administrative centre of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway. This was an imperialist project to give Russia a shortcut to Vladivostok and the Russian Far East,

Barely a week after inaugurating himself as president once again, Vladimir Putin has gone to China – his first foreign trip of his new term. He is accompanied by a rarely seen entourage of all the principal ministers of state, the head of the Russian central bank, leading industrialists and top managers of state-controlled companies.  Along with all the pomp and grandeur laid on by the Chinese, this cast list provides a handy illustration of the deepening friendship and cooperation between the two superpowers. Moscow and Beijing have a history of ‘eternal friendship’. But Russia and China have never truly been equal partners in their friendship with benefits. Putin and

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

The personal details of members of the UK’s armed forces appear to have been the latest target of China’s prolific cyber spies, with the Ministry of Defence’s payroll system containing the names, bank details and some addresses of up to 272,000 people on its books targeted by hackers. The government though is directing its fury at the hapless MoD contractor whose systems were breached, rather than the suspected perpetrators in Beijing. Defence secretary Grant Shapps said the attack was carried out in recent days and was ‘the suspected work of a malign actor’. He would not name the actor, though in multiple background briefings China was identified as prime suspect

The rusting and disintegrating hulk of a former Second World War landing ship has become an unlikely but dangerous flashpoint in US-China relations. The Sierra Madre, built for the US navy to land tanks, has for several decades been stranded on a shoal in the South China Sea. But now it has become a symbol of Beijing’s growing aggression in the region and its disdain for international law. The Philippines, which bought the ship in 1976, intentionally grounded her on the largely submerged Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly islands in 1999 to defend their claim to the territory. There she has remained to this day as a lonely symbol of sovereignty and home to a small contingent of Philippine marines. For many years,

A US diplomat in Beijing once told me a story of an American businessman hospitalised in the city of Ningbo after being hit at the airport by an electric buggy that was ferrying a group of Chinese VIPs who were late for their flight. The authorities confiscated his passport, demanding he pay for the damage to the buggy before he could leave. The diplomat was outraged, but when he got to Ningbo to provide help, the businessman told him to go home, explaining that he wanted to pay the fine since he was on the cusp of a big deal and didn’t want to upset the authorities. To the diplomat

When two Chinese fisherman died last month trying to flee Taiwan’s coastguard, Beijing laid the blame at Taipei’s feet and demanded an apology. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also spied an opportunity to advance its territorial claims. China has been targeting Kinmen, an island controlled by Taiwan, more aggressively over the past few weeks. The CCP stated that ‘there is no such thing as “prohibited or restricted waters”’ – saying that the waters around the island had been used as traditional fishing grounds by both sides. On the morning of 19 February, four Chinese coast guard vessels patrolled around Kinmen’s restricted waters. Personnel boarded and inspected a Taiwanese tourist boat that had ‘veered slightly of course’. The next day, a