World

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What is it to be ‘Chinese’?

43 min listen

Sun Yat-sen was the founding father of China’s first republic, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown. Here he sits, with his successor Chiang Kai-Shek standing behind. They were two among many intellectuals and politicians whose agitations helped contribute to modern Chinese national identity. In his book, The Invention of China, journalist Bill Hayton argues that this is where ‘China’ and the key parts that contribute to a modern Chinese identity – territorial claims, ethnicities, history and so on – were moulded into an ‘imagined’ nationalism. I interview Bill in this episode, and we discuss everything from the contribution of foreign aggressors (especially Japan) to China’s modern identity, to the ferocious intellectual

Andrew Tettenborn

Poland steps up its legal fight against Europe

Poland’s legal wrangles with Europe show no sign of ending. Back in September, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal determined that some parts of EU law might be contrary to the country’s constitution. Now the tribunal has lit another firework: doing the same in respect of the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR). Is this just another round in the war between the European elite and the ruling political party, the PiS (which is cordially detested in both Brussels and Strasbourg)? You’d be forgiven for thinking so. Yet this latest wrangle is much more significant, since it opens up an entirely new front. The ECHR is separate from the EU; it and the Human Rights

Charles Lipson

Biden is losing America

Plummeting polls are sending a clear message to the Biden administration, but the President is deaf, dumb and blind to it. And it’s not just the polls. Take congressional retirements. Democrats who chair congressional committees, reading the grim poll numbers, figure life will be a lot more comfortable as highly paid lobbyists than as powerless minority members. They are retiring in droves. Historically, retirements by well-informed insiders are strong predictors of the next House majority. Local elections are sending the same message. They tell Democrats they have moved too far left and that voters’ quality of life is suffering. Voters are especially troubled by inflation, Covid and crime. They are

Sunday

Radomir Tylecote

China’s growing influence over the Commonwealth’s armies

On Monday in the city of Bridgetown, Prince Charles will be forced to witness the spectacle of Barbados officially becoming a republic as it removes the Queen as its head of state. The former British colony became independent in 1966, but last year the country’s Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced that the country would have its own president, though it will remain a member of the Commonwealth. The decision appears to have been influenced to some degree by China’s activities. Barbados has signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while an office to facilitate investment in Barbados has opened in Beijing. Prime Minister Mia Mottley calls President Xi ‘very

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Lockdown resentment is growing in Europe

‘Traitors to the nation,’ read placards carried by protestors in Prague this week, depicting government figures who have imposed new lockdown restrictions on the unvaccinated. Anger has been bubbling under the surface in eastern and central Europe. But as new lockdowns are imposed and governments consider making vaccines compulsory, this resentment is now threatening to burst out into the open. Czech protests have been mild compared to the unrest seen in other European countries. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte described recent riots in Rotterdam as ‘pure violence,’ with police firing warning shots at protestors and inflicting multiple injuries. In Brussels, tear gas and water cannons were used to contain a

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will the EU condemn the Rotterdam police shootings?

Last month on Coffee House I drew attention to the inconsistency in how Europe responded to the migrant crises in Belarus and France. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, was accused of ‘weaponising’ Middle Eastern migrants seeking to enter Europe at his country’s border with Poland, but no government dared criticise France for the chaos in Calais. There is similar hypocrisy in how the EU has reacted to Dutch police firing live bullets at protesters in Rotterdam. Last Friday three people venting their anger at the fresh Covid restrictions imposed by the Dutch government were wounded by what a police spokesperson referred to as ‘warning shots’. Shouldn’t warning shots have

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why a love child might help ‘Papa Zemmour’

It’s not often you find Eric Zemmour plastered across the front of Closer magazine. Brigitte Macron, Beyonce and Lady Gaga are the preferred darlings of the celebrity magazine. But this week’s issue – which is selling like gâteaux chaud in France – has on its cover Zemmour and his 28-year-old paramour Sarah Knafo and underneath what can only be described as a bombshell: ‘He’s going to be a dad in 2022!’ Is Zemmour really upset or is it faux outrage? There are more photos on pages 12 and 13, including a close-up of Madame Knafo’s alleged bump as she and her beau, 35 years her senior, stroll through a Parisian

Jeremy Black

How Thomas Jefferson became ‘problematic’

A victim of revolution, King George III’s statue was toppled almost 250 years ago in New York. Now the statue of his most bitter critic, Thomas Jefferson, is to follow in his footsteps – after the founding father’s likeness was removed from New York City Hall this week because he was a slave owner. Jefferson’s statue will be moved down the road to the New York Historical Society, after the city’s public design commission unanimously voted to remove him from his plinth. His statue had been in the city council chamber since 1915, but as councilwoman Adrienne Adams explained in a presentation: ‘It makes me deeply uncomfortable knowing that we

Harry Mount

Don’t turn Notre Dame into a ‘politically correct Disneyland’

Sacré bleu! Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a ‘politically correct Disneyland’. The plans, yet to be rubber-stamped, will turn the cathedral into an ‘experimental showroom’, with confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures replaced with modern art murals. New sound and light effects will be introduced to create ‘emotional spaces’. Themed chapels on a ‘discovery trail’, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia, will pop up. And Bible quotations will be projected onto chapel walls in various languages, including Mandarin. The last chapel on the new trail will have an environmental emphasis. Defenders of the new plan are bound to

Friday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Britain’s duty to the Black Sea

With Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, the Black Sea is looking choppy. While that may seem to have little significance for us, in an age of globalised supply chains, international security commitments and Britain’s ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific,’ that matters more than we might think. However, there is also an opportunity for the UK. In a report for the Council on Geostrategy that was published this week, I, James Rogers and Alexander Lanoszka, suggest that the Black Sea region is at risk of becoming an anarchic environment where insecurity reigns amid Russian domination. This matters. Rather than being seen as some distant periphery, at best a ‘flank’ of Europe,

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron can’t blame Boris for the Channel migrant tragedy

Boris Johnson yesterday wrote to French president Emmanuel Macron suggesting escalated measures to stop the deadly human traffic between Calais and Kent. As voters in both France and Britain asked themselves how this terrible tragedy could have happened, the letter might be read as a nudge to the French, who have not merely been turning a blind eye to people smuggling, but essentially forcing migrants into the embrace of the passeurs by bulldozing shantytowns. ‘As I set out in a letter to you this summer, I have long been profoundly concerned that any morning, we could wake to the news of a serious tragedy involving widespread loss of life in the Channel,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Both Johnson and Macron need to get a grip

Anglo-French relations continue to deteriorate. Not even this week’s tragedy in the Channel can stop the point scoring between the two governments. Last night, Boris Johnson issued a letter to Emmanuel Macron which proposed, among other things, a bilateral readmissions agreement between the UK and France which would see those crossing the Channel returned to France straight away. The French were not impressed either by this proposal or it being made public.  This morning, Priti Patel was uninvited from a meeting of northern European interior ministers. Macron then went on TV to accuse the British of not being ‘serious’ and to say that leaders shouldn’t communicate by tweets. (He is right

Thursday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The sinister attempt to silence a Yazidi survivor

Are we cancelling former Isis sex slaves now? It would seem so, at least going by this barmy story out of Toronto, Canada, where a school-board recently pulled out of an event with a survivor of the Yazidi genocide amidst fears her story could ‘foster Islamophobia’. Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human-rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner. In 2014, her family were killed by Isis as the group swept through northern Iraq. She was sold into sexual slavery. She was raped, tortured and passed around depraved militants until she eventually escaped. She has since become an advocate for the rights of Yazidis, determined to make sure the West does

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Kyle Rittenhouse and the collapse of media neutrality

Anyone who thought the jury’s verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case might prompt some reflection among the political and media classes will have been rudely disabused over the last five days. The teenager was convicted in the court of elite opinion long before he set foot in the Kenosha County Courthouse and that sentence isn’t about to be overturned. The response underscores how far American liberals have drifted from liberalism and how their total surrender to progressivism has rendered them incapable of understanding events except through the prism of ‘anti-racism’. Newsweek told its readers that ‘emboldened white supremacists and neo-Nazis have celebrated the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in far-right channels

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris must act to prevent a repeat of the Channel migrant tragedy

The tragic drowning of more than two dozen people in the English Channel yesterday should remind us that closing down this irregular migration route has become a multi-purpose moral duty. Not only does the British state have a responsibility to do so to preserve its social contract with its citizens and the integrity of the nation, but also to protect lives. The large-scale loss of life that took place was the proverbial accident that had been waiting to happen. There has been a spate of smaller-scale drownings in recent weeks and it was only a matter of time before a fully laden, sizeable inflatable capsized or sank. Boris Johnson reacted

Yiannis Baboulias

Turkey’s president Erdogan faces his greatest crisis yet

President Erdogan’s aggressive foreign policy is what usually captures the attention of the international media, but it is at home where his biggest troubles now lie. Turkey’s currency, the lira, has tanked, hitting a record low of just over 13 lira to the dollar. Thousands of protesters will hit the streets in the coming days over the country’s turbulent economic situation. Erdogan finds himself embattled. For now, Erdogan remains defiant. But the figures are brutal: since the beginning of the year, the Turkish lira has lost almost 40 per cent of its value. The minimum wage in Turkey, which was worth $556 (£417) at its highest, is now down to

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Peng Shuai and the return of the concubine

A high-flying Chinese businessman once told me his secret to happiness: ‘Before a man is 35, women are tools; after 35, women are toys.’ It worked for him. He married an educated woman from a good family who helped him climb the career ladder; but once established in his career, he began seeking more exciting female company. I’ve been thinking about that man since the story of the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai broke. Peng detailed a three-year affair she had with the retired vice premier Zhang Gaoli, 40 years her senior. During the good times, they would ‘talk for hours, play chess, play tennis no end… our personalities fitted

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

‘Immigration is war’: an interview with Éric Zemmour

Éric Zemmour looks down at a copy of The Spectator and cocks his eyebrows at the unflattering cartoon of him on the cover. He decides he doesn’t care. ‘It takes a lot to offend me, you know,’ he says. He then leafs through the magazine making polite and appreciative noises. ‘Ah, Doooglas Murray!’ he exclaims. ‘I like Doooglas Murray very much. We’ve exchanged ideas.’ Zemmour is in London as part of his still undeclared campaign to be the next president of France — to curry favour with and raise money from the many French voters who live in the capital. But the British Establishment has given him a cold reception.

Paul Wood

Daughters for sale: Afghans are growing desperate

Shukria Abdul Wahid has nine children, two boys and seven girls. All they had to eat yesterday, she says, were two small pieces of stale flatbread — for the whole family. She and her husband went without. They couldn’t even have tea to quieten their own hunger pangs. The gas bottle used to boil water ran out long ago and there is no money for another one. She tells me it is unbearable having to say ‘no’ to her children all day when she doesn’t have a scrap of food to give them. ‘They are very little. They do not understand the situation, they do not know what’s happening in

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Covid revolts: Europe’s new wave of unrest

Given the ability of Covid-19 to make fools out of everyone, it is not entirely fair to single out an opinion piece penned by Christina Pagel and Martin McKee, members of the self-appointed ‘Independent Sage’ committee on 7 October. But it sums up an attitude which was common just seven weeks ago. ‘England, not for the first time, is the odd one out in Europe,’ they wrote. England had recklessly abandoned Covid restrictions in July, relying on vaccines alone to keep the country open. In contrast, our European neighbours were sensibly employing a ‘relatively light set of extra measures’, such as vaccine passports, to keep infections much lower than England’s.