China

Life on the margins pt II: Li Ziqi and the phenomenon of the rural influencer

23 min listen

In the last episode, I discussed Chinese rural lives with Professor Scott Rozelle. One point he made which particularly stuck with me was the dying out of farming as an occuption – he’d said that most rural people under the age of 35 have never farmed a day in their lives. So that got me thinking, what do they do instead? In this episode I’ll be looking at one, very high profile, alternative – vlogging. I’ve noticed through my hours of scrolling through Chinese social media that there is a huge genre of rural, pastoral content.  This is an interesting phenomenon both for what it says about the rural population

Life on the margins: how China’s rural deprivation curbs its success

41 min listen

Too often our stories about China are dictated by the urban experience, probably because journalists inside and outside of China are often based in the big cities; Beijing specifically. Those who live in the cities also tend to be more educated, more privileged, and so able to dominate the global attention more.  That’s why I’m particularly keen to hear about the lives of those who still live in the countryside, or at least are still considered ‘rural residents’ by the Chinese government. They make up a sizeable proportion of the population, and you’ll hear that in my first question to my guest today, we discuss just how big this group

What the Messi row reveals about Chinese football

40 min listen

The Argentinian football star Lionel Messi has been trending on Weibo – and unfortunately, not for a good reason. It all started when Messi sat out a match in Hong Kong earlier this month. His reason – that he was injured – wasn’t good enough for some fans, and keyboard nationalists quickly took offence when Messi played in Japan, a few days later. The furore has dominated Chinese social media over the last few weeks, and even led to the cancellation of some upcoming Chinese matches with the Argentinian national team, as authorities demanded an apology from Messi. What a mess. But beyond its seeming triviality, this episode tells us

China is set for a serious economic fall

 The future trajectory of the Chinese economy is a subject for doctoral theses rather than casual column items. But the advent of the Year of the Dragon, at last weekend’s Lunar New Year, was greeted with such pessimistic commentaries that the natural contrarian should ask whether the consensualists are getting it wrong: maybe the dragon is merely marking a pause before martialling its mighty resources for the next transglobal burst of fire? The negative narrative goes like this. In spite of deflation in consumer prices, Chinese shoppers are frightened of spending. Despite central bank interventions aimed at boosting asset prices, the property market is crashing after the collapse of the

The greed and hypocrisy of the opium trade continue to shock

‘A fact that confounds me now when I think back on it,’ writes the acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh at the start of this expansive and thoughtful book, ‘is that for most of my life China was for me a vast, uniform blankness.’ There were many reasons for this, he says. The war between India and China in 1962 might have played a part, along with the complex relationship between the two countries since then; but also the way that ‘an inner barrier’ has been ‘implanted in the minds’ of many around the world – one that blocks out China but allows in the ‘language, clothing, sport, material objects and

Why do people join the CCP?

36 min listen

At last count, the Chinese Communist Party has 98 million members, more people than the population of Germany. Its membership also continues to grow, making it one of the most successful and resilient political parties of the last a hundred years, perhaps with the exception of India’s BJP, which boasts 180 million members. And yet the CCP’s track record is strewn with bloody crackdowns and systematic persecution. So what would drive someone to join the CCP, and what accounts for its success? Do party members today all support the atrocities committed by their government? I think these are important questions to ask, because without understanding the answers to them, one

Was China’s economic boom ‘made in America’?

53 min listen

Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There’s renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China’s economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables. There’s trade, of course, but the imbalance in that (some $370 billion in 2022) tilts in China’s favour and only serves as another source of ammunition for America’s Sinosceptics. China, on the other hand, is also decoupling in its own way, moving fast to cut its reliance on imported technology and energy. At this moment, it seems like US-China tensions are inevitable – but look into the not so ancient

Taiwan can’t escape China’s shadow

The Taiwanese rock band Mayday – ‘the Beatles of the Chinese-speaking world’ – are being investigated by the Chinese Communist party for the crime of lip syncing. Local authorities are combing through recordings of Mayday’s Shanghai concerts from November looking for evidence of ‘deceptive fake-singing’, as the CCP calls it, which has been illegal in China since 2009 (although the law is rarely enforced). Last month, an anonymous Taiwan-ese government source told Reuters that the investigation had been cooked up because the pop stars refused a request from Beijing to say something nice about China in the run-up to Taiwan’s election this Saturday. The band found itself at the centre

Who will be Taiwan’s next President?

43 min listen

Taiwan goes to the polls in just over a month. This is an election that could have wide repercussions, given the island’s status as a potential flashpoint in the coming years. The incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, is coming to the end of two elected terms, meaning that she cannot run again. Her party’s chosen successor is William Lai – Lai Ching-te – who is the current vice president. For most of this year, he has been facing off opposition from the Kuomintang, the biggest opposition party in Taiwan, and the Taiwan People’s Party, a third party led by the charismatic Ko Wen-je. Lai remains in the lead with a month

Henry Kissinger saw his world fall apart

The leading advocate of world order died at a time when it all appeared to be coming undone. Henry Kissinger spent the last months of his century-long life travelling to China to temper escalating tensions with the United States, pushing for negotiations to end a war begun by Russia in Ukraine (he made his first intervention on this war in The Spectator last year), and watching as Israel and Hamas entered a new death struggle. Even more discouraging, isolationist tendencies were ascendant again in the US, and American democracy seemed crippled by divisions that shut down Congress repeatedly. Kissinger’s last book, co-authored with Google’s Erich Schmidt, warned that artificial intelligence was on

Carbon capture: how China cornered the green market

30 min listen

On the podcast: In her cover piece for the magazine, The Spectator’s assistant editor Cindy Yu – writing ahead of the COP28 summit this weekend – describes how China has cornered the renewables market. She joins the podcast alongside Akshat Rathi, senior climate reporter for Bloomberg and author of Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, to investigate China’s green agenda. (01:22) Also this week: Margaret Mitchell writes in The Spectator about the uncertainty she is facing around her graduate visa. This is after last week’s statistics from the ONS showed that net migration remains unsustainably high, leaving the government under pressure to curb legal migration. Margaret joins the podcast with Michael Simmons, The Spectator’s data editor. (13:07)

Dialect and identity: is Mandarin bad for China?

44 min listen

Across the span of China, a country as big as Europe, there are countless regional dialects and accents – perhaps even languages. Often, they’re mutually unintelligible. The Chinese call these ‘fangyan’, and each Chinese person will likely be able to speak at least one fangyan, while also understanding Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People’s Republic. It means that the Chinese are more multilingual than you might think. But it also means that the question of language is inherently a political one. Standard Mandarin has a relatively short history, created by the country’s founding fathers to unify the spoken word in a huge country. But with the ubiquity of

From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed

Among many other prizes for her stunningly original work, Alexis Wright has won Australia’s greatest literary honour, the Miles Franklin Award, for a novel of the highest literary merit representing Australian life. It is ironic, but sadly apt, that her epic Praiseworthy should be published in the year that Australians, offered a chance to give greater political rights to their indigenous peoples, have voted not to. Everything blends together: dream and reality, donkeys and butterflies, the Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz Wright is an Aboriginal activist as well as a writer. Praiseworthy, which has already won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, is an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the

Cambridge’s China complicity

UK-China Transparency (UKCT) was formally launched this week (see Notes, 16 September). Its aim is in its name. There is sadly little transparency about UK-China dealings, especially in our universities. I first reported this problem early in 2020 when I investigated the behaviour of Jesus College, Cambridge, and its China Centre, run by the CCP apologist Professor Peter Nolan. It is probably not a coincidence that the three founders of UKCT – Sir Bernard Silverman, Martin Village and the young freelance reporter Sam Dunning – are all Jesus alumni. The more they looked, the more uncomfortable they became about their college’s advancement of CCP networking and propaganda and its role

Rethinking Chinese food with Fuchsia Dunlop

50 min listen

All cultures care about their cuisine, but the Chinese must have one of the most food-obsessed cultures in the world. It may be because we have the best food… Those listeners of Chinese Whispers who’ve been to China will know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, you may have come across the classic Chinese takeaway with dishes like sweet and sour pork, or you may like Cantonese dim sum, and some of you may be big fans of Sichuanese cooking. But China has so much more to offer than what has made across into the West’s Chinese restaurants. Thankfully, that’s changing and quite fast. Part

‘The mask has slipped’ – Tuvia Gering on China, Israel and Hamas

43 min listen

When China brokered a historic detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year, it seemed that a new phase in world history – and certainly in Chinese foreign policy – had opened up. Instead of the US being a policeman of the world, it was the rising power, China, that was stepping into that role. Whereas Chinese foreign policy had previously only really cared about promoting trade and silencing dissidents, it seemed that perhaps, now, Beijing was taking a more leadership role in global diplomacy and security issues. And yet the events of the last week and China’s response to them have shown that perhaps the country isn’t ready

What we know about Beijing’s spies

32 min listen

Two years ago, Richard Moore, head of MI6, said that China was now the organisation’s ‘single greatest priority’. Parliamentarians and the British public have been starkly reminded of this by last week’s news that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. On this episode, we won’t be commenting on the ins and outs of that case, but talking more generally about Chinese espionage. What forms does it take, what are its goals and how successful are the Chinese secret services at achieving those? I’m joined by a brilliant and knowledgeable guest. Nigel Inkster is the former director of operations and intelligence for MI6. He has

Cindy Yu, Charlie Taylor and Petroc Trelawney

17 min listen

Cindy Yu tells the story of how she got to know Westminster’s alleged Chinese agent and the astonishment of seeing herself pictured alongside him when the story broke (01.12), Charlie Taylor, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, talks breakouts, bureaucracy and stabbings, and wonders – where have all the inspirational leaders gone (06.45), and Petroc Trelawney shares his classical notebook and describes a feeling of sadness as the BBC Proms wraps up for another year (11.54). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran.

How to do business with China

Amid reports of Chinese spies in Westminster, we learn that Huawei – the telecoms manufacturer western governments shun for fear of cyber espionage – has launched a smartphone containing microchips more advanced than anything China was previously thought capable of making. Some analysts say China is now ahead of the US in tech fields ranging from AI to robotics, while, in the auto sector, BMW chief executive Oliver Zipse (announcing plans to make electric Minis at Cowley from 2026) described Chinese electric carmakers with improved battery technology as an ‘imminent threat’ to his industry in Europe. In response, Rishi Sunak – after a brief and no doubt deeply oblique meeting

China is spying on us, so what?

That China is spying on us is hardly the revelation of the century. The Sunday Times broke the story that police have arrested two men amid allegations that a parliamentary researcher was spying for China. The spy, working on international policy, had alleged links to senior Tory MPs with sensitive information. He had previously lived and worked in China, leaving officials apparently fearing he may have been a ‘sleeper agent’ recruited to infiltrate British political networks.  Cue howls of indignation all round. An unnamed source close to Alicia Kearns, chairwoman of the foreign affairs select committee to whom the spy allegedly had access, claimed the allegations, if true, constituted a ‘serious escalation and show