China

President Xi Jinping’s second term was meant to come to an end in 2023. However, the news that the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee has moved to eliminate the constitution’s two-term limit for presidents suggests he plans on staying in power longer than this – and perhaps indefinitely.  The rest of the world will now have to figure out how best to deal with him. Xi is currently 64 years old, which means he could dominate Chinese politics until 2030. This would let him implement his ambitious ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, to link Eurasia through Chinese infrastructure and trade, and the ‘Made In China 2025’ plan, which aims to make China a manufacturing

A Chinese Communist Party Congress meeting a few months ago was intended to affirm President Xi Jinping for a second – and supposedly final – five-year term. Instead, it looked and felt like a coronation of someone settling in indefinitely, with hints of a personality cult. Earlier on today Xinhua, a leading Chinese news agency, reported suggestions for 21 constitutional reforms that the government is proposing. Tucked away – suggestion number 14 – is the following (my translation): Constitutional Article Seventy-Nine Section 3: ‘The terms of the President and Vice-President of The People’s Republic of China will coincide with the terms of the National People’s Assembly. Service from the President and Vice-President are

Beijing is starting to worry that the rest of the world will steal its advanced technology. The Chinese military is calling for stronger protection of the country’s intellectual property, particularly in sensitive defence areas. Supercomputers, drones, rocket launchers and the like, were singled out as areas where ‘generations’ of Chinese research cannot be allowed to be put at risk. Give China credit where it’s due: not in its technology, but in its gall. China is the world’s largest or second-largest economy (depending on how you count) because of its size, its hard-working labor force, its focus on STEM education, its relentless government policy, etc, etc. But also because it cheats.

Did Theresa May raise human rights with China during her visit to Beijing this week or not? The Chinese press has praised her for not mentioning the most neuralgic issue between China and all visiting officials. Downing Street sources, however, stated flatly that Mrs May raised the issue with both President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. The Global Times, a voice of the Chinese Communist Party, said the ‘Sino-UK partnership transcends media mudslinging over human rights…May will definitely not make any comment contrary to the goals of her China trip’. It contended, too, ‘while the government is responsible for public well-being, the media tends to whip up sensations while

Why aren’t spy stories sexy anymore? The revelations last year that Beijing destroyed America’s espionage ring inside China a few years ago, including executing a number of US informants, got a brief flurry of attention and then subsided beneath the waves. News reports of American bureaucrats arrested for passing information to the Chinese have also barely raised eyebrows. Now the ex-CIA agent suspected of being the mole that led to the collapse of America’s spy operations in China has been arrested, though on a lesser charge of simply possessing classified information. How long before Americans turn back to Donald Trump’s tweets or the latest #MeToo charges? And why don’t more people seem

When I first hear that my well-heeled Surrey neighbourhood is receiving aid from China, I assume it must be a hoax. I don’t believe it until I see a press release from the borough council confirming that the Dongying municipal government has made a £5,660 donation to help the unskilled and socially excluded of Guildford through projects including bicycle-mending. Ever get the feeling you are living in a parallel universe and that the world you once understood a little bit has left you behind, in terms of the dwindling sense that it makes? Who’s funding who in the overseas aid fandango is one of the great mysteries of globalisation that

The first election day since Donald Trump was elected president a year ago brought a funereal mood to Washington that you could feel on the streets. The swamp, apparently, remains undrained. Elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for mayor in New York City cheered the locals a bit, producing the expected victories for Democrats. Virginia was the most consequential of these. It seemed a harbinger of the next presidential race. The moderate, decidedly un-Trumpian Republican Ed Gillespie was accused of making ‘ugly racial appeals’ — this for expressing the opinion that the statues of Virginia’s Civil War heroes should not be razed in a frenzy of revisionism.