China

Is China in decline? I was born in China in the 90s, and growing up it felt like the future was always going to be brighter. My parents were wealthier, more educated, better travelled than their parents, and it seemed assured that my generation would only have even better life chances. But in the 2020s, China’s economic growth has slowed down. Some of the once-bright spots in its economy, like real estate, are in slow motion meltdown. In the last couple of years foreign direct investment into the country has been falling at a record pace. The youth unemployment rate from this summer shows that just under a fifth of

In the early 2000s, Desmond Shum and his wife, Whitney Duan, were among the richest people in China, with fingers in various real estate, infrastructure and hospitality projects. They also had some of China’s most powerful people on speed dial – including the family of then-premier Wen Jiabao. But that all changed in 2017 when Whitney was disappeared by the Chinese state. Desmond now lives in the UK where he published a memoir in 2021, Red Roulette, and is now an analyst and commentator on Chinese politics. On this interview, we discuss why Shum thinks Whitney was the victim of a power struggle involving Xi Jinping, the reality of politics and

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought home the sheer potential of artificial intelligence and the speed with which developments are being made. It made AI the hot topic from business to politics and, yes, journalism.  This was true in China too, despite the fact that ChatGPT has never been allowed to be used within Chinese borders. Instead, China has a rich landscape of homegrown AI products, where progress is being led by tech giants like search engine Baidu and TikTok’s owner, ByteDance. So already we are seeing a bifurcation in the AI worlds of China and the West – just like with social media and e-commerce. This episode

As a child, the New York Times journalist Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. But as he grew up, a second generation immigrant in the United States, Edward was hungry to find out more about his father and mother’s pasts in the People’s Republic of China. That hunger took him to study China at university and eventually to become the New York Times’s Beijing bureau chief. Edward’s new book, At the Edge of Empire, is a marvellously constructed work that traces his father’s journey through China as a soldier in the PLA, and his own reporting in China as an American journalist. It reveals how

The South China Sea has been an area of regular clashes and heightened tensions under the leadership of Xi Jinping. It seems that, every few months, Chinese naval or coastguard ships clash or almost clash with vessels from South East Asian nations like Vietnam and the Philippines. Only last week, a Chinese ship clashed with the Filipino coast guard in the Spratly Islands, with both sides levelling angry accusations at each other. The region is full of disputed claims, making it fertile waters for accidental escalation. China says its claims to the region – encompassed by the ‘nine-dash line’ – are historic; that island sets such as the Spratlys and