Cindy Yu is a Times columnist, and formerly both an assistant editor of The Spectator and presenter of our Chinese Whispers podcast.
One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the coming months. That would be a political problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself (or tries to) on its competence. But it turns out the CCP has a rather elegant solution: stop counting
In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory
Zero Covid seems to be ending in China. After three years of pushing this policy, the message from the state has now changed: each person’s health is now their own responsibility. State media is emphasising ‘new evidence’ showing that Omicron has a lighter viral load than previous strains. Meanwhile, testing sites across the country are
I’ve always loved the Chinese national anthem. I used to think I was the loudest Communist Youth League pioneer as my class belted it out, dressed in our little red neckerchiefs, during our school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony. ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was composed in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it starts
Protests seem to be breaking out in several major Chinese cities in what has been a week of horrors for China’s zero-Covid policy. Rare displays of public anger have risen to levels not seen since the Shanghai lockdown, and perhaps even since the death of the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang three years ago. Chinese social
There’s been none of the wolf warriorism we’ve become used to from Chinese diplomats as President Xi met world leaders this week. While meeting presidents Biden, Macron and Australia’s PM, Xi was all smiles; the discussion focused on climate change and food security, as well as how to prevent tensions from spilling over into war. The one exception to Xi’s
China’s president Xi Jinping has shaken hands with more world leaders over the last two days than he has met in three years. Xi hasn’t worn a mask throughout the G20 summit: from the moment he and his opera singer wife stepped off the plane in Bali, emerging from a Covid cocoon. When the summit
Imagine you’re scrolling through Twitter. You see a new coat and, on impulse, tap ‘buy’. Purchase confirmed. Later, you open Twitter again to order a taxi to a restaurant and once there, you scan a QR code to see the menu, from which you order directly to the table. All of this is charged to
In the run up to China’s National Party Congress, there were whispers that a high level official in state security had been wiretapping the President. After all, why else would Sun Lijun, previously the vice-minister of public security, have been sentenced to death for taking bribes that others got much lighter sentences for? But if
The Spectator’s panel on tech-driven economic growth at Tory party conference began with a disclaimer. ‘Just to clarify, I am not inside the tent’, says economist Gerard Lyons. Lyons was an advisor to Boris Johnson at City Hall so is no stranger to frontline politics, but in recent weeks, he’s been identified as one of the
Posing as a marine biologist and with Soviet agent Anya Amasova posing as his wife, James Bond checked into Hotel Cala di Volpe in the The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Their mission: to gather intelligence aboard super-villain Karl Stromberg’s secret underwater lair, somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Italian mainland. In the
Unlike some Americans, China’s communists have no problem getting their heads around hereditary monarchy. Last week, President Xi sent his condolences to the United Kingdom. Now, he’s sending one of his most trusted deputies to pay respects at the Queen’s funeral. China has called off its wolf warriors, its diplomatic ideologues known for berating the West. Beijing
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi, the capital of Xinjiang), he is alone, angry, unstable and homeless. The events of The Backstreets take place over one long night, as he looks for somewhere to stay (‘I just wanted a small space
President Xi Jinping hasn’t stepped outside his country since the pandemic began. For almost three years, China’s elderly leaders have been swaddled inside Beijing; journalists granted an audience with Xi have told me that they had to go through days of hotel quarantine before the meeting. Today Xi returns to the global stage. His first
Early on in the Tory leadership campaign, Liz Truss was the only contender to say that she wanted to sit down with Vladimir Putin – so that she could ‘call him out’. It now seems that President Xi Jinping will be next in her firing line, after her team briefed yesterday that as PM she
Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and read Chinese. Some question my English accent, almost suspiciously posh given that I didn’t speak a word of the language until the age of ten. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. My podcast, Chinese
I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the Communist party’s brutal suppression had been scrubbed clean. So Tiananmen was not part of the national conversation when I was growing up. I only fully grasped what had happened when I visited Hong Kong in
Covid infections are finally falling in Shanghai. The city reported just over 2,000 cases on Tuesday, down from over 27,000 at its peak a month ago. Yet instead of regaining their freedom, locals have been hit by tighter lockdown restrictions. Even the World Health Organisation, which typically shies away from criticising China, is urging Beijing to
For weeks, Shanghai’s 25 million residents were assured that they would not be locked down. Then when the order came, the lockdown was supposed to last only seven days. It is now almost into its fourth week, and the government is struggling to suppress the chaos. Last week, 82-year-old Yu Wenming called his neighbourhood committee
‘We’re being driven mad. Nobody is listening to us. They’ve politicised this disease.’ This week, the candid remarks of Zhu Weiping, a senior official at Shanghai’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), have gone viral in China. Her phone call with a frustrated local was recorded, and her despair resonated with people in the city and the
