Ian Williams is a former foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News and NBC, and author of The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War (Birlinn).
China is entering the new year with its tech ambitions under a Covid cloud. The enormous cost of the now abandoned zero-Covid policy has badly strained government finances, and the communist party’s pledge to build a world-beating chip industry, already reeling from American sanctions, is falling victim to the familiar ills of cost, waste and
China’s scrapping of strict Covid controls represents not so much a shift in gear, as a screeching hand-break turn. It is abrupt and haphazard and comes at a particularly risky time. Hundreds of millions of people will soon be on the move for Chinese New Year, which is next month, and the spread of the
It is a measure of the dark places Xi Jinping is taking China politically and economically that the rule of Jiang Zemin, who died on Wednesday aged 96, is being looked back upon with some nostalgia. During Jiang’s later years, ‘toad worship culture’ (a play on his supposed amphibious features) became popular on social media
The Chinese people seem to have run out of patience with their country’s draconian Covid policies. After almost three years of brutal lockdowns, mass testing and sweeping quarantine, all facilitated by claustrophobic surveillance, they appear to have snapped. The protests that swept China at the weekend are the biggest challenge to Xi Jinping since he
It has been a remarkable few days for China’s increasingly absurd and at times chilling zero-Covid campaign. There was outrage on social media after the death of a three-year-old boy from carbon monoxide poisoning, which his father blamed on delays obtaining treatment because of a lockdown. Angry residents who took to the streets were confronted
A steward tries to lift Hu Jintao from his seat, but Hu doesn’t want to move. The former Communist party leader is sitting to the left of current boss Xi Jinping, and he reaches out to take Xi’s notes, but Xi moves Hu’s hand away and takes back the papers. The world’s cameras follow every
It is hard to say what is more shocking, dozens of former British military pilots lured by vast salaries to work for China’s People’s Liberation Army or the fact there appears to be no law to stop it. At least 30 experienced pilots, who have flown Typhoon, Jaguar, Harrier and Tornado fighters, as well as
The chip war between China and America is heating up, with an increasingly assertive Joe Biden battling with Xi Jinping as he enters his third term as Chinese leader. The US last week further restricted China’s access to advanced American know-how, in what were some of the most stringent export controls for decades. Xi didn’t mention
In her speech to the Conservative party conference, Liz Truss rightly pointed out that we did not stand up to Russia early enough. ‘We became too dependent on authoritarian regimes for cheap goods and energy,’ she said. We can safely assume that those ‘other’ regimes include China, though curiously given how prominently the China threat
Another Covid-19 lockdown, another angry confrontation. This time it was on the streets of Shenzhen, China’s high-tech hub, where videos this week showed an angry crowd facing off against police officers wearing protective medical gear, including blue gowns, masks and plastic visors. ‘Lift the lockdown’, the protesters yelled, pushing against hastily erected barricades. Some threw
To say that Vladimir Putin is giving autocracy a bad name is rather to state the obvious. But it now appears to have dawned even on his ‘old friend’ Xi Jinping that Russian incompetence and cruelty in Ukraine is undermining their joint ambition to re-write the international order. Putin’s admission that Beijing might have ‘concerns’
China is struggling to limit the impact of its longest and most widespread heatwave since records began more than 60 years ago. Temperatures have reached the highest the country has ever recorded and a drought is wreaking havoc across much of southern China. It is compounding the multiple economic challenges facing China’s communist leaders, including
A Chinese spy ship that docked in Sri Lanka on Tuesday in defiance of Indian and western protests is the latest symbol of China’s power and ambition in the Indian Ocean. It is also a stark demonstration and warning of the harder edges of Beijing’s debt trap diplomacy. The Yuan Wang 5, bristling with satellite
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Freddy Gray speaks to Spectator contributor, Ian Williams, author of Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny and Nicholas Eftimiades, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and professor of Homeland Security. On the podcast, they discuss the scale of Chinese espionage infiltrating Western society. Has the problem been ignored for decades? What kind of
Chinese social media is full of anger and frustration – because the military didn’t shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane. As she headed to Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whipped up a wave of rabid online nationalism. Influential commentators led by Hu Xijin, the former editor of the CCP’s Global Times, suggested the speaker of
China has launched a new round of military drills near Taiwan, having previously announced they were ending on Sunday. The People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theatre Command said it was ‘continuing joint training under real war conditions, focused on organising joint anti-submarine warfare and naval strikes’. A social media account of the nationalist tabloid Global Times
The scene could have come straight out of a spy novel. An ornate Chinese garden with temples and pavilions, built at one of the highest points in Washington DC – a gift from the Chinese government. At its heart, a 70-foot high white pagoda – perfectly positioned and equipped to eavesdrop on communications at the
HSBC was being more than a little disingenuous when it claimed on Thursday that Communist party cells don’t have much influence on the businesses in which they are installed. Try telling that to Xi Jinping, under whom the CPP has extended its tentacles into every aspect of nominally private businesses in China. The British bank
Economic growth in China is grinding to a halt. The days of soaring double-digit growth are over, and the malaise facing the country’s spluttering economy goes far deeper than the hit from Covid-19 lockdowns. Gross domestic product in the April to June quarter grew by a paltry 0.4 per cent from a year earlier, according
What began as a run on a handful of provincial banks is rapidly morphing into one of China’s worst financial scandals, threatening the stability of the country’s heavily indebted financial system. It poses a serious challenge to a Communist party obsessed with social order, which has thuggishly cracked down on desperate depositors demanding their money
