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
A Chinese health app, developed to enforce the Communist party’s draconian Covid-19 restrictions, is being repurposed to tighten political control on dissidents and others deemed to be troublemakers. Only the very young and very old are exempt from the compulsory National Health Code System. The ‘traffic light app’, as it has been dubbed, assigns Chinese
The Beijing political rumour mill has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, seizing upon every nuance and reading between every line for signs of the impending downfall of ‘Xi dada’ (Big Daddy Xi). All kinds of stories are being circulated about President Xi Jinping’s health, with reports over squabbling over his likely successor. Chinese premier
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In this week’s episode:Ian Williams, author of The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold war, and Alessio Patalano, Professor of War and Strategy in East Asia at King’s College London, talk about how the war in Ukraine has changed the thinking in Taiwan. (00:37) Also this week: Was Sue Gray’s report on Downing Street
Taipei Nowhere is watching Russia’s faltering attempt to crush its democratic neighbour more closely than Taiwan. The Ukraine war is seen in Taipei as a demonstration of how determined resistance and the ability to rally a global alliance of supporters can frustrate a much larger and heavily armed rival. Taiwan has spent the past
Taipei Nowhere is watching the zero-Covid horror show unfolding in China more closely than Taiwan, where it is encouraging the island to ease restrictions, even as cases of the infectious Omicron variant spike. Taiwan’s premier Su Tseng-chang has said the extreme measures being imposed on the other side of the Taiwan Strait are ‘cruel’ and
Xi Jinping has made his choice. He is sticking with his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin, and no end of Russian atrocities or wishful thinking in the west is going to alter that. Their axis of autocracy presents a far-reaching challenge to western democracies, which the UK in particular is struggling to come to terms with.
The latest warning was stark – that China’s population will shrink this year, more than a decade faster than forecast, and the country will become a ‘super-aged’ society by 2035. The economic implications will be a ‘huge thing’. This came not from what Beijing has dismissed as ‘western doomsayers’, but from Zheng Bingwen, director of
Confusion is infecting Shanghai. The authorities are dithering over a promised easing of severe lockdown rules in the face of record cases of Covid-19 and widespread anger over their cack-handed way they have handled the crisis. The city has become a test for China’s faltering zero-Covid strategy, with nervous Communist party leaders sending mixed signals
The read-outs from Friday’s two-hour call between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were so different, that you have to wonder whether the two leaders were on the same line. The White House version had Biden bluntly warning China of the consequences of providing assistance to Russia, while Beijing’s take presented Xi as a peacemaker ‘The
