The Chinese rock band Varihnaz is more likely to sing about pesticides and rice than love and loss. Its part-farmer, part-musician bandmates appeal to young Chinese who dream of a simpler, slower way of life beyond the frenzied cities. Its …
Xi Jinping’s cunning housing crisis
With the imposition of his “three red lines” regulations in 2020, Xi Jinping called time on China’s epic real estate boom. For the previous two decades, real estate had played a huge part in China’s economy, matched only by exports …
China is not the answer to Nato
The timing of President Xi Jinping’s visit to Belgrade yesterday was far from accidental: exactly 25 years before, Nato forces bombed the city’s Chinese embassy during Operation Allied Force, the two-and-half month campaign against what was then the Federal Republic …
How the CCP infiltrated Britain
Nearly four years after reports first emerged from Wuhan of a mystery virus filling hospitals with sick patients, we are told of an “unidentified pneumonia” circulating in China. Unlike last time, however, a healthy number of sceptics have been paying …
China’s super-rich are fleeing to Singapore
Sentosa, a resort island of palm trees and imported sand off the southern coast of Singapore, is a place devoted to pleasure. It has theme parks, golf courses, elegant gardens and casinos. You get the sense that the rules of …
Xi Jinping is not Mao reborn
Ever since he eliminated China’s two-term limit in 2018, Xi Jinping’s rule has produced a proliferation of articles and studies that compare his rule with Mao’s. The comparison is true only at a very superficial level, relating to the cult …
What pandas teach us about sex
One of my favourite childhood toys was a fuzzy little panda, with grippy arms that would cling to a curtain or bedpost. What I didn’t realise back then, as I doodled World Wildlife Fund-style pandas on my schoolbooks, was how …
America and China should kiss and make up
If Presidents Xi and Biden have one thing in common, it’s that both desperately need a historic win. In the 23 years since Bill Clinton welcomed China into the World Trade Organization, the aura of the two nations’ relationship has …
The myth of Chinese imperialism
When President Xi Jinping first announced his plan to revive the ancient “silk road” between Europe and China in a speech in Kazakhstan 10 years ago, Western leaders paid little notice. There was no indication that the man on stage …
The paranoia behind China’s spy war
The revelation that a parliamentary researcher was arrested in March on suspicion of being a Chinese spy has sent Westminster “reeling” and left the British political establishment in “shock”. Or that, at least, is the impression offered by London’s news …
The dismantling of the Chinese mind
When retired spy Peter Wright announced the existence of Spycatcher, his astoundingly indiscreet MI5 expose, in 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to block its publication in Australia. When that failed, it banned English newspapers from reporting on Wright’s allegations, including …
The West and China share the same fate
A simple and easy narrative is often provided to explain our present moment: a new Cold War, we’re told, is dawning between the United States and China, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy”. The future of …
The clue China is preparing for war
In a sinister reversion to the very worst days of Mao’s rule, Communist Party officials across China are blindly obeying orders to rapidly increase the supply of arable land by any means possible. As with the “Great Leap Forward” that …
Jacinda Ardern still haunts New Zealand
New Zealand’s prime minister, Chris Hipkins, had a bumpy ride on his recent trip to China. Not only because of technical issues with his official plane — the defence aircraft used by the PM keeps breaking down, so the delegation …
What Xi can learn from Tsar Nicholas
As Europe was rocked by uprisings and revolutions during the 1830s and 1840s, one nation remained unaffected, secure in the grip of its authoritarian ruler. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I watched while groups as disparate as English Chartists and Polish nobility …