China

Monday

Cindy Yu

Life in a changing China

From our UK edition

39 min listen

Since 1978, China has changed beyond recognition thanks to its economic boom. 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty as GDP per capita has grown eighty times. Some 60 per cent of the country now live in cities and towns, compared to just 18 per cent before. But you know all this. What’s less talked about is what that does to the people and families who live through these changes. What is it like to have such a different life to your parents before you, and your grandparents before then? How have people made the most of the boom, and what about those who’ve been left behind? A fascinating new book, Private Revolutions, tells the personal stories of four millennial women who were born as these changes took place.

Jan Camenzind Broomby

There’s trouble ahead for Taiwan’s new president

From our UK edition

Not many inaugural ceremonies bring together dragons, dancers, rappers, and a 10-metre-high blue horse breathing steam out of its nostrils. But last Monday morning, as thousands gathered to watch the inauguration of Taiwan’s new president William Lai, Taipei’s residents were treated to just that. And as Lai danced on the stage, he may well have been very happy. His inauguration ceremony, an eclectic display of Taiwanese culture, had gone off without a hitch.  Moreover, his inaugural speech, designed to outline a pragmatic foreign policy while developing new ideas to stimulate Taiwan’s economy, had elicited what felt like a relatively muted reaction from Beijing.

Sunday

Calla Jones Corner

My father’s trunk reminds me of one of my earliest Memorial Days

Perhaps we all have our first memories of celebrating Memorial Day. Mine comes from 1945 when my father returned from the Pacific Theater of World War Two. I was only two. My father didn’t have to go to war as he had a family and was “safe” from the draft. Nevertheless, he volunteered after being recruited by the newly founded OWI, or Office of War Information. The OWI wanted men and women, like my father, whose graphic, photography, writing and communication skills at J. Walter Thompson, the worldwide advertising agency, had been noted and would help defeat the Japanese. He felt it was his patriotic duty and was buoyed, no doubt, by having close friends with families who had volunteered.

Saturday

Ian Williams

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan remains unlikely

From our UK edition

For a second day, yesterday, Chinese fighter jets and warships surrounded Taiwan for drills which the People’s Liberation Army said were designed to ‘test the ability to jointly seize power, launch joint attacks and occupy key areas’. They followed the inauguration earlier this week of Taiwan’s new and democratically elected president Lai Ching-te, who Beijing has characterised as a ‘dangerous separatist’. The exercises were a ‘strong punishment’, said the PLA, presumably for Taiwan’s audacity in electing a leader who wants to distance the island as far as possible from the thuggish leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Thursday

Rohit Kachroo

Gangs of Tehran: how Iran takes out its enemies abroad

From our UK edition

‘It was Friday afternoon, around 2.45. I came out of the house and was going towards the car on the driver’s side,’ Pouria Zeraati says casually. Zeraati – a presenter at the London-based TV station, Iran International – is recounting what was probably an Iranian state-sponsored attack. ‘I was approached by a man who pretended to be someone asking for £3. The second man then approached. They held me strong, very firmly, and the first person stabbed me in my leg.’ The Iranian regime is reshaping the murder-for-hire market in the US and parts of Europe Zeraati is talking on his first day back at work since he was knifed on Good Friday in Wimbledon. It’s still too painful for him to sit down, so we’re standing for our conversation.

Cindy Yu

Be more tiger mum!

From our UK edition

‘What’s it to do with me if your boyfriend wants to break up with you? Or if you cried, or had a fight, these are not things that I as a supervisor care about. I’m not your mother. All I care about is results. Our relationship is just employee-employer.’ In a series of videos posted on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), Chinese tech executive Qu Jing was a little too candid about her management style. Sharply dressed and with hair cut formidably short, she said she expected her staff to be on call 24 hours a day, including at weekends, even at the cost of their personal relationships. If Qu thought these videos would give her a ‘girlboss’ image, she was wrong. They went viral and she became a national hate figure.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, June 2024

The rise of reverse gaslighting Sir — To an otherwise excellent article, I have a small correction. In 1860, the Southern states did not keep Lincoln off the ballot. Unlike today, where voting ballots are printed by the states, in 1860, voters were not presented with official ballots at polling stations that allowed them to check off which candidate they were voting for. Instead, a nineteenth-century ballot or “political ticket” was a slip of paper, provided by each party, listing their candidates for whatever offices were up for election. This allowed voters to easily “vote the ticket” for their party without having to know the names of every candidate and office.

letters

Tuesday

Brian Martin

Fools rush in: Mania, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

From our UK edition

Pearson Converse teaches literature at Verlaine University, Pennsylvania. She exists in an alternative universe to our own in which the Mental Parity Movement holds sway.  There is intellectual levelling, and no ‘cognitive discrimination’. This is high satire, exaggerated, crude, inviting ridicule of the social system portrayed, close to the great satirists of the 18th century in tone if not in style.   Yet Lionel Shriver’s Mania is more than just a satire. It is a study of Pearson’s family life and her ‘unbalanced’ relationship with her best friend from childhood, Emory. Pearson has three children: an intellectually gifted girl and boy by a high-IQ sperm donor, and an averagely intelligent girl conceived with her tree-surgeon partner, Wade.

Monday

Cindy Yu

China’s vendetta against Nato

From our UK edition

46 min listen

Last week, President Xi Jinping visited Serbia. An unexpected destination, you might think, but in fact the links between Beijing and Belgrade go back decades. One event, in particular, has linked the two countries – and became a seminal moment in how the Chinese remember their history. In 1999, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by US-led Nato forces. Three Chinese nationals died. An accident, the Americans insisted, but few Chinese believed it then, and few do today. The event is still remembered in China, but now, little talked about in the West. Xi’s visit was timed to the 25th anniversary of the bombing itself.

Thursday

Charles Lipson

Why Gaza and not the Uighurs?

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.” Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces. But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity.

gaza
Cindy Yu

What Xi wants in Europe

From our UK edition

On a quiet street in Belgrade, a bronze statue of Confucius stands in front of a perforated white block, the new Chinese Cultural Centre. This is on the former site of the Chinese embassy which in 1999 was bombed by US-led Nato forces during the Kosovo war. Three Chinese nationals were killed. The Americans said the bombing was an accident, but the deaths allowed China and Serbia to share a common anti-Nato grievance. This week, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the bombing, Xi Jinping visited Belgrade and talked about the Sino-Serbian ‘bond forged with the blood of our compatriots’. He had been expected to visit the embassy site but seems to have decided that that would be too provocative against Washington.

Tuesday

Maggie Fergusson

The traditional British hedge is fast vanishing

From our UK edition

Five years ago, a documentary about the Duchy of Cornwall featured the then Prince of Wales in tweeds and jaunty red gauntlets laying a hawthorn hedge. It was a brilliant piece of PR. If Charles was a safe pair of hands with a hedge – something as quintessentially English as a hay meadow or a millpond – he was surely a safe pair of hands full stop. A cuckoo in one breeding season needs to eat about 22,500 hairy caterpillars Focusing on a hedge in south-west Wiltshire, Hedgelands combines history, celebration, lament and warning. Christopher Hart is a companionable writer, and makes a powerful case that, at a time of ecological hazard, well-nurtured hedges can play an astonishing role in buttressing the future. First, though, the past.

Tuesday

David Abulafia

Are all great civilisations doomed?

From our UK edition

To quote Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, ‘We’re doomed, doomed!’ That seems to be the message of Paul Cooper’s eminently readable series of essays about how and why 14 civilisations rose to greatness and then collapsed. He begins with the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, and he finishes with Easter Island in the 18th century. He then concludes with dark prophecies about how a few centuries from now an overheated planet will look in a simpler post-industrial age. The style is informal, based on a series of popular podcasts, and one can almost hear the spoken word as one reads.

Monday

Cindy Yu

How China is quietly cutting out American tech

From our UK edition

32 min listen

Last week, President Joe Biden finally signed into law a bill that would take TikTok off app stores in the US, eventually rendering the app obsolete there. This is not the end of the saga, as TikTok has vowed to take legal action. In the US, the drive to decouple from Chinese tech continues to rumble on. In this episode, we’ll be taking a look at the reverse trend – the Chinese decoupling from American tech. It’s a story that tends to go under the radar in light of bans and divestments from the US, but you might be surprised at how much China is cutting out American tech too – and doing it much more quietly. Cindy Yu is joined by the journalist Liza Lin, who has been following this story in her detailed coverage for the Wall Street Journal.

Saturday

Ian Williams

Why was Blinken’s China visit so underwhelming?

From our UK edition

It had been billed as an electrifying encounter – the US Secretary of State preparing to confront Beijing with a catalogue of global misdemeanours, ranging from stepped up support for Russian aggression against Ukraine to the intimidation of ships in the South China Sea belonging to US treaty ally, the Philippines, and the systematic breaking of world trade rules by flooding the market with heavily subsidised electric vehicles (EVs) and other renewable tech. ‘Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support,’ Antony Blinken said on Friday, at the end of a three-day trip that included meetings with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and with President Xi Jinping. ‘I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The Xi files: how China spies

From our UK edition

38 min listen

This week: The Xi files: China’s global spy network. A Tory parliamentary aide and an academic were arrested this week for allegedly passing ‘prejudicial information’ to China. In his cover piece Nigel Inkster, MI6’s former director of operations and intelligence, explains the nature of this global spy network: hacking, bribery, manhunts for targets and more. To discuss, Ian Williams, author of Fire of the Dragon - China's New Cold War, and historian and Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins joined the podcast.. (02:05) Next: Lara and Gus take us through some of their favourite pieces in the magazine, including Douglas Murray’s column and Gus’s interview with the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Nigel Inkster

The Xi files: how China spies

From our UK edition

Most states spy. In principle there’s nothing to stop them. But China’s demand for intelligence on the rest of the world goes far beyond anything western intelligence agencies would typically gather. It encompasses masses of commercial data and intellectual property and has been described by Keith Alexander, a former head of America’s National Security Agency, as ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in history’. As well as collecting data from government websites, parliamentarians, universities, thinktanks and human rights organisations, China also targets diaspora groups and individuals. Chinese cyber intrusions have targeted British MPs and stolen population-level data from the UK Electoral Commission database.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Lessons from the foreign aid votes

The past week has presented a fascinating object lesson in the continued tension over the direction of foreign policy and national security in the MAGA era, on what matters and what doesn’t, and who matters and who doesn’t, when it comes to finding a true forward-looking Trump-Reagan fusion. I wrote about this in the context of reviewing the new book by Matt Kroenig and Dan Negrea, who wrote a Ukraine-focused piece for Foreign Policy last week. But that’s just writing, not voting — and this week brought votes that include more useful indicators of what’s going on.

foreign aid
Jon Pelson

After TikTok, there’s another app we should ban

From our UK edition

The American House of Representatives has passed a bill ordering Bytedance, a Chinese company, to divest from TikTok or stop operating in the USA. Their involvement in the app risks national security, the critics say. But what about other apps owned by Chinese companies? Should they be banned too? The most insidious part about Gauth? Look at the reviews. Apparently it gets the homework wrong. Gauth, or Gauthmath as it is known in the UK and elsewhere in the world, is a tutoring app designed to help children complete their homework in maths and science. It’s currently the #2 educational app in the Apple app store, and is targeted at primary school children. Only the very youngest need parental approval to use the app.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Ex-TikTok employees sound the alarm over ties to China

Cocaine Mitch may be onto something. Last week, the senator called on his colleagues to pass a bill banning TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Now ex-TikTok employees are coming forward with stories detailing the company's entanglement with China.  According to eleven former employees interviewed by Fortune, TikTok has deep ties to Beijing through ByteDance which the company has tried to conceal. Some of the employees were with the company as late as last year, after the launch of Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative to store data of American citizens in the US. Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist at TikTok, worked for a Beijing executive during his time at the company.

tiktok