China

Tuesday

Ed West

The CofE doomed? Only because it’s surrendered to phony soullessness

The Church of England is doomed, Lord Carey has said, warning that Anglicanism is just ‘one generation away from extinction’. To be fair people have been saying this for a long time; in the mid-19th century the Church decided to make a survey of churchgoing, and were stunned to find out that only a quarter of people in England attended Anglican services and a similar number to non-Conformist services. Half the population wasn’t going at all. Now you’d be lucky to get that many at Christmas.

Thursday

Jonathan Fenby

Does Xi Jinping really want reform? If so, he would unravel China

It is now 35 years since Deng Xiaoping gained mastery of China and launched a process that changed the world. The diminutive, chain-smoking ‘paramount leader’ adopted market economics to make his nation a great power once again and to cement the rule of the Communist party with no room for political liberalisation. The formula he adopted at a Party plenum after winning the power struggle at the end of 1979 that followed the death of Mao Zedong has been amazingly successful by its own lights, but is fast running out of steam.

Friday

Stanley Johnson

How a marine reserve could make Pitcairn the crown jewel of the South Pacific

Last week, while the Mayor of London (pop. 7.8 million) was visiting China, the Deputy Mayor of Pitcairn (pop. 50) was visiting London.  I met Simon Young for afternoon tea in a riverside restaurant near the Tower of London.  Both he, and a fellow member of the Pitcairn Council, Mrs Melva Evans, had travelled thousands of miles to Britain with one specific purpose: to persuade the Government to designate a vast area around the Pitcairn Islands as a marine reserve. Most of us, I suppose, know the Pitcairn Islands as the place where the mutineers from the Bounty settled, with their Tahitian companions, in 1790.  The majority of the current population are their direct descendants.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

The global race means swallowing pride every so often

George Osborne is in Beijing at the moment, drumming up support for Britain in the global race. Although that doesn't quite work because Britain is obviously racing China in this global race, but all the same, he wants China to run alongside Britain cheering it, rather than sledging as it steams ahead. And to be able to do that, this country apparently needs to swallow some of its pride about the sort of country that China is.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Edward Snowden and the Guardian have started a debate…in the Kremlin and Beijing

I was on the Daily Politics earlier, discussing the Guardian / Snowden leaks and debating against a representative from the campaign group 'Liberty'. The 'Liberty' representative kept saying what a lot of apologists for the actions of the Guardian (now including Vince Cable) have been saying - that Snowden and the Guardian should in some way be respected because they have started 'a debate'. They appear incapable of realising that while such leaks may be simply fascinating to them, they are infinitely more fascinating to the Kremlin, Chinese Communist Party, al-Shabaab et al. One other thought.

Thursday

Jasper Becker

The Empress Dowager was a moderniser, not a minx. But does China care?

For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager Cixi was the ultimate oriental sex kitten, an insatiable, manipulating dominatrix who brought the decadent Manchu empire to its knees. While all seems lost, as foreign troops burn the Summer Palace in Peking, she is to be found, thinly disguised, in the pages of Flashman and the Dragon, locked in our hero’s rugged embrace. More recently, it has suited communist historians to concur with Flashman that she was ‘a compound of five Deadly Sins — greed, gluttony, lust, pride and anger — with ruthlessness, cruelty and treachery thrown in’.

Thursday

Elliot Wilson

If you think British banks are bad, you’ve never tried China’s

It’s hard to think of anything more badly run than a Chinese bank. Somalia perhaps, or the BBC’s remuneration committee. Certainly, Beijing’s embattled lenders make ours look like paragons of financial rectitude. We may dislike RBS et al for bringing our economy to its knees, but at least we’re not saddled with a cabal of banks inextricably linked to whoever resides in Downing Street. Let’s start with good old-fashioned service. We may complain about our banks, how they all look the same and bombard us with adverts that would patronise a two-year-old. But at least they pretend to care. China’s banks don’t. Service is dire wherever you go. Internet or mobile banking ranges from poor to non-existent.

Friday

Jeremy Browne

Ed Miliband needs to get out more

They say travel broadens the mind, and Ed Miliband needs to travel more. To China, India and Brazil, but also to South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and Indonesia. If he did he would see the evidence before his eyes of a global revolution taking place. This revolution, and how Britain can best be a contender in the global race, is the biggest fact of life in politics today. To dismiss this phenomenon as a 'race to the bottom' is so breathtakingly arrogant, parochial and ignorant that it demonstrates Ed Miliband's lack of seriousness and suitability as a national leader. The whole world order, that has existed since at least the Industrial Revolution, is undergoing an upheaval. The change is incremental but it is also fast.

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Extremists and the mainstream: the case of Comrade Newman

The Chippenham Labour Party has decided that its candidate to contest the 2015 general election will be one Andy Newman. As the anti-totalitarian blogs Howie’s Corner and Harry’s Place have already argued he is almost certain to be the worst politician to stand for a mainstream party. An innocent observer, who believes the British Left’s protestations that it is for workers’ rights and against sexism, racism and homophobia, could go further wonder how such a man could get close to the Labour Party – let alone close enough to run on a Labour ticket. Newman manages the laughably named “Socialist Unity" website: laughable, not just because it engages in vicious factionalism, but because it indulges the religious strain of far-right thinking.

Thursday

Jasper Becker

The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikötter – review

The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history. This is the notion, propagated in countless books and documentaries, that Mao’s regime started off well, deservedly coming to power on a wave of popular support and successfully tackling the evils left behind by the corrupt and incompetent Nationalists. Then, at the end of the 1950s, it all started to go wrong. There were terrible natural disasters, followed by famine; and, seemingly unaccountably, the brotherhood of brave revolutionaries fell out, creating the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. This is the version still served up to A-level students in Britain.

Thursday

Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr’s diary: Holidays after a stroke, and what the Germans really think of us

It’s been a strange summer. After a stroke, holidays are not what they used to be. We went to Juan-les-Pins for a week in a hotel. It seemed perfect because it had beaches for the family, and at nearby Antibes there is a great little Picasso museum for me to haunt. It has the best drawing of a goat ever made. My daughters and wife doggedly manhandled me across hot sand into and out of the water and I enjoyed that. But being surrounded by so many fit people running, cycling and swimming was a little dispiriting. Mind you, I’ve always been useless at holidays. I hate being too hot. I hate lying around on grit (rebranded as ‘sand’). I hate airports. I hate long car journeys. My idea of a good break involves a bracingly cold northern city and some good art galleries.

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Korea – the 60 year war

In the early morning hours of June 25, 1950 the opening shots of the Korean War were fired. At the time, few could have predicted how seminal this event would be in shaping world history. While the Korean War itself was only fought over a period of three years, no peace agreement was ever reached. In her new book ‘Brothers At War’, Sheila Miyoshi Jager provides a compelling historical analysis of a conflict that set the agenda for much of the Cold War.  Sheila Miyoshi Jager is Luce Associate Professor and Director of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, Ohio. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary Korean politics and history. Would you describe the various phases of the Korean War?

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Who’s talking the most nonsense about Edward Snowden? It’s a tough contest

From which of the actors engaged in the thoroughly entertaining case of Edward Snowden has come the biggest spewing-out of cant, do you reckon? Edward himself? The Guardian? Or the Yanks or -Chinese? Edward was a fairly low-level CIA technical contractor in Hawaii when he released to the world details of his government’s clandestine electronic surveillance programme (Prism) and also some stuff about our own much-loved GCHQ in Cheltenham. Apparently shocked to the core to discover that the security services were secretly spying on people, Edward was gripped by a spasm of narcissistic outrage and said: ‘I don’t want to live in a society which does these sorts of things.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Timothy Beardson interview: It’s urgent that China reforms

Recent convulsions in China’s banks will not, I suspect, have surprised Timothy Beardson, a sinophile, veteran Hong Kong financier and author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future. He argues that China’s extraordinary growth over the last 30 years has come in spite of its banking system. A dinner party might speculate where China would be if not for Mao; but a more immediate question is: where would China be if its banking system supported the private sector? “If the economy has grown by 10 per cent for 30 years, as is reported (and I think that the data in China is very frail – it probably hasn’t grown at 10 per cent a year – but it’s clearly grown at a very high rate and that’s all that matters).

Thursday

Owen Matthews

China: the Middle East’s new power broker

It’s exactly ten years since Iranian dissidents first blew the cover of a secret uranium-enrichment facility under a mountain at Natanz, in a bleak stretch of desert near Isfahan. Ever since, relations between Israel and Iran have headed inexorably towards war. Israeli leaders have insisted that they are ready to launch a military strike — unilaterally if necessary — against Iran if the uranium enrichment continues. Iranian leaders, liberals and hardliners alike, have been equally adamant that the centrifuges will continue to spin. For Israeli hawks like prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the question has been not whether to strike Iran, but when.

Jonathan Mirsky

China’s War with Japan, by Rana Mitter – review

The Sino-Japanese struggle that began in 1937, two years before the rest of the world plunged into war, is not as unknown as Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford, contends in this comprehensive new book. His copious notes, after all, display how well that conflict has been studied by many scholars. But in the sense that few Westerners under the age of 80 can string more than two sentences together about those terrible eight years, he is right. It is a big story, and for the most part Mitter tells it well. The scene — China — is vast. Two competing leaders, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, dominate it.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Meet Chen Guangcheng – a hero of the Chinese people

The other week I had the honour of spending some time with a great hero. Chen Guangcheng is the blind Chinese human rights activist who made world news last year when he escaped from house arrest and made his way to Beijing where he claimed asylum in the US embassy. Now living in the US with his immediate family, Chen and I had some time to sit down and talk during a brief visit to London. We talked about China, Communism, his extraordinary story and his hopes for his own - and China's - future. He relayed, in unsparing but necessary detail, the gruesome and inhumane reality of the Chinese Communist Party's one-child policy. I also asked him to talk about his opinion of David Cameron and William Hague, who refused to meet with him on this trip. The interview is in this week's magazine.

Douglas Murray

Chen Guangcheng – the brave Chinese activist who David Cameron refused to meet

How did a blind Chinese dissident scale the walls of his house while under house arrest, evade government surveillance, travel hundreds of miles to Beijing, seek asylum in the American embassy and in the process shine attention on a horror the world has grown used to? The questions for Chen Guangcheng are legion. Last week I met up with him in London. Chen, who is 41, has been blind since childhood and wears smart dark glasses. At our meeting place in central London — the headquarters of a Christian organisation which has helped arrange his visit — he sits upright, suited and tied, occasionally repositioning himself by feeling the corners of the table. He does not share the world’s fascination with his personal story.

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

The Dark Road, by Ma Jian – review

If you are considering adopting — that is, buying — a Chinese baby girl, recycling a television or computer, or buying a Vuiton bag, think again. Ma Jian, author of the startling Beijing Coma, prepared for this evocative and sometimes horrifying novel by travelling through Chinese regions few tourists see. There he encountered some of the millions of women who had just given birth to babies declared illegal by the one-child family laws, which were taken away and sold by corrupt officials to rich foreigners eager to adopt. He saw, too, the effects on the poor migrants who disassemble our unwanted televisions and computers and poison themselves by handling the toxic parts.

Wednesday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy. Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China. It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has reality caught up with Chan’s fiction.