Elliot Wilson

When King George III sent the diplomat-statesman Lord Macartney to Beijing in 1793 to meet China’s all-powerful Qianlong Emperor, history was in flux. The Celestial Empire had dominated world trade for two millennia, yet it was in a state of protracted decline. Britain in contrast was a rising superpower on whose empire (to use a term coined by Macartney) the sun ‘never set’. The mission’s task was simple: unveil the latest wares from Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh – globes, telescopes, weaponry – then wait for a dazzled and covetous audience to open trade routes through northern China. Yet despite pausing lovingly over an ornate clock, the 81-year-old Emperor declined the offer.

Some years ago, I sat with an old China hand in a Beijing teahouse sipping oolong. An American director at a local education firm, his face was grey, creased by decades of pollution and office politics. But when talk turned to the country’s first spacewalk, recently completed, his brow furrowed. 'Have you ever noticed that the government is trying to do everything the United States did, but 50 years later?' He ticked off a list of the mainland’s aims and achievements, from manned space travel, to plans to place a Chinese citizen on the surface of the Moon. But the comparisons don’t end there. For all of its trumpeted exceptionalism, this is a country desperately striving to catch up with and copy the West. A network of Chinese motorways mimic Dwight D.

One-party states are rarely any good at admitting to any form of blunder. It is certainly the case with China’s prickly political leaders, who love to flood domestic media with jolly tales of fashion shows and bamboo-chomping pandas – anything to divert people’s attention from a flagging economy and rising unemployment. This makes today's main headline on China Daily's website all the more arresting: 'Stocks plunge most since 2007 as state support measures fail' the state-run newspaper blared, after the Shanghai Composite share index lost 8.5 per cent in a single day. The wider world followed China’s lead: all major Asian stock indices fell on Monday, with oil tumbling to a six-year low.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3" title="Elliot Wilson and Andrew Sentance discuss China's economic slump"] Listen [/audioplayer]I stood alongside the chairman of the board of a state-owned enterprise in eastern China. The factory floor, partially open to the elements, stretched out far in front of us, littered with towers and blades designed for some of the world’s largest wind turbines. It was an impressive sight, one to which regular visitors to mainland factories are accustomed: China as the workshop of the world. But something was missing: workers. ‘They’ve been given the day off,’ the chairman said with a slight cough, as we stared out over the vast compound.

With all the chaos and confusion engulfing Hong Kong in recent weeks, it’s worth reminding ourselves what an extraordinary city it is — and what a loss to investors the removal of one of the world’s great safe havens would be. Hong Kong has long operated in a culturally neutral zone somewhere between China and the world, a bridgehead between the West and the world’s rising superpower. By the time London handed it back to Beijing in 1997 after 150 years of British rule, a once barren rock had been transformed into a genuinely global city. In the 17 years since, China has adhered largely to a set of principles thrashed out in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, which allowed the city to retain its free media and independent judiciary.

The vendetta against Bangladesh’s Nobel Peace Prize winner ‘It is all lies,’ says Muhammad Yunus, his voice quiet but firm. ‘The media in Bangladesh attacks me unceasingly and I cannot stop them, but the accusations are untrue.’ I believe him absolutely. Yunus is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has done perhaps more than any other living person to alleviate global poverty. Grameen Bank, the microfinance operation that he founded nearly 30 years ago, has (by lending to even the very poorest families) transformed the lives of millions of his fellow Bangladeshis and become a model emulated across the world. But he is now living in fear of his government, which seems bent on discrediting him. ‘My voice is not heard.