Ian Williams

The presence of Chinese president Xi Jinping as ‘guest of honour’ at Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day military parade in Moscow today, which will include soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is both chilling and fraudulent. Chilling, because it is the most explicit endorsement yet by Xi of Russia’s militarism and its poisonous narratives about the Ukraine war, and fraudulent because the Chinese Communist party played a marginal role at best in the Allied victory in the second world war. In the run-up to today's parade, Putin has linked victory over Nazi Germany with his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, which he has falsely claimed is to achieve ‘denazification’ of the country.

For Republican voters sick of “deep-state” shenanigans, Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, seems an ideal appointment. He and his new deputy, the former police officer turned podcaster Dan Bongino, look and sound like exactly the right men to disrupt a bureau that has at times in the past eight years acted as an investigative arm of the Democratic party in its attempts to thwart Donald Trump through the legal system. Patel is considered so pleasingly anti-establishment that his ties to a Chinese e-commerce business have been largely overlooked. He has holdings worth up to $5 million in a fast-fashion company called Shein, founded in China but headquartered in Singapore, and he intends to keep his stock. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se.

In the fight against climate change, China loves to present itself as the world’s White Knight. Armed with wind turbines and solar panels, EVs and batteries, it will rescue us from oblivion if only we would let it.  There’s no shortage of western politicians, academics and organisations who are happy to go along with the idea that China is an ally in the global green revolution. The argument, broadly put, is that whatever our differences on other things (trifles such as security, economics and human rights), surely we can agree on saving the planet. Rachel Reeves seemed to reach that conclusion when she returned from her visit to Beijing last month.

They were only six words on a website, but they helped maintain Beijing’s fiction that Taiwan is part of its territory. Their disappearance has infuriated China’s communist leaders. ‘It gravely contravenes international law and the basic norms of international relations,’ raged Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, on Monday. The website in question was that of the US State Department. The words – ‘we do not support Taiwan independence’ – have been removed from its ‘fact sheet’ along with a tweak to another section that implies stronger support for Taiwan’s right to join international organisations, which Beijing has consistently blocked.

When the security services accessed the mobile phone of Yang Tengbo, the alleged Chinese spy who became a confidant and business partner of the Duke of York, they found a document in which Yang said of the duke, ‘He is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything’. We can only assume there are memos circulating in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) this week describing the visit by Rachel Reeves in similar terms.

As the fallout continues from the latest China spy scandal, it is hard not to conclude that Labour’s policy on Beijing – as far as one can be identified – adds up to appeasement in the vain hope of some economic crumbs from the Emperor’s table. It will certainly be seen by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a green light for stepping up what Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, has described as ‘a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale’. ‘National security is the most important issue of our times,’ said Keir Starmer at the time of 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, a few weeks before the general election.

In an effort to create a cutting edge force, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) has spent billions of dollars expanding and modernising its armed forces at a pace rarely seen in peace time. But on the evidence of the last few days, the most cutting edge features of its top ranks remain corruption and political intrigue. Miao Hua, one of China’s top commanders has been suspended and is under investigation for ‘serious violations of discipline’ – CCP-speak for corruption, according to the defence ministry. Miao, a navy admiral, is one of six members of the party’s powerful central military commission, chaired by President Xi Jinping. He was also head of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) political works department – charged with ensuring CCP control over the PLA.

Few people embody the ideal of scientific excellence as much as Albert Einstein. Each year a Berlin-based foundation bearing his name hands out awards for the sort of research that might have made him proud. This week, the individual prize went to Elisabeth Bik, not a conventional boffin, but a sleuth – a dogged Dutch researcher who abandoned a career at a biomedical start-up for one exposing scientific fraud. That the Einstein Foundation chose to award Bik is testament not only to the impact of her detective work, but also to the way an epidemic of fake science is shaking the scientific establishment. ‘I have a very strong sense that I’m right. I see these problems and I want to convince people there’s fraud in science,’ she said on receiving the award.