Ian Williams

The Chinese Communist party (CCP) is spooked by Halloween. In Shanghai, police have rounded up people gathering in costumes that included a Donald Trump with bandaged right ear, Spiderman, Deadpool and Batman. A man dressed as Buddha was also shown being escorted away in videos posted on Chinese social media, but quickly deleted by online censors. The aim seems to be to prevent a repeat of last year’s celebrations, when revellers used the occasion to take a tongue-in-cheek poke at the CCP, and costumes included a surveillance camera and hazmat suits (a swipe at Covid lockdowns).

It was presented as a bold stimulus to boost China’s ailing economy – but while it excited stock markets in Asia, Western economists were underwhelmed. At a rare press conference in Beijing on Tuesday, the usually gnomic governor of the People’s Bank of China, Pan Gongsheng, unveiled a range of measures designed to ‘support the stable growth of China’s economy’ and see that it hits this year’s target of five per cent growth. There was a time when such measures, which included an interest rate cut and more funds to support the stock and property markets, would have quickened the pulse of investors. But this is unlikely to reverse their exodus.

So China wants to make the world more ‘safe, reasonable and efficient’ by training thousands of police officers from across the globe to ‘help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities’. The offer came this week from Wang Xiaohong, China’s minister for public security, at a police forum attended by officials from 122 countries in the eastern city of Lianyungang. There were few details, but then few are needed. Authoritarian countries will see China’s frequently brutal approach to law and order, coupled with its zero tolerance for dissent, as rather appealing – and many will already have invested in the technical side of China’s surveillance state.

Elon Musk revels in the role of ‘free speech absolutist’. Last week, for instance, he jumped to the defence of Pavel Durov, the head of the messaging and social media app Telegram, after he was arrested by the French police. But while Musk claims he is a defender of free speech, he frequently kowtows to the Chinese Communist party, for whom the concept is alien. Musk is now the CCP’s favourite western capitalist. So although he is eager to tell his 196 million Twitter followers that ‘Britain is turning into the Soviet Union’, he has avoided antagonising China. He has echoed CCP talking points on contentious issues, such as Taiwan and artificial intelligence, while remaining silent on China’s human-rights record.

Relations between China and Russia are going from strength to strength – or so they say. In reality, the strain is beginning to show. ‘Against the backdrop of accelerating changes unseen in a century, China is willing to further strengthen multilateral coordination with Russia,’ said Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency after a meeting on Wednesday in Moscow between premier Li Qiang and Vladimir Putin. Far more intriguing, though, was what wasn’t said, and which suggests a growing tensions in their ‘no limits’ partnership. First there were the cyber spies.

The news was seemingly big but the announcement curiously low key. Earlier this month, China declared that it had discovered what it described as the world’s first large-scale gas field in ultra deep waters and not far beneath the seabed. Lingshui 36-1 contained 100 billion cubic metres of gas, said the China national offshore oil corporation (CNOOC), and the data and plans to extract it had been approved by the ‘relevant government authorities’. It did not give a timescale or the precise location of the field – which it merely described as ‘southeast of Hainan’, China's southernmost island province. It is easy to see why maritime borders matter to Vietnam The reticence is because the gas isn’t China’s – at least not legally.

Four Chinese warships were spotted off the coast of Alaska last weekend. According to the US coast guard, the ships were in the Bering Sea around 124 miles from the Aleutian Islands. They were inside America’s exclusive economic zone, which extends to 200 miles, but within international waters. ‘We met presence with presence to ensure there were no disruptions to US interests,’ said a coastguard commander, as he monitored their progress. The Chinese were within their rights to be there, but the uneasy standoff was another example of Beijing boosting its presence around the Arctic.

The visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin to the north-eastern Chinese city of Harbin today was no doubt designed as a symbol of the tightening economic relationship between the two countries. Harbin is a gateway for their burgeoning trade; the Russian leader was there to open a China-Russia expo. In the minds of many Chinese nationalists, though, Harbin has far darker symbolism. ‘Little Moscow’, as the city is sometimes called, was established by Russian settlers at the end of the nineteenth century and was the administrative centre of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway. This was an imperialist project to give Russia a shortcut to Vladivostok and the Russian Far East, which were themselves snatched from the decaying Qing Dynasty.

The personal details of members of the UK’s armed forces appear to have been the latest target of China’s prolific cyber spies, with the Ministry of Defence’s payroll system containing the names, bank details and some addresses of up to 272,000 people on its books targeted by hackers. The government though is directing its fury at the hapless MoD contractor whose systems were breached, rather than the suspected perpetrators in Beijing. Defence secretary Grant Shapps said the attack was carried out in recent days and was ‘the suspected work of a malign actor’. He would not name the actor, though in multiple background briefings China was identified as prime suspect – a ‘fabricated and malicious slander’, according to the Chinese embassy in London.