Ian Williams

Two down and who knows how many more to go. This week, Defence Minister Li Shangfu became the latest of China’s top leaders to vanish, reportedly caught up in a corruption scandal. He has not been seen for three weeks and his disappearance comes three months after that of foreign minister, Qin Gang, and follows a purge at the top of China’s Rocket Force, which oversees its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal. Li lasted just six months in the job, having been appointed in March. At a security forum in Beijing late last month, one of his last public appearances, Li said the world was entering a period of ‘instability’ – though that term would seem to apply more aptly to the top echelons of the Chinese Communist party.

The Chinese Communist Party’s ‘standard map’ is updated each year to include Beijing’s ever-extending territorial claims. Neighbours see it as a sinister measure of Beijing’s imperialist threat, but to the party it is a sacred document, a badge of legitimacy, encapsulating its historic grievances and its growing ambition. It must be faithfully reproduced in school textbooks and in government and corporate handouts and plastered to the walls of workplaces and classrooms.  The timing of the latest edition is unfortunate – or perhaps deliberate – coming just ahead of next week’s summit of G20 countries in Delhi, a meeting that President Xi Jinping intends to snub. It seemed to send a message that China really doesn’t care what its neighbours think.

At least James Cleverly had somebody to meet. The Foreign Secretary's last effort to get to Beijing was postponed after his Chinese counterpart disappeared in late June. Former foreign minister Qin Gang has not been seen or heard of since. Gang's whereabouts are as mysterious as Cleverly’s China policy, which is beginning to feel a lot like a re-tread of the incoherent and failed past strategy of ‘engagement’. That policy, as far as it can be described as one, was driven by greed and gullibility. It added up to little more than kowtowing to Beijing, largely ignoring its growing repression at home and aggression overseas, while at the same time allowing Communist party-linked entities unfettered access to the most sensitive corners of the British economy and academia.

It is strange and surreal, even by the standards of the looking-glass world of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Foreign Minister Qin Gang has disappeared, not seen in public since 25 June and the information vacuum about his whereabouts has inevitably been filled with all manner of rumour about marital infidelity, a love child, and even the dark world of foreign espionage. First the facts, as far as there are any. Qin, a former ambassador to the United States is a protégé of CCP leader Xi Jinping. He was regarded as a rising star, one of the new generation of aggressive ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats and was appointed foreign minister in December ahead of others who were regarded by China watchers as more senior.

China is engaged in a ‘whole of state’ assault on the UK and the government’s approach has been ‘completely inadequate’. That is the devastating verdict of today’s long-awaited report on China by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. The committee accepts that Chinese influence and interference activities may be difficult to detect, but questions whether the government has even been looking in the first place. ‘China’s size, ambition and capability have enabled it to successfully penetrate every sector of the UK’s economy,’ it states.

‘The Chinese Communist party is probably the funniest thing that exists,’ the dissident artist Ai Weiwei once told me, ‘but it doesn’t have a sense of humour.’ The brave band of comics in China’s fledgling stand-up comedy scene are discovering that poking fun at the grim-faced old men who run the country with an ever-tighter grip is a dangerous pursuit. Last month, at a comedy club in Beijing’s Dongcheng district, 31-year-old Li Haoshi mocked a military slogan coined by President Xi Jinping. Li said that ‘Forge exemplary conduct! Fight to win!’ reminded him of his two dogs chasing a squirrel. A clip of the show spread rapidly online.

So now it’s official, Chinese chatbots will have to be ‘socialist’ and woe betide any tech company that allows its AI creation to have a mind of its own. While the communist party wants to lead the world in AI, it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own ‘Content generated by generative artificial intelligence should embody core socialist values and must not contain any content that subverts state power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the country or undermines national unity,’ according to draft measures published Tuesday by China’s powerful internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

It’s 2026 and China begins its invasion of Taiwan with an intense missile bombardment that in a few hours destroys most of the island’s navy and air force. The Chinese navy begins ferrying its main invasion force of tens of thousands of soldiers and equipment across the Taiwan Strait. But all is not lost. US submarines, bombers, and fighter jets, reinforced by Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, rapidly cripple the Chinese fleet. The People’s Liberation Army is defeated, and communist party rule in China destabilised, but victory for the US and its allies comes at an enormous cost. Chinese missiles destroy US bases in Japan and Guam; the US loses dozens of ships, including two aircraft carriers, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of servicemembers.

It has been a bumpy week for China’s beleaguered technology giants. They are under increasing scrutiny overseas, and the communist party continues to tighten the screws on them at home. In many ways they are also their own worst enemies. The UK has become the latest government to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok from government devices over security concerns. Parliament has also banned the app from its network. This follows similar bans from the European Union and 11 countries, including France, New Zealand, Denmark and the US. Western lawmakers are unconvinced by TikTok’s often cack-handed attempts to distance itself from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, and that company’s obligations to the Chinese communist party.