Ian Williams

Twenty twenty-two is the year that Xi Jinping plans to seize power for life, but it is not going according to script. He is retreating further into his bunker – a self-isolation that is amplifying the Communist party’s arrogance and insecurities. Challenges are mounting at home and abroad, which will make for a bumpy year in China’s growing rivalry with the West. Xi’s most immediate problem is Covid-19, where he has backed himself into an increasingly untenable ‘zero tolerance’ cul-de-sac, just as most of the rest of the world is learning to live with the virus. Just before the new year, gun-toting police in the city of Jingxi paraded four people accused of breaching Covid control measures through the streets.

China reacted to the news of the US government’s diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics with predictable fury — a foreign ministry spokesman described it as a ‘naked political provocation’. He then added that US officials had jumped the gun because they had not even been invited. That seemed like a bit of added petulance, but it is entirely in keeping with China’s growing mood of self-isolation — a mood that is beginning to have some bizarre and dangerous consequences. The Chinese Communist party has always been a paranoid organisation, with a deep suspicion towards the outside world, but President Xi Jinping has taken this to new heights. Western policy-makers are alarmed.

The commercial road to Beijing is littered with grovelling apologies, cringeworthy kowtows and silent complicity in repression. That’s why the Women’s Tennis Association’s decision this week to suspend all tournaments in China is so important. In doing so the WTA is demonstrating commendable support for the missing tennis player Peng Shuai, but it is also putting moral clarity ahead of business and making a rare stand against the Chinese Communist Party. In a statement released on Wednesday, WTA chief executive Steve Simon said, ‘In good conscience, I don’t see how I can ask our athletes to compete there.’ He said he had serious doubts that Peng was ‘free, safe and not subject to intimidation’.

Serena Williams has joined the growing ranks of international tennis stars expressing concern over the disappearance of Peng Shuai. The former world No. 1 said she was ‘devastated and shocked’ about the plight of the Chinese tennis star, who has not been seen since she accused a senior Communist party official of sexual assault. The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) said it was prepared to pull its tournaments out of China if it does not get satisfactory answers. ‘This is bigger than business. Women need to be respected and not censored,’ said chairman Steve Simon. He was demonstrating something altogether too rare in dealings with China – a willingness to put moral principle ahead of the lucrative Chinese market.

China’s #MeToo movement has taken a step closer to the centre of power in Beijing, after sexual abuse allegations by a top Chinese tennis star were made against a man who until recently was one of Xi Jinping’s closest henchman at the pinnacle of Communist party rule. The tennis star, Peng Shuai, made the allegations against Zhang Gaoli, who until 2018 was vice-president and a member of the seven-strong Standing Committee of the Party’s Politburo, the country’s highest ruling group. Peng alleged in a post on her Weibo social media account that Zhang had assaulted her at the beginning of an affair that lasted from 2012 to 2017.

China is seeking a grand bargain from the Taliban: eliminate the groups Beijing says are stirring up trouble among its Muslim Uighurs in exchange for massive aid to rebuild Afghanistan. It sounds enticing for both sides as they sit down in Doha this week, but there are numerous questions about whether either can deliver, and a good chance that China will become the next imperial power sucked into the ‘graveyard of empires’. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, and Wang Li, China’s foreign minister, are reportedly meeting in the capital of Qatar just as the Taliban faces a growing number of attacks from Isis-K, a provincial affiliate of Islamic State. Baradar is insisting that the security situation is ‘under control’.

Over the weekend, China sent waves of warplanes racing towards Taiwan in numbers not seen before, forcing the democratic self-ruled island to scramble fighters and ready its air defence missiles. The United States says it is ‘very concerned’ by Beijing’s ‘provocative’ actions and reiterated Washington’s ‘rock solid’ commitment to the island. According to Taiwan’s defence ministry, 38 Chinese aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers and J-16 fighter jets, entered its air defence identification zone on Friday, and another 39 did so again on Saturday — the largest incursion to date. Some 16 more were sent on Sunday.

Zhou Xiaoxuan was in tears when she emerged from the Beijing court around midnight on Tuesday. ‘I’m really sorry there wasn’t a better result,’ she said in a video clip shared by supporters after the court threw out a sexual harassment case against one of the country’s most famous television hosts. Zhou claimed she had been forcibly groped and kissed while working as an intern at state broadcaster CCTV in 2014. The case was seen as a test of China’s proclaimed determination to clamp down on abuse, and it galvanized the country’s fledgling #MeToo movement.

The revelations this week of the alarming influence of Huawei within the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management provide the latest evidence of the tightening grip of China on Britain’s leading university. The Times reports that three out of four directors of the centre — part of the university’s Judge Business School — have ties to the telecoms giant, which has close links to the Chinese Communist party. The centre’s ‘chief representative’ is a former vice-president of the company who has been paid by the Chinese government. An honorary fellow of the centre wrote a book praising Huawei’s ‘ability to transform the intellectual elite into a band of soldiers with the same set of values and resolve'.

The employee alleged that she was forced to drink heavily at a banquet during a business trip and was then sexually assaulted by her boss. She informed her managers, but they failed to act and told her to keep quiet. So she staged a protest in the company canteen and shared details of her ordeal in an 11-page document posted on a company message board. The company was Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant, and the document quickly spread, creating a firestorm online. Chief executive Daniel Zhang struggled to contain the damage, saying he was ‘shocked, angry and shameful’. He fired the accused manager, and the two others who had failed to act were forced to resign. ‘We must rebuild, we must change,’ he said.