A compilation of Chinese Whispers: understanding China
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The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Along with a free £20 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk forward slash voucher. Hello and welcome to this compilation of some of the best moments from Chinese whispers with me, Cindy Yu.

Thank you for being such a long-time listener of the podcast. As you may have heard, it's coming to an end because I'm joining The Times and Sunday Times later this year. But for you now, here is a compilation of just some of the best discussions I have had from across the series with journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about Chinese politics, society and more.

And if you'd like to keep up to date with my writing, then please sign up to my free Chinese Whispers sub stack at chinesewhispers.substack.com. I hope to see you there. And thank you again for listening. 再见!

The Chinese government puts forward an idea of what it is to be Chinese, of what contributes to that Chinese identity, which is often shared by a lot of Chinese people themselves. Some of the key tenets of this identity are 5,000 years of history, for example, dating all the way back to the Yellow Emperor. There's also this notion of territorial sovereignty, this territorial wholeness, which includes places like Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and even the South China Sea.

And there's also a definition of what peoples live in China, 56 ethnic groups of which the Han are the vast majority. But amongst these and other tenets of national identity, how much of them actually have a solid historical basis as opposed to being constructed in some way by people in recent history?

That's the question I'll be asking today, together with the journalist Bill Hayton, who has written the book The Invention of China, looking at all of these questions. He pins a lot of what we know as modern Chinese identity down to a group of reformers that were active at the end of the Qing dynasty. And without giving you even more spoilers, Bill, welcome to the podcast.

To start with, can you set out your store? You write that you are not a historian, but you're collating and making accessible the academic debates that have been happening in recent history, this revisionism of Chinese history that looks at the constructed nature of Chinese identity. The book is...

a beginner's guide to the emergence of Chinese nationalism. But it's not just a book about things which happened 100 years ago. Every chapter begins with a modern day example of how these debates, which emerged in the late 19th and then carried on into the early 20th century, how they affect China and its relations with the world today. And I try to sort of make a

a lot of things which maybe you might study in a university degree, sort of accessible to a general audience. And what is your argument about, because you call it the invention of China, which is quite a radical thing to say. Yeah, I mean, it sounds slightly provocative. Well, it's deliberately provocative. I mean, an academic might call it the construction of China. It's the way that people took certain ideas and then they remolded them and they sort of used them in a political way to recreate an idea of China.

And so it's not to say, of course, that there were, you know,

Of course, there were Chinese people and there was a Chinese state. But the way that that was reimagined around the turn of the 19th, 20th century really changed our perception of China. And I think, and let's say the Chinese people's perception of China as well. And what I wanted to show in the book was that this was very much a hybrid process, that the modern China that we see today was created, constructed, I use the word invented, by people who were

In very close dialogue with Europeans and Westerners generally, either through the things they were reading or actually physically that they were in exile or they were traveling around the world and encountering new ideas and modernizing principles.

As you get towards the end of the 19th century, there is a sense of crisis at the end of the Qing Empire, which had ruled from 1644. And of course, you've had the two Opium Wars, 1840 and 1860.

But then actually there was a sort of 30-year period where there was this attempt to modernize without changing too much of the politics. And there was a sense that the European powers, Britain and France, wanted to help the Qing Empire to modernize. They provided shipyards and all this kind of industrial exchange. And there was the idea of the self-reliance.

strengthening movement that they wanted you know there was an internal modernization campaign that wanted to understand how the west had become strong to take those ideas about technology and science and modernize china or modernize the qing empire but then that

of doing things sort of runs out of road. And the crisis is 1894, 1895 when you have the Sino-Japanese War. And Japan, which the Qing Empire had seen as this little upstart country on the other side of the sea, beats the Qing Empire comprehensively. And there's just a total sense of crisis. And a lot of the sense of crisis is informed by European ideas about social Darwinism. And I mean, it's a...

I think maybe an older generation would be much more familiar with ideas of social Darwinism. But it was very strong, the idea that the races were competing with one another for survival in this Darwinistic sense, and that the strong races would survive and the weak would fail. And it looked like the whites were going to win and the yellows were going to be confined to extinction. And this is the language that's being used at the time. So what can, and I'm using the words at the time, what can the yellow race do in order to survive? And so...

real sense of crisis. And then three years from 1895 to 1898, an intense burst of reform. And then the Empress comes in and says, you know, that's enough of that. And the reformers are exiled off to Japan. And it looks like there's going to be a kind of an end to this reform process. But by sending all of these reformers off to Japan or into exile, actually, they encounter more and more of these ideas. And so for the 1900s,

All of these Chinese reformers, a lot of them are in Japan, but some are in Southeast Asia, some are in Europe, some in North America. And they're just, you know,

absorbing all of these ideas and arguing one another about what kind of country China should be in the future. And then when the revolution comes in 1911, 1912, all these ideas sweep back into the country. And that's when, you know, the real change takes place. But it's this, it's the fact that all these people were outside of the country, I think, looking back at their homeland through foreign eyes in some ways.

That created this sense of China and where it had to go in the future. That's a fantastic overview of that period of time. Very clear. Thank you so much. So I guess what we can see is that, you know, maybe chronologically divided as well. There were reformers, people who wanted a constitutional monarchy or constitutional imperial dynasty, who, as you say, got exiled when the empress said no to that. And then there were people who were more radical.

revolutionaries, Republicans who wanted no Qing empire, no empire at all. And they got their way in the Republic in 1911. Well, for a little bit, at least. Yes. Yeah. For the next 40, 50 years. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to move on to the Communist Party of today in a little bit. But first, maybe some context, because I think that's important to people who are not social scientists, which is probably

really a lot of listeners. But the construction of a national identity is not unusual. And certainly, I wouldn't have thought any national identity was not constructed by to some extent, in terms of arbitrariness or geopolitical interests. So I guess maybe just, could you talk a little bit about, you know, you write in your book that other countries have this as well. And you mentioned Britain, what is like the UK equivalent of constructing a national identity that because we're not saying that China, we're not saying that China is the

No, absolutely not. And I mean, I think this period, late 19th, early 20th century, this was happening all around the world. And it was, without getting too social sciencey, I mean, industrialization, modernization, urbanization, changes in old social relations, these were causing crises everywhere. I mean, in Britain, I mean, the idea of Britain is a construction. I mean, a good sort of quiz question is to ask anybody in Britain where...

when did our country get its name, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Well, only in 1921, you know, when Southern Ireland becomes the Republic. And so, you know, we've had to construct our own identity of what it means to be British. I mean, which nation lives in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? The problems in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland show that we haven't answered these questions ourselves. And the question of how we relate to, you know, to the rest of Europe. I mean, it used to be, I think that there was a sort of

We had a view of it. We were British and that was the end of the discussion. But obviously Brexit has reanimated all of those conversations now. And yes, I mean, you've seen the same thing in France. And as you say, Italy, you know, I mean, there's there are sort of countries like France and Italy that sort of their nationalism was forging a single state out of lots of small parts. And then I guess you had a

where you had an empire like, say, the Ottoman Empire or the Qing Empire, you had a nationalism there and they went in different directions. The Ottoman Empire fragmented and the Arab world became independent and the Ottoman Empire retreated to its Turkish core. Whereas in the case of the Qing Empire, it didn't retreat to its Chinese core. It remained...

China remained, you know, it's still full territory, but it had to change its composition within that territory. And the People's Republic of China is still trying to keep together those different territories. And I guess they saw the experience of the Soviet Union and they didn't want these satellite states to break off. So let's talk about what's happening now then, because I think one difference between the construction of China and the construction of

Britain, for example, is that the construction of Britain can have this freedom of speech and have this debate that's still going on. Whereas increasingly in China, in modern China, you can't do that. The party controls the Qing narrative ever closer. It controls this narrative about the century of humiliation, about the territorial claims, because

It's obviously important to its own power. Yeah, actually understanding and controlling the past is really important if you want to tell people that the shape of the country is natural and the way it's run is natural. I mean, there have been shifts in time. I mean, there have been periods when...

the government, the state, the party, wanted to sort of smelt everybody into a single unit to make everybody the same. And then there was a period, say, sort of the 80s and 90s, when there was a tolerance for difference, shall we say. And then, you know, under Xi, there's clearly an attempt to kind of, you know, to go back to the smelting mold. And in the book, I trace...

This is not a new thing. I mean, these two ways of looking at difference were there from the beginning. Someone like Sun Yat-sen was definitely a smelter. He wanted to kind of, you know, he looked at the United States and he saw not so much the treatment of, say, black and white, but white.

all the different Europeans that had migrated to the US, you know, Italians and Brits and Germans, they'd all been smelted to make them into Americans. And he really liked that idea. And Liang Jichao also loved that idea, that they had a single strong nation. And yet, you know, Xi Jinping's father, he saw the Cultural Revolution's effects in Tibet and he...

saw that was a bad thing and so he led a movement to have much greater autonomy and allow Tibetans to run their own affairs and now Xi Jinping himself he's definitely a smelter he's definitely about making everybody feel Chinese in every way possible but smelting with Han dominance yes it's not like

Maybe, you know, I mean, everybody, you know, in Shanghai likes Uyghur food, but, you know, that doesn't mean they're all going to kind of adopt a bit of Uyghur culture and sort of even everything out kind of, you know, across the country. No, there's definitely an idea of what is higher civilization and what needs to be got rid of.

And finally, Bill, you've got a paperback version of this book coming out soon. I hope so, in the new year, yes. Are there bits that you're changing on or amending on or bits that you wish you could change on since this hardback came out? No, I think I'm going to leave it as it is. I mean, there's, you know, people who got irritated by the word invention, they're still going to be inventing. But I mean, if I'd called it the construction of China, people would have thought it was about civil engineering. I think that's a very fair point. Thank you so much, Bill Hayden. It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Over the last few hundred years, China has had a difficult and complicated relationship with foreigners. On the one hand, foreigners added to the country's intellectual richness by introducing Western philosophy and science, and on the other, these contributions often came accompanied by guns and gunboats.

Today's China is still a very homogenous place. Out of a country of 1.4 billion, there are fewer than 1 million foreigners living there. So what is it like to try to make China one's home, if you were British or anything else? I spoke to two long-time China hands in a discussion about identity, history and belonging today.

They are Mark Kitto, who's a writer and actor who lived in China for 16 years, setting up two businesses in succession there, but now back living in Norfolk. And Alec Ash. You might know his 2016 book Wish Lanterns, all about Chinese millennials. He moved to China around the time that Mark left in 2012 and has just moved back to the UK after a decade there.

I wanted to find out from them what it was like to be foreign in China, given the country's complicated history with Brits and other foreigners, and whether the Chinese identity itself is particularly hard to penetrate. In the last few years, at least anecdotally, I also feel that there has been an exodus of foreigners leaving China, not least because of zero Covid.

Though it's worth saying, of course, that in this discussion, given that Alec and Mark have both left, perhaps their perspectives don't represent those who continue to live in China.

I started by asking Alec to give us a bit of background on the time that he spent in China. I first went to China fresh out of university in 2007 to do some teaching in the hills of western Qinghai province. And then I went back in 2008 for two years of language study at Beijing University. And that was sort of the zenith, really, of the sort of exciting times. Everyone was looking at China. It was opening up.

Everyone thought there might be a color revolution or something, rather naively. And I then went back in 2012.

and was there continuously for the last 10 years writing books and articles about China. And it turns out that it sort of went the other direction and has become more sort of authoritarian and illiberal. But really, the reason why I went was because it was and remains, I think, such a vibrant and sort of protean and swiftly changing country. But, you know, for a young man and a fresh graduate, go east young man sort of vibe, which I'm sure was the same with Mark back in the 90s.

Mark, tell us about your respective experience. Well, just to set the perspective, we can say that I first went to China as a student in the year that Alec was born. I wasn't going to age you, Mark. I am the old China hand of your set-up this afternoon. The more experienced, the wiser. I don't know about that. But kind of similar. For me, it was an interest in languages, the Far East language.

and that Deng Xiaoping had just said that he was opening up China and it sounded like it was a place to go for an adventure. It was all going to be new and exciting and I wanted to. I hoped that I could build a sort of life and career over there. And in 86, as a student at the Beijing Language Institute, I definitely fell in love with China.

Then came home to do my finals. We walked out of our exam halls in the middle of June 1989. And so we all thought, well, that's a bit of a waste of four years. We'll never go back. But we did go back, many of us. And the way I sometimes describe it is that pre-89, there was a fantastic optimism and excitement about what might happen.

happen in China as it sort of shook off the really strict communist rules that it had been living under and the cultural revolution was over and all that. And everything was going to get better. When I went back eventually in 96 to live and work,

There was a similar sort of optimism, but it wasn't everything's going to get better, it's everyone's going to get richer. Which wasn't too objectionable, but it was definitely a different atmosphere or underlying feeling, but it was still very positive.

And then things, yes, have changed. And just to riff off that, because I find it always interesting how there are these cycles of China, as there always have been, but really ever since sort of 49, there's been cycles of feng and shou, right? Tightening and loosening up. And we as foreigners...

in China, migrants in China, get swept along with these cycles, these waves, as sort of flies on the beast's back. And so, in a sense, sort of ever has it been thus. There was the excitement of the 80s, followed by tightening up in the early 90s. And as with me, in 2008, this Olympic wave of foreigners who came, that was such an exciting time, and it seemed to be opening up. So the waves continue, and we continue to attempt to surf them.

Lovely analogy. I just wondered how objective these waves are, because, Mark, by that point, you were already, I feel, getting disillusioned with China. By 2008? Yeah. Oh, yes, the Chinese Olympics, not the Beijing Olympics. They were known as the Chinese Olympics by China. They were a fantastic propaganda opportunity. I would say, rather than if you were suggesting that it was sort of an opening-up period when they were welcoming in people for the Olympics, it was, in fact, the opposite.

I had friends who could not get visas to China because it was the Olympics. They had satisfied the numbers that they wanted to sort of fill the camera frames behind the, you know, in the shots of the events and particularly my own commercial ventures, which had ended shortly before that. I mean, the

The magazines that I used to run... So you founded magazines, didn't you? Yes, I've skipped a bit. I lost them to a government takeover in 2004. It was a good idea to found a media source in China. Please don't say it that way. Yes. Yeah, I thought you said I was wise. Definitely that wasn't. But they were taken over again for the Olympics because during the Olympics, everything had to be Chinese.

IKEA became Chinese when they furnished the Olympic Village. I think it was the beginning of the end or the beginning of this cycle of tightening because as a sort of fresh-faced young China watcher, it felt like the Olympics was this sort of great moment and coming out party, to use that well-worn phrase.

cliche and then in hindsight it turns out that that was the moment when things really started to tighten up and they're much just less welcoming it's been a steady decline of less and less welcoming to outside influence outside business and if that was the zenith it's now reached its nadir i think

And you have a play at the moment, a one-man play, which is very fun, and I've seen it and I can highly recommend. Thank you so much. But it's an interesting historical parallel because it's set in a time when foreigners in China also played a very interesting, controversial, rewarding role. Can you tell us about what you were thinking there? What I was thinking there, so the play is called Chinese Boxing. It's using the story of the Boxer uprising, which took place in 1900 and was very much an anti-foreign movement movement

supported by the government at the time, the Qing dynasty. And the point of the show is to get people to understand this constant, never-ending misunderstanding between China and the West, and Britain especially. And, I mean, yes, it was an anti-foreign movement.

which I think we're seeing an echo of today. In fact, the inspiration for the play was the cyber army, the unofficial cyber army that the government uses to criticise and attack people who say things that they're not happy about, about China, especially foreigners, but also Chinese too. The 50 Cent Gang, you've heard of. I mean, they are a classic example of the government co-opting a sort of popular...

But what am I trying to say with the show? As I say, is that those days, over 100 years ago, the Boxer uprising, it was very much a direct conflict in between the West and China. Yet at the same time, on both sides, you had people who understood the other side.

The focus of the show is about the siege of the legations in Beijing when all the diplomatic community was holed up for 55 days and held on by the skin of their teeth. They only survived because the Chinese were secretly allowing them to survive, the good guys. And likewise, the foreigners themselves, who I think you appreciated when you saw it because we were talking about it earlier, they come across as very anti-Chinese or sort of them-and-us imperialist. But actually, they're incredibly sympathetic to the Chinese too.

And so I think the main point is there is, within this misunderstanding and this apparent sort of surface conflict, there's a lot of sympathy and understanding between the two sides. I just wish that there's more of it. That's very nice. I mean, I think it's very complicated, isn't it? I mean, what's fascinating about this particular episode is that in China, growing up, certainly in schools and stuff, the siege is not what you learn about. No.

The siege of international diplomatic delegations is not what you learn about. What you learn about instead is the Baguolianjun, the Eight Nation Alliance, that the siege then needed to free them. But for obvious reasons, in Chinese education, it's the Baguolianjun, the Eight Nation Alliance, which is these foreigners coming in, kind of invading your country into the heart of Beijing, all of this stuff. So it becomes, again, a story of the Chinese versus the foreigner and the Chinese being victims again. Alec, and...

And Mark, thank you so much. Thank you, Cindy. Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There's renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China's economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables.

There's trade, of course, but the imbalance in that, some $370 billion in 2022, tilts in China's favour and only serves as another source of ammunition for America's Sino-sceptics. And of course, very much similar things are happening from the Chinese side too.

At this moment, it seems like US-China tensions are inevitable and have been around for ages. But look into the not-so-ancient history and you'll find a totally different picture. In fact, when it comes to communist China's early entry into the global economy, American policymakers and business people were vital in the 1970s and 80s. You could even say that a big part of China's economic success was made in America.

I'm joined today by Elizabeth Ingleson, Assistant Professor of International History at the LSE, whose upcoming book contains some very interesting research on this question. It's called Made in China, When US-China Interests Converge to Transform Global Trade. Elizabeth Ingleson, welcome to Chinese Whispers. Hi Cindy, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. Now, I think listeners know all about the miracles of China's economic growth, lifting 800 million people out of poverty in just five decades, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Most people put that down to Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms after 1978. But you say in your book that actually China started opening up even before then under Mao. Can you take us back to the 1970s and what was happening before then? Yeah, and it's this really...

surprising discovery that I myself wasn't expecting to find. So often when we talk about China's reforms today, Deng's influence looms really large in these narratives, and for good reason. You know, Deng's reforms in 1978, the reform and opening, were crucial to understanding China's political economy today.

But when you switch your lens just a little earlier to the 1970s, you see that there were experimentations happening, or I discovered that there were experimentations happening within China from the very early 1970s under Mao, largely as a consequence of a shift in strategy during the Cultural Revolution.

So as the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s begins to take a different turn, you have the death of Lin Biao,

Chinese policymakers, particularly more pragmatic-oriented policymakers, begin to think about different ways to develop China's economy because ultimately the history of the Communist Party in China is a history of experimenting with different development strategies. It failed during the 1950s with the Great Leap Forward. It was failing again with the Cultural Revolution. And by the early 1970s, you see a new attempt to

at experimenting with ways of development. And one of the crucial reasons that this 1970s experimentation began to get legs in the 1970s is because it coincided precisely at the moment with profound changes happening within the American economy too. And so what I discovered was that the changes happening within China were part of a different process

or a different side of a similar story happening within the United States too. And so I begin the book in 1971. And so in this year that you see three key changes, two within the United States and one within China itself. So in the US, President Nixon implements two very surprising policy changes that are often referred to as the Nixon shocks.

In July, he announced that he was going to go to China. He was ending what had been a 20-year, almost complete isolation between the two nations. And in July 1971, he says, I'm going to go to China. I'm going to start to sort of repair the relationship with this really deep Cold War foe. So this is known as the China shock, the first Nixon shock.

And then a month later, Nixon announces that he's going to be ending the Bretton Woods system of dollar-gold convertibility. It's often referred to as the Nixon economic shock. And these two shocks, the China shock and the economic shock, were connected at the time, but they were connected because of the surprise element that they had, that Nixon was sort of using the tool of surprise for his own political benefit to

But when we look actually at the longer term repercussions of these two shocks, you can actually see that they unintentionally worked together, that opening up to China and beginning a process of rapprochement with China

in combination with ending dollar-gold convertibility, which freed up capital and enabled business people to ultimately be more fluid in how they use their finance and ultimately led to a sort of what we call financialization of globalization. And those two things did begin to work together. And I can talk a little bit more about how that happened later.

But the third key thing that happens in 1971, which certainly wasn't connected to those other two changes at the time, is that Lin Biao dies, a key military chief within China, dies in very mysterious circumstances. And it's this really key moment in the cultural revolution within Chinese high politics that more pragmatically minded policymakers in China begin to be freed up

to turn to different developmental models or experiment with different developmental models for China's political economy. Lin Biao had been very against China

any kind of opening up with the United States. And with his death was taken away the limitation that a lot of more sort of pragmatic and more open to US Chinese policymakers were. And is that mainly Zhou Enlai or who are the people we're talking about here? Because Deng Xiaoping at the time, I think, was working in a factory cell

way in Central China. Yes, he was. Zhou Enlai was crucial to this story. So too were Shen Yun and some other, Li Shen Yan, another sort of key economic policymaker who then return again or sort of they

and come back again throughout the 1970s and return again in the early 1980s. Yeah, you've got an incredible figure in your book that China's foreign trade actually tripled between 1971 and 1974. And, you know, I think people have this idea, I certainly have this idea of the Cultural Revolution where many foreign things were seen as suspects. So it's fascinating to hear about what the death of Lin Biao was able to open up. But presumably Mao was also endorsing this kind of experimentation. I mean, he was the one who also met Nixon.

Absolutely. Mao was crucial to this entire story. Nothing that was happening in these experiments happened without Mao's approval. And so what you see in the early 1970s, and again with the death of Lin Biao, is a delinking of industrialisation from militarisation. There had been a real connection between the military and industrialisation, and that military-industrial nexus began to sort of unwind, right?

with Mao's approval. Because the PLA was also going through its own cultural revolution, is that right? Absolutely. And so Mao, throughout this era, Mao dies in 76, as you know, and in the early, the first half of the 1970s,

Each experimentation, each policy that gets put in place, I look at a whole range of them, including the 4.3 program, which is implemented in 1973. It's so named for a $4.3 billion price tag, industrialization price tag that it had. Each one of these experimentations and programs that get put in place

were only able to be done with Mao's approval. So this is really crucial to sort of rethinking how we chronologize China's economic changes that we're familiar with today. And you can see what the Chinese side gets out of it in terms of, you know, you've had a great famine, cultural revolution has disrupted all aspects of ordinary life. But what did

the Americans get out of it? Why were they interested in suddenly going to Red China as they knew it then? Yeah, this is a really important question to the book and it was something that I really grappled with because on the face of it, the easy answer is, you know, they wanted to make profit, they wanted to make money.

But I soon found that a lot of the business people I was looking at, a lot of the American corporations that are part of this story, were not making money at all. In fact, a lot of them were losing money. So, for example, JCPenney, a major retailer, lost a whole bunch of money from its trade with China. Ford Motors...

sold barely a thing to China and in fact purchased from China and was giving money, you know, the dynamic was one of importing rather than exporting. And so I started to see that the story of American motivations and American corporations and business people was far more complex than simply, oh, they wanted to make a buck.

And this is where I think the role of a historian is really important because I'm interested in political economy. I'm interested in big structural changes. But I also understand the importance of culture and the importance of human emotion to big systemic change. And a lot of the business people I look at were motivated by excitement and

And exoticism, right? These are human beings who themselves had, some of them had a lifelong affinity with China. Some of them were children of missionaries. Others had studied the culture or the language. Others were simply, you know, suited executives, high-flying corporate America who were

saw an exotic other and saw in China the possibility of an adventure. And so a whole range of different emotional sort of registers motivated these business people. And I guess it would have been incredibly exciting in the 1970s because...

Before that point, you had two decades of China closed off, basically, since the 1949 takeover of the communists. Whereas before 1949, China was actually an incredibly international and cosmopolitan place in the cities, at least, for the first half of the century. So these foreigners were kicked out, and this is the first time they could have to come back in. So I can imagine that is...

Really exciting, especially if you happen to have family or links to China somehow. But they also started seeing China not just as a market, as the early Western traders saw China, you know, I'm talking about before the communists, because you also write that they started seeing China as a source of labour rather than a source of consumers. So tell us about that shift. Why is that so important? Yeah, this is such a, it's such an important aspect, I think, to understanding China.

What is ultimately at the heart of this book is the question of how did China converge? How did this giant communist nation converge with the global capitalist system? A significant part of that has to do with the changes that were happening within American capitalism itself. So this was an era in which...

What we take for granted today in 2024, in which you have supply chain dynamics, you have internationalized manufacturing, we're familiar with that. We understand a sort of outsourced labor, outsourced manufacturing. In the 1970s, that was still being developed. It was still happening.

JCPenney, for example, a really important retailer at the time in the United States, one of the largest retailers in the country, in the early 1970s only imported about 10% of its entire stock. Right.

The rest of what it sold was made in non-unionised, largely non-unionised manufacturing facilities within the United States. It developed a plan in which it wanted to increase its imports of goods produced overseas. It wanted cheaper labour. But that was something that it was still working through. It was something that it was aiming towards. And I think that's really important to keep in mind from our context in 2024 is

just how much the sort of global systems of production that we are familiar with were decisions still unfolding in the 1970s. But we take it so for granted now. Exactly, we take it so for granted now. And so these changes happening within American capitalism...

began to coincide with and be deliberately cultivated on the Chinese side. And the two began to converge in very interesting ways and often unexpectedly. These were often unintended consequences or at least the bigger picture of the sort of China is the workshop of the world today. That is a largely unintended consequence of this bigger structural change happening within American capitalism today.

So China began to be understood as a place of cheap labor by small importing groups within the United States. So people working in the textile industry, people working in fashion. They were some of the crucial people leading the change in how to trade with China.

And what was so important is that they were seeing China as a place to import goods, to see China as a place for cheap labor. And that was precisely what those experimentations I mentioned earlier, precisely what those experimentations within China were aiming to do. They wanted to create a China that was able to industrialize via export.

So an export-oriented production or an export-oriented industrialization that used production of goods and the sales of those goods. Cheap clothing is an easy starting point for most developing countries,

and using the money obtained from that in order to buy fertilizer factories and larger scale goods. So those interests of the Chinese pragmatists began to coincide with and align with the changes happening within American capitalism and production. And is that quite a back and forth process? Are you saying that Zhou Enlai was so prescient that he could see this coming or was it just very much kind of rubbing along, trying to see what works? How did that happen from the Chinese perspective?

rubbing along and seeing how it works. I really like that. It's, I think, it's not quite Den's cats of a medical book. No,

It's not, but it is, I think it captures the messiness of this era. And I think it captures the messiness of often how big historical change can occur. It's very rare that you have this sort of pronouncement from a high and this sort of large scale vision that ultimately ends up where history is the story and the world we live in today is the story of unintended consequences. Yeah.

And this story is perhaps one of the largest. The creation of a workshop of the world, of a country that has been able to industrialise and benefit so strongly from these processes, it was a consequence of muddling through. With vision as well, right? With vision as well. But often those visions did not foresee the full potential. If I could at this point though say there was a real opportunity

key group who did see the potential of what and the long-term consequences of what of what's happening uh right from the start and that is american labor so even as i say you know this is a muddling through and you know chinese pragmatists were experimenting and they had no idea i mean china's economy we've got to keep in mind china's economy in the 1970s

is still very much recovering from it in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and the huge upheaval that has been caused there at all levels of society. It was very much a space of promise at best. And so you have this muddling through on the China side and on the corporate side within the United States today

But there is a key group who right from the start were warning about the consequences of what would be happening if the United States did just, without thinking, without putting on some brakes or some restrictions, if it did just continue to trade with China in the way that it was going. And so organised American labour groups, the AFL-CIO, a crucial labour organisation, the key one within the United States, were warning right from the start

about what this would do to American jobs and what might happen as a consequence simply of the sheer size and scale of China's economy. But I think exactly because China's economy was so uncertain, there was very little heed paid to that in addition, of course, to a politics that did not value or prioritise labour interests properly.

So those two things, the political deprioritisation of labour and the realities of the Chinese economy meant that those fears were largely unheeded. And that all looks so misplaced now in 2024 with lots of American jobs lost to China and...

you know, that kind of de-industrialization arguably contributing very much to the rise of people like Donald Trump, for example, decades later. But on that point about the politics, because we've talked about the businessmen who for excitement or for profit or for cheap labor want to go into China, but they were also supported by the politicians, right? You know, you've mentioned Nixon, but

From what I understand from your book, it's also that the political establishment as a whole wanted to pull China away from the USSR and into the American economic orbit. And so actually thought this kind of rapprochement through trade was quite good. So what role did those politicians and diplomats play? Yeah, this is such an important question.

The role of geopolitics here was crucial. So when we think today about US-China trade, often there's this conversation about the engagement policy that, you know, if the United States continues to trade with China, perhaps China would liberalize and, you know, its politics may change. And that was certainly an important aspect of

of US-China trade, even in the 1980s and particularly from the 1990s and 2000s onwards. But it's crucial to emphasise that in the 1970s, this opening of trade was motivated not by a desire to change China's politics, not by a desire to change China actually in many ways at all, but instead it was driven by geopolitics.

and by a desire in particular to contain the Soviet Union and to sort of, in what's known as triangular diplomacy, wedge between China and the Soviet Union, which themselves had had a major falling out by the early 1970s. And so to pit these two sort of Cold War foes, keep in mind we're still in the Cold War in this era,

to pit these Cold War foes against one another. America also had geopolitical interests in sort of using China to assist it in getting somehow muddling its way out of the war in Vietnam as well. And so while geopolitics was crucial to understanding the rapprochement, it also means that we can understand why it is that US policymakers began to encourage China

American business people to import from China. Because what you see in the middle of the decade is a real concern on the part of Chinese policymakers

who are worried that American business people are wanting to sell to China without buying from China as well. They didn't want a trade deficit. Exactly, exactly. And so this concern on the Chinese side of a trade deficit meant that Chinese policymakers began to indicate through policies and through what they were saying and through...

cancellations of orders from American business people, it began to very strongly show the ways that they did not want a trade deficit, particularly with the United States.

And so US policymakers who saw trade as a tool of their larger geopolitical imperatives, trade was important for helping geopolitics. They therefore began to say, okay, China wants to limit its trade deficit with us. Why don't we help them by increasing the imports that American business people have from China? We need to encourage more American business people to buy from China.

And it's precisely that political assumption that trade can be used as a tool for larger geopolitical ends that led to a larger restructuring or encouraged the larger restructuring that was happening on the economic front. So on the economic front, you have, as I've mentioned, companies beginning to turn towards outsourced production.

And on the political and diplomatic front, you have an encouragement of that same mentality coming from a very different space. And that's a space of wanting to use trade to assist and sort of placate the Chinese concerns. And so those different imperatives began to work together to an ultimate transformation in what it means to even speak of US-China trade today.

you know, for so long, American and not just American, European and other business people had looked to China for centuries as a place to sell. China was a place to sell surplus goods for the United States in the late 19th century. This China market was always fabled as offering real potential in that regard.

And in the 1970s, as you have this really important structural change occurring in the ways that American capitalism and global capitalism more broadly was operating, you see this idea of the China market begin to look not of one of selling to its customers, but rather a place where you could get cheap labor, one of 800 million workers. That trade deficit thing is so incredible because, I mean...

In global trade, obviously, countries will have deficits and surpluses with each other. But China has an extraordinary amount of surpluses with other countries when you look at it from a Chinese perspective. And that has become so politicized. You know, especially I think I remember Donald Trump talking so much about how, you know, America imports more from China than it exports to China. And how that's a massive problem. So to hear you say that actually, as recently as the 1970s, American policymakers were actively encouraging China

Where there was a surplus with China, they were encouraging Americans to have a deficit instead. It's just so incredible. Elizabeth Ingleson, thank you so much. Thank you. How much do we really know about this generation of communist leaders, the ones who might replace presidency in the future? In this episode in particular, I want to talk about their formative experiences. What were the things that impacted them and made them who they are as they were growing up?

On this episode, I'll be joined by Professor Kerry Brown, who's at King's College London and author of a recent book on President Xi called Xi, A Study in Power. So he's an expert on the man. And also by Professor Steve Tang, who is a historian at SOAS.

So Steve, I want to start with you. Can we look at the Politburo Standing Committee? Its average age is 67, which means that they would have all been teenagers when the Cultural Revolution started. So I want to start with that experience, which must be one of the most formative moments in their lives. For listeners who don't know, what was the experience like for young people during the Cultural Revolution? Perhaps you could start with the earliest, with the Red Guards. Well, the Cultural Revolution was an amazing time for the young people in China.

Never did young people in China experience anything like the Cultural Revolution before or since then. They were being unleashed by order of the great Chairman Mao to break things, to struggle against old fogies who were revolutionaries, even if they were extremely senior people. They were given a license to rebel.

And some of them, a lot of them, were then sent down to the countryside to learn from the peasants. And in all that experience, they were able to attempt and try things that your average teenager anywhere in the world would never have an experience to. And they will also have acquired some kind of sense of the reality of power.

they know, or at least they learned that they must say the politically correct thing. And then they must first and foremost protect number one, because nobody else is going to. I think

Different individuals draw different lessons from the Cultural Revolution. You will have some who became senior leaders today who will think that never again the Cultural Revolution or anything like that. You also have some, a few, at least Xi Jinping, who thinks that the Cultural Revolution was a wonderful thing.

And the Red Guards then, so they were these schoolchildren, essentially, who were enlisted by the chairman in order to create a revolution. And what they did was often against the traditional Confucian authorities of, you know, teacher to students, because they would denounce their teachers, they would denounce their parents. Kerry, is it fair to say that what were, you know, this generation of party leaders, do you think they would have been Red Guards themselves?

No, I mean, I actually looked at the 25 members of the current full Politburo and a number of them were born in 1950 to, I think the youngest is 1963, that's Hu Chunhua. So that's quite a kind of big period. The older ones would certainly be sent down youths and some of them would have been later kind of campaigns. The sent down youth campaign was really launched in 68 and I think Xi Jinping was actually sent

to Shanxi province in 60, early, very early 1969. And so their experiences of the Cultural Revolution are quite diverse. I mean, the very young ones would have a memory of it, like you'd have a memory of being at infant school.

And then the older ones would have a memory of being, you know, kind of in campaigns and things and maybe involved with Red Guard groups. I couldn't find any explicit mention of that. If you think of a failed leader like Bo Xilai, I mean, there were all these rumors that he'd been an extremely activist Red Guard and denounced his father, an elitist leader, Bo Yibo, when he was at Tsinghua University in the 1960s.

And in fact, I believe that Xi Jinping was, I mean, he was at Tsinghua University later. No, I mean, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping's predecessor, was also at Tsinghua around about that time. But there's no association with him and Red Guard. So I think it's very variable. I mean, the Cultural Revolution was a very complicated movement and people's experience of it, I think, was very, very variable, which this group of people kind of testify to. And they're very different experiences in what they did.

Steve, it's partly that because somewhere like Beijing, for example, would have had more of the epicentre of the revolution, of the movement. And if you were growing up elsewhere in China, perhaps you weren't affected so much. And just give us this flavour, because I think in the West, it's often easy to think of the Red Guards as what epitomises the Cultural Revolution. But how prevalent was that movement to join for your average young person during that time? It was, in fact, country-wide.

You might have greater intensities in places like Beijing or Shanghai or Tianjin or Guangzhou. But even in other places, the cultural revolution mostly reached a bit less in the minority, heavy border regions of China. But generally, young people were able to travel across the country.

The railway system was being required to provide free travel for young people who went around to see the country and learned about the revolution. A cultural revolution interrailing, a railcard. It was a kind of free interrailing for cultural revolutionaries. But then that was the intention of Mao Zedong, that he was going to use the cultural revolution in part

to raise a new generation of revolutionaries who are beholden to him, but not to the party. And that's why you can have other very senior leaders of the Communist Party who could be the subject of struggles and beatings and public humiliations, and yet everybody were supposed to be pupils of the great chairman.

And people took advantage of that and make that travel and do a lot of things that they would not otherwise have been able to do without the freedom of the Cultural Revolution. Kerry, let's talk about Xi Jinping's sent down experience, because in your book, you quote him saying of that time later on, he says, later in life, whenever I ran into difficulties, I would think of that period. How could I not carry on now when I could work under those extremely difficult conditions?

So it brought in him this determination, or at least he wants us to think that. Yeah, I mean, the politicisation of society from 1966, when the Cultural Revolution started, you know, as part of a kind of, well, political movement, a cultural movement was a very complicated phenomena.

I mean, the one thing it did do is, I think, for the first time, really, in modern Chinese history, there was a shared belief system, even though people struggled with how to define that. You know, kind of Mao Zedong thought, you know, it was something you had to embrace and have in your most intimate life in many ways. And I suppose...

I suppose secondly, the kind of practices, the things that people did every day were kind of mandated by the movement, you know, the schools and colleges closed. And so someone like Xi Jinping basically ended their formal education around about '67, '68. I mean, he was in an elite school next to Zhongnanhai in Beijing, and then was quite a young kind of member of this initial tranche of sent down youths.

So, I mean, a lot of accounts of this in Chinese are dubious because they're issued today and they kind of reinforce this idea of Xi Jinping, the man who has eaten bitterness. You know, he's churku, I think the Chinese phrase is, you know, he's really, you know, kind of earned the right to have the position he's got today. I think Lee Kuan Yew, the late leader of Singapore, called him, you know, he's just Nelson Mandela because of the way he'd suffered at this time.

But I mean, it did give a very distinctive worldview to people. And I think in looking at the accounts, at least I use in this book on Xi, I do sort of appreciate that it's definitely a distinctive generational culture, that the people who remember this before 1976, when it broadly ended, and the people afterwards who don't remember it, are very different in their worldview. And one of the things about the accounts of his colleagues or contemporaries at that time is that

The idea of just getting off a train and then being taken to various parts of this locality around Yunnan, I mean, it's quite a big area, and being sort of put on these kangs, these brick kind of things, beds. And the thing that kind of is most striking is their complaints about being bitten all night by mosquitoes, and then having as Beijingers to get used to this very different diet.

Again, that's kind of quite a radical change, especially as your parents, you know, aren't around. And for Xi Jinping, his father had been abstinent since 1961 because of political issues in Beijing. So this is a pretty unstable environment to have your adolescent years when already you're going through a lot of different changes in your life. So I think that instability has sort of impacted on the psychology of this generation and made them maybe respond in the ways they do to both domestic issues and the outside world.

This actually leads very nicely on to the next question about the next generation of political leaders in China, as far as we can see. Because presumably people who are coming up now will be experiencing reform and opening, they will be traveling much, much more when they're younger, maybe even studying abroad.

Does that matter? Or will it matter, Kerry, do you think? I mean, obviously, we don't know for sure. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, whether or not that kind of Western education, that kind of, and maybe COVID is a breaking point in the kind of cosmopolitan modern Chinese have become. But certainly from, you know, 1990 to maybe 2020, there were so many Chinese who were going all over the world all of the time.

do you think the next generations could be more cosmopolitan is that a good thing well it depends what you mean by cosmopolitan I mean I think we're living in a period where there's a big backlash against globalization and the idea that

Being local is being good. You don't like citizens from nowhere. So I don't know whether the big returnee population of the last 30 years, which is millions now, I think it's about three, three and a half million, this is going to have a big impact in domestic Chinese politics because people who have been educated abroad give very variable accounts of how that education these days is valuable back in China.

Well, Steve Tang and Kerry Brown, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers.

On this episode of Chinese Whispers, I've asked back Bill Bishop, who runs the popular cynicism newsletter, and Professor Victor Shi, author of Coalitions of the Week, to talk about the party congress that's just finished. Victor, Bill, welcome back to Chinese Whispers. Now, let's start with the personnel, because last time we talked a lot about who would be in, who would be out, speculating that possibly Xi Jinping, in order to get a third term in power, would have to give some roles, some important roles to other corners of the party. And I think that's a good point.

But Bill, as you've written about, that doesn't seem to have happened. And what seems to have happened is a Tongshi, which Xi Jinping has won the whole table. He's taken all the winnings. That's what it looks like, both from the composition of the central committee and then through to the Politburo and the standing committee. I mean, I think that

And I really want to hear what Victor thinks, but it looks like there was no even pretense of any sort of a balancing or moderating with other significant interests if there are any left in the system. And so from a personnel perspective,

I think she got what he wanted from, you know, the revised party constitution was just issued and it isn't clear yet that he got everything he wanted in that. I actually haven't fully digested it. But personnel wise, I think it does look like a running the table. Well, Victor, let me bring you in here. What did you make of it? And also, do we glean from this that she has more power in the party than we thought he did?

Well, I think I had suspected that he could do that, but I thought he would do it. First of all, I thought he would do it in a more...

kind of legalistic way than he did. So as I speculated earlier, I thought he might have changed the retirement age to one year earlier. Then he could have expelled Li Keqiang and Wang Yang from the Politburo Standing Committee. But then he would also have to move Wang Huening out of the Politburo Standing Committee. But as it turns out, he just did it purely according to his own preference without any

any kind of reference to any rules or norms that you could think of. So, you know, the three people who got moved up, Ding Xuesheng, Li Qiang and Cai Qi, they, you know, as Bill was joking earlier, I mean, they were kind of personal secretaries to him in the past, in sort of past three stages of his career. Then you had Li Xi and Zhao Leji was there already.

who were these family friends, basically. Friends of the family, people who had worked for or related to other people, to people close to his father, whom he had known for decades and decades, trusted by him. And then Zhang Youxia was the big norm-busting one. I mean, the guy is 72. He got reappointed to the Politburo and also the Central Military Commission.

Typically, people in the military, they do retire later for their level. But still, I mean, Zhang Youxia, that's we haven't seen anything like this since the 90s, really. So, yeah, there's no just purely his preference, no reference to any norm shifts or anything like

And the other age, sort of noticeable age, kind of norm busting was Wang Yi on the Politburo, who looks like he'll take over from Yang Jiechi as the head of the Foreign Affairs Commission as their top diplomat. And if those norms had held, I think he's 69, he would have aged out.

Yeah, because the norm had been if you're 68 or over, you would be retired. But of course, we have some people under 68 who are retired anyways, but we'll come on to that. Just on C's men for now, Bill...

Are some of these people qualified or competent to do the jobs that they possibly are being lined up to do? So for example, people point to Cai Qi not having much central government experience or any central government experience. They point to people like Li Qiang, the former Shanghai party secretary who oversaw this horrific and inhumane prolonged lockdown in Shanghai earlier this year. It seems like loyalty comes above merit in this instance. Or loyalty is merit.

Depending on how... No, but seriously, you look at someone like Li Qiang, I think before the Shanghai lockdown disaster...

Plenty of people thought he was competent. He's run Shanghai, he's run Jiangsu province. He was, I think, governor of Zhejiang province. So he's been number one or number two in three of the largest economic centers of China, each of which I think is bigger than most European countries in terms of economic output. So it's hard to say that he's not a competent bureaucrat up to a point. Clearly, the Shanghai lockdown was a disaster. And I do think it does, to your earlier point,

remind everyone that this idea of meritocracy is either doesn't really matter or meritocracy. It's a different kind of merit, which is more like loyalty and closest to she, because of his longstanding ties with she. So, you know,

I think I was surprised he got not only premier, but he's also number two in the hierarchy, right? He was vaulted. You know, he went above Jalaji, above Wang Huning, you know, people with more seniority in the party and on the standing committee. Tai Chi is one where, again, he's run Beijing. He has a long experience in the government. He's clearly a competent bureaucrat and administrator. I mean, his...

His time in Beijing, he did a very good job with COVID. He's done a very good job with COVID. He did have the incident, I think it was 2017, where after there was a big fire in southern Beijing, they cleaned out tens of thousands of migrant workers in the middle of winter.

and just basically kicked him out. And a lot of people, you know, it was literally the middle of winter. And again, that looked like it was incompetent, but maybe that was what she wanted and he did his job. And Bill, let's talk about the work report. We saw a little bit about the future economic policy in that common prosperity was mentioned, and that's this evening out of inequality in China. What else was notable from the work report? Well, there was certainly also, I think there was a phrase that seemed to freak some people out around sort of regulating wealth accumulation. I'm paraphrasing that.

And that got a lot of notice. In general, the C's report to the Congress, I think,

A lot of the themes were ones that shouldn't have been a surprise. They really built on top of the sixth plenum last year, the third historical resolution, various things he and the party have been saying. I think a lot of focus on security, a lot of focus on technology, self-sufficiency. And then there was the changing of the language around this concept of period of strategic opportunity, which is sort of

the idea that China had a relatively benign security environment in which it could develop. I'm simplifying here to one that is now it's sort of both there's opportunity and there are lots more challenges. And so it's a general, I think an indication of a real shift in the assessment of their external environment to one that is much more challenging and in some cases potentially hostile to China. And

left unsaid, but clearly the driver of many of these themes was the US-China relationship and how bad it's gotten. And I think how, how much worse the leadership in Beijing thinks it may get. And,

And what about on Taiwan? Because that's something that Western media has picked up on a little bit, that there's this refusal to rule out force in reunifying Taiwan. Is that significant at all, Bill? I mean, the language in the report that Xi Jinping gave to the Party Congress, I don't think there was anything new around Taiwan. And so...

It's interesting here in DC, especially there's a real kind of a frenzy that, you know, they've moved up the timeline. They're accelerating their timeline for taking Taiwan. And yet in the actual documents, it's,

There's nothing that sort of indicates that they've made that decision. And so I don't think from a Taiwan perspective, the work report itself indicated any sort of a significant shift in policy. But tell me, Victor, tell me if I'm wrong. I mean, there is this idea that to achieve the great sort of rejuvenation of China, Taiwan has to be returned to the motherland. And the target for the rejuvenation is 2049. So people say, well, then it has to happen by 2049, 27 years from now.

That's sort of the only obvious inferred timeline in there. But Victor, before you respond to Bill, can I also lay down an additional gauntlet, which is that now that Xi is confirmed, confirmed in another, at least we think, I mean, I don't even know if we can say it's five years or 10 years or however long it is, the second decade, at least that it's starting, does that give it a time limit as well? Because is he going to want to be the person who does this, who manages to solve the Taiwan problem?

I mean, frankly, I think the personnel lineup suggests it also. In fact, it's suggested for the next five years sometimes. Because if you think about it, why do you want people whom you trust absolutely to fill every single important position, including, you know, vice chairman of the CMC, as well as public real estate and committee, but then of course, people who are now in charge of

national security issues and the Ministry of Public Security. You know, there's been some discussion by Sheena Graydon and others on the fact that there are now two security people close to Xi in the secretariat, Wang Xiaohong and Chen Wenqing.

What's the advantage of having that? Right. So because even Chairman Mao didn't do this. So Chairman Mao had these puppet figures from the old guard in the Politburo, even during the Cultural Revolution, because it's always helpful to have this facade of collective leadership. And if things go wrong, you can say, oh, we collectively bear the responsibility to.

But she didn't go for that. She wanted, you know, completely his own people. So then if things were to go wrong, he himself would bear responsibility, but then he doesn't care.

An advantage of having that is that you can make very extreme policies, right? So whatever extreme policies he enacts, no one is going to say no or try to undermine it. Basically, the people whom he trusts, at least at that level, they will presumably do the best to implement them.

whatever extreme policy he chooses. And as the final, you know, wrap up point, which is now that we know Xi is going to be in place for at least another term or however long he wants to be, unless he gets ousted, but it seems as we say, the party is terrified of him. What is that bringing in terms of policy, both for China and for the world?

Bill? Well, I think from a policy perspective, sort of for the rest of the world, again, I don't think we're going to see much deviation from the sort of current trajectory. It certainly may accelerate or deepen, but you've got the main backdrop is growing competition with the U.S. with increasing risk of some sort of a conflict. And that's in every domain. And then you've also got, we are presenting a different vision of a world order in

You know, they're not saying we're going to, you know, we're revisionist, but we're saying we're going to improve the world order, working more with the global south. But in general, we should expect increasing on the like the diplomatic side. We'll have more more sort of diplomacy, you know, what call it Wolf Warrior or call it whatever. But it's really a fundamental tenet of Xi Jinping thought on diplomacy. That's not going to change. And Victor? Yeah, there was a lot of wording on technological competition, you

achieving supremacy. But, you know, now that all the legal channels for China to acquire US technologies have been closed off, what do you think will happen? You know, the illegal channels will have to be intensified. So that's going to be a point of contention, obviously, between two countries. Victor, Bill, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers.

The word West is often used as a shorthand to describe liberal democracies in Europe and perhaps in Asia too, such that we'll often talk about the West's attitude to China or the West's relations with China. But this is at best a lazy shorthand. And by the way, I'm guilty of this too, as of course you will have heard on this podcast. But it's lazy because there is actually no unified West on China. Not really. And so I'm going to be talking about the West as a shorthand.

So on this episode, I wanted to disaggregate that idea, focusing especially on the continent of Europe, to understand exactly how different nation states or multilateral institutions, or even factors within a country, have differing views and approaches on China, and what Beijing does in response to that. So my guest for this week is Noah Barkin, who's a senior advisor at the Rhodium Group, an independent research provider.

He's also associated with the German Marshall Fund, with whom he writes the very popular Watching China in Europe newsletter. Noah, welcome to Chinese Whispers.

I also want to touch on some of the poorer nations in Eastern and Central Europe, because in some ways, you know, they seem to be prime targets for Chinese investment. We've already mentioned Hungary, for example, being a recipient of the Belt and Road Initiative. A few years ago, China set up the 16 plus 1 framework for relations with 16 of these countries. The number has fluctuated since then up and down. So I just wondered how successful has it been in this respect in China's courting of these poorer European nations?

Well, I think the 16 plus one format, which, as you said, has fluctuated, it was 17 plus one. Now it's 14 plus one. Hasn't worked out so well. I think it's this forum is is in tatters to a certain extent because many of the countries have.

in Eastern Europe that hoped that this format would lead to Chinese investment and also facilitate the export of their goods to China have been very disappointed. And there are countries like Hungary and Serbia, for example, which of course is outside the EU, which I think have...

have embraced this format. But if you look at the Baltic countries that just, you know, over the past few years have left the format, if you look at the Czech Republic, if you look at a country like Romania, even Poland, I think there's widespread disappointment with the format. And countries are not really participating actively in this format anymore. And of course, the

Russia's war in Ukraine and China's position on the war has further soured many of these countries on engagement with China. Yeah, and I was speaking to a Polish diplomat recently who said that they were quite interested in the idea of Chinese investment when the Chinese first came knocking. But since then, there have been a few different infrastructure projects that have just really turned out to be

poor quality, poorly built, and with not enough transparency. And so really, these kind of companies kind of lost out the chance for China to kind of export its soft power, at least in Poland. Is that the reason, Noah, you think that, you know, when you say people have been disappointed about Chinese investment, is that the same kind of theme going on?

I think every country has different experiences. I think Poland has had a few bad experiences with Chinese projects. I think

We've also seen a sharp rise in the trade deficits of Eastern European countries with China. So a complaint that I often hear from the Poles is that their exports to China have not increased significantly. On the other hand, Chinese exports to Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe have risen quite significantly. So this is a disappointment about China.

the lack of investments or problems with the investments that these countries have seen from China, its disappointment with the direction of the trade relationship, and then the tensions because of China's

support for Russia and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that has added another layer to the disappointment, the tensions with China. So this is a combination of things. There are countries, for example, in

In the Western Balkans, Montenegro, who have gone into serious debt because of big Chinese projects, a highway project, which has left that country highly indebted. And the project itself is not even complete years later. So some countries have had some very bad experiences and problems.

16 plus one, 14 plus one, 17 plus one has not been a solution. I mean, it strikes me as so interesting that China had this opportunity to really get some of these countries on side, but whether it's because the Belt and Road Initiative is actually quite

haphazard on the ground or because some of the companies are not regulated enough. You know, it seems to me a massive waste of an opportunity here. When I was talking to this Polish diplomat with a few other international diplomats, you know, they were keen to see what the Chinese could offer. And that opportunity seems to have been squandered. And as you say, now the Russian invasion has pretty much changed everything. So let's talk about that, because it's obvious, obviously, why post-Soviet states

are nervous about the Russian invasion and why they're disappointed in the Chinese situation.

Then there was that awful interview from the Chinese ambassador to France, Lu Xiaoyi, where he basically said that post-Soviet states have no basis for existence in law. But no, what I wanted to ask you was, is it fair to say that this impact of the Russian invasion goes across the entire continent such that France and Germany could be advocating for an even closer relationship with China if it wasn't for the fact that China was so ambivalent on the invasion and has been so far?

Yes, I think that China's position on the war in Ukraine has...

certainly had a big impact on Europe's relationship with China over the past year, year and a half. I think there were a host of problems in the relationship before that, economic issues, but also human rights and a host of other issues, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang. But

I think it has made coming out of the pandemic, especially with China opening up, it has made it more difficult

for European countries to go back to business as usual with China. I think a lot of the engagement that we've seen, we've seen a flurry of European leaders go to China over the past months since China opened up. And a lot of those conversations have been about the

China's position on the war in Ukraine. And it's what appears to be a deepening relationship with Russia. Xi Jinping has met with Putin on a number of occasions over the past year, and they look pretty chummy when they're together. So this makes it much more difficult for Europe

and European leaders to argue that the relationship with China can return to some sort of semi-normal state. And I think the big fear in Europe is that

If China were to support Russia militarily, which it hasn't done so far, that that would would fundamentally change the relationship. So I think there's a lot of concern in Europe that China could take this step depending on how the war evolves over the coming months. Yeah.

And I wonder if the Chinese side really understands the depth of feeling in Europe surrounding this war, because it seems to me that they are, well, it seems to me that they don't understand the depth of feeling.

So finally, Noah, what are the chances of a unified approach in Europe to China? Would you put money on it? Well, I think we have to be realistic about this. We're talking about 27 European countries. I think we have seen a lot of progress over the past five years or so. There is now a common European language on China.

China is now described as a partner, competitor and systemic rival, has been for the past four years. There seems to be a European embrace of the term de-risking. So I think we're moving in the right direction. And it's also important to remember that some European member states like to hide behind the European Commission. So there's a lot of steps that the Commission has taken, including the Xinjiang sanctions, that all member states are

But they wouldn't necessarily take these sort of more confrontational steps on their own. So I think we're moving in the right direction. Ultimately, this will depend on China's behavior. If we see a shift in Chinese policies and the economy,

assertiveness and authoritarian tilt of the country, then I think we'll see changes in Europe. But there are no indications of that, really. Xi Jinping was just pointed to a third term. And I don't think we're going to see a major shift in policy from China. That's the lessons of the past few years. Noah Barkin, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers.

In much of the conversations surrounding China and Taiwan these days, the question of invasion seems to be a when, not an if. But is an invasion really so inevitable? No one knows for sure, of course, but there are good reasons to think that speculations of a war have been overblown. For one, the economic links between Taiwan and China mean that their respective interests are not so zero-sum. For another, China may well be causing serious damage to itself through an invasion.

This episode of Chinese Whispers presents the case for the defence that invasion is not, in fact, inevitable.

Later on the episode, I'll be joined by Charles Parton, former British diplomat in China and Taiwan, who contributes to the analysis of numerous foreign policy and defence think tanks, including RUCI and the Council on Geostrategy, to understand why he doesn't think an invasion would happen. But first, to give you an idea of just how much Taiwan and China are currently linked by trade, I spoke to Professor William Kirby of Harvard University, who's an expert on the business environments in Taiwan and China.

I started by asking him to give an overview of the complicated trade links between those two sides of the strait. Well, mainland China is Taiwan's greatest trading partner, much larger than the United States or the European Union. And their trade, despite the tensions over the last several years, have been growing exponentially.

Taiwan's imports over the last five years from mainland China have grown by about 87%. And its exports to the mainland have grown by 71% over this period of time. And this is largely in those areas in which Taiwan is a dominant player in the world, which is in electronics and in semiconductors, but not only in that.

It is a robust trading relationship, although it shows signs of fraying at the political edges. The government of Taiwan has encouraged Taiwan businesses to invest rather less in their next investment in the mainland and rather more, say, in Southeast Asia or in other countries. You see some firms that really are at the center of the mainland Taiwan trade, such as Apple.

relocating some facilities, in this case Foxconn, a Taiwan company that assembles iPhones in China, relocating some of its production facilities outside of mainland China. But it is still a very robust and, to Taiwan, very important trading relationship.

It's really interesting that semiconductor focus in particular, because something that was noted last year after the Pelosi visit to Taiwan was that the Chinese stopped importing Taiwanese things like pineapples and beer, but not semiconductors, not the vast volume or value of the trade. No, no, no. Although Taiwan makes, I think, the world's best pineapples, they were denied access to the mainland market. It was the United States, not Taiwan.

Charlie, welcome back to Chinese Whispers.

Before we get into the economic considerations here, I just want to set out your position clearly. When it comes to speculating about an invasion on Taiwan, much of the rhetoric these days is a when, not if, at least in the West. But if I understand your position correctly, you are saying that China will not invade Taiwan. Well, certainly I think that is my position as far as I'm able to look ahead.

And what's it realistic to look ahead? I mean, 10, 12 years possibly, but any further than that, no. Let's be clear that Xi Jinping has not ever set down a deadline for...

for invasion. That's not what a lot of people think, though. A lot of people think it's 2027 or 2049. There are two days that are bandied around. Well, I think a lot of those people need to read more carefully or listen more carefully to what Xi Jinping has said. I mean, they talk about the modernisation of the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, by 2027, and that's the deadline. I think one or two American generals have even put it in 2025. There is no basis for that.

I mean, if I can be a little bit boring, what has Xi Jinping said about the modernisation of the PLA? And I'll quote from his actual speech, the Fifth Plenum, I think. By 2027, ensure realisation of construction. Well, take that to mean what you will. By 2035, modernisation of national defence and the army. And by 2049...

which is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, modernisation of national defence and army comprehensively.

So I think you could say there is a deadline of 2049 in the sense that how can you achieve the second centennial goal of being a modern socialist, civilised, harmonious, strong country and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation if, in your eyes, you haven't got Taiwan back? I mean, of course, there's a lot of historical argument as to whether

you get it back where you had it in the first place, but that's outside the scope of our discussion. So in theory, that's an implied deadline, but that's so far ahead that no one's going to hold a politician to that, and Xi Jinping will be something like 96 by that stage anyway. So no, there has not been a declared deadline.

Charlie, I think it's worth setting out now for those who don't know your work that you are pretty hawkish on China. You know, you're not, I wouldn't say that you're an apologist on China by any means. You were in support of the Huawei ban from the UK infrastructure. You are currently working on how, looking at how the Internet of Things could be hijacked by malicious Chinese actors. You know, you're pretty clear eyed or if not actually very, very critical of what you think Chinese motives are.

Yeah, I reject the ornithological comparison. Hawkins is not popular anymore as a phrase. No, no, I was once described as a moderate hawk. Well, I mean, hawks aren't moderate, but I'm not, I think it's wrong. No, I am a defender of the UK's interest. And I think we have every right to do that. And I frequently quote Robert Frost, the American poet who said that good fences make good neighbours. We should cooperate with China. We should work with China on many areas.

But we've also got to be realistic about what their aims are, the threat that they do pose to us, and raise our defences accordingly. And from those strong defences, go out and work with China wherever we can.

Well, let's look at the reasoning that you put forward then. You say that economics is your main concern. Why are the economic consequences for China just so bad if they were to invade? Yes, I'll be just one other preliminary, Cindy. And that is that, you know, invasion and blockade, and I mean a full blockade to bring Taiwan into the Chinese Communist Party's grasp, is the same thing.

So I don't think we need to differentiate between those. Whatever means they do, it involves a form of arms and a large dose of coercion. But I think the consequences are equally drastic for China. Taiwan produces 90% of the world's high-level semiconductors and 50-60% of all of them.

Taiwan exports to China last year something like $185 billion worth of mainly components that go into Chinese exports or products. So if that trade is...

...stopped by an invasion or by a blockade... ...just magnify that number by whatever you want... ...I mean, at a zero, let's say nearly two trillion downside for China... ...but it goes a lot worse than that... ...because the moment an invasion or a blockade happens...

Well, first of all, trade and investment dries up. What foreign company is going to trade and invest in China when there's a war or a blockade going on? What happens to shipping and insurance rates? Well, first of all, ships ain't going to go through that area. And as we know, a third of the world's trade passes through that area.

I was struck to hear that, to read that in your paper, actually, and also more than 90% of China's seaborne trade obviously has to go. Correct. So shipping and insurance rates, ships probably won't go, but insurance rates, if they did, would be immensely, immensely high.

And so this is all before sanctions. So whether semiconductors and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation is so important, its chief executive officer said it would not allow it to fall into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. But even if it was, quotes, handed over, it requires on a very regular basis machinery, inputs, equipment,

So essentially it wouldn't work if the Chinese were to take it over? It wouldn't work. And so this is all before sanctions. Now let's also then bring those in, and I think the Americans would, I think we probably would. The European Union, to some extent possibly. Even Switzerland has said it would oppose sanctions to the degree that the EU does. And that's Switzerland, for goodness sake. So I think that that would just magnify everything. So the world economy would crater.

The Chinese economy would crater. What happens inside China is mass unemployment, a lot of very angry, hungry people. And all good things come from the Communist Party. But then the obverse of that coin is that all bad things have to be laid at the Communist Party's door. So without a social security net, there's going to be mass violence. There already is each year. There are a very large number of

demonstrations and mass incidents, as they call them. This would be on a completely different scale, which could be an existential, probably would be an existential threat to the Communist Party's rule and possibly to the life of Xi Jinping. Now, he can calculate that, if I can, and I just don't think you're going to take the risk, even before Xi

you get to the military side. It's a surefire way of destroying your own power. Let's talk about the military concerns. It's often compared to the Ukraine invasion, but actually it's not the same situation at all to invade Taiwan, is it? No, I mean, I think when Mr Putin decided to go into Ukraine, he saw wide open plains and was assured by his people that it would be

over by Christmas or in fact a lot earlier. Whereas, of course, Taiwan is completely different. Seaborne invasions are extremely difficult. The UK found that in a small matter in the Falklands. But this is against a far better prepared defensive position. It's a very rough sea. The number of days when you can actually be confident

per year is not many. I mean, you know, a couple of months' worth landing on 14 beaches against topography that's easily defended. You've got increasingly a different type of defence. Taiwan can't compete in conventional. But enough to make it by no means a certainty that you would win, even allowing for whether the Americans would or would not come in. And even if you did then take over...

were successful, what are you going to have left? A population that may or may not resist you quite strongly. And then, of course, you get to move on from that into the economic matters that we talked about. So I think most military analysts that I've spoken to have said you would need to mobilize something in the region of 2 million men. Wow. I mean, that's including, I presume, all the back logistics and all the effort to get

ready for the actual spearhead invasion. That's going to be something that you can't do sneakily. It will be very visible. It will take time. It will allow other defensive forces, the Americans, to take whatever measures they decide to take.

It's a very big risk. OK, they might, the PLA might win. It's not got any combat experience. And these are very, very difficult operations. But there's a good chance they would lose. And the consequences of that, I think, would be catastrophic for the Communist Party and for Xi Jinping.

Okay, so Charlie, as we finish up then, I want to ask you what the two sides will do next, because the CCP still wants to have Taiwan reunified. And clearly, that's something that the West wants to prevent. So what do you think that the party will do if invasion slash blockade is not what it will do?

Well, and again, just to finish off on the subject of optimism, I'm not optimistic about what's going to happen in the next decade. I mean, short of invasion or blockade, I think we're in for a very rough time. So we will see a lot more military activity because the aim of the Chinese Communist Party is to convince, is to break the will of the Taiwanese people and to convince them that

or as they say, reunification, is inevitable and irresistible. And similarly, they wish to convince the world of that. So military exercises posturing short-term blockades, which don't too long interfere with your import of necessary components, etc., we're going to see a lot more of that. I think Taiwan itself is going to be under a lot of pressure. There's been some talk about revamping the secession law of 2005, 2015,

I think the Hong Kong national security law is perhaps a good model for that, which will put more pressure on Taiwanese individuals and companies. Inside China? Well, the Hong Kong national security law has application globally. Although that hasn't been used as such, even though in law it's obviously ambiguous. But it would be perfectly possible for someone to be arrested in a country friendly to...

Like in Thailand, for example. In Thailand or Zimbabwe or anything being from A to Z and then sent to China. So that's what I mean. I think there'll be a lot more pressure on Taiwanese companies, embargoes of goods, which don't affect too much China's own economy. And I think we'll see countries, foreign countries, our countries and our companies also being put under a lot of pressure to

And there'll be a graduation of things. So would it surprise me if Jinmen and Mazu, which are islands, sets of islands very close to the Chinese mainland, which belong to Taiwan, either in a fit of patriotism, open and closed inverted commas, demanding to return to the motherland or having their water cut off or whatever it is, supplies cut off so that they are absorbed there.

into China. There's the Prattis Islands, halfway between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which currently have a very small Taiwanese garrison on. If the Chinese took that back, would that be sufficient cause for the sort of economic consequences and worries to follow that I've talked about, or America to take a position? I think, you know, people talk about the Penghu Islands, which are off quite close to the main island of Taiwan.

I think that would be, as a county of Taiwan, that would be perceived as an invasion and might cause undue worry. It would require more resources. But the Chinese side would be pushing, basically pushing at the red line. But there will be a lot of pushing. So it's not going to be a comfortable decade by any means. But my point is that it will fall short of invasion and that both Taiwan and countries like ours need to have the will to protect Taiwan

not least because this is 24 million people who have the right to decide their own future. That's something we believe in very strongly, but also because of the need to protect the semiconductor industry and ultimately to protect the strategic position. America is our ally. America's position in the Pacific, Western Pacific, will become untenable if China sees Taiwan because Taiwan is an integral part of the first island chain.

and that makes it a stepping stone to the second island chain. And if you start getting military and technical, a submarine base on Taiwan means the PLA Navy, if it had one, could very quickly get into very deep water and escape detection, whereas at the moment, of course...

They go out through Hainan or other ports and are fairly locatable in shallow waters. So there are a whole form of military reasons also and strategic reasons why Taiwan is very important. And Charlie, just very, very, very, very finally then, how confident are you that this invasion is not going to happen? Would you bet money on it?

Well, the normal expression is I'd bet my house on it, but I think my heirs would be a bit unwilling for me to do that. But I'd certainly bet an awful lot of money on it. Maybe my pension, Cindy. Okay, very good. Charlie Barton, thank you very much.

And thank you for listening. If you'll forgive the cheesiness, I'd like to thank you for being such a good old friend of the Chinese Whispers podcast. As you may have already heard, I'm joining the Times and Sunday Times in May to write a column on China. So this episode is a wrap on the podcast for now. I may be able to bring it back in some form in the future.

To be the first to know and to keep up to date with my articles and interviews, sign up to the free Chinese Whispers Substack. I'm delighted to see so many of you there already. If you haven't yet, go to chinesewhispers.substack.com to check it out. This isn't goodbye. As the Chinese say, 再见, we will meet again.