What does it take to be 'an old friend of the Chinese people'?
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This episode of Chinese Whispers is sponsored by Alliance Witton Investment Trust. From the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s, the financial crash in 2008, to the COVID epidemic and Liz Truss's doomed premiership, there has been no shortage of economic crises over the last 58 years. And yet, throughout that time, every single year, without fail, we've paid out an increased dividend to our shareholders.

In fact, Alliance Witton's history dates all the way back to 1888. And today, we manage around £5bn in assets. If you're looking for a less stressful way to invest in stocks and shares, learn more about Alliance Witton and find your comfort zone. Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? The term old friend might seem a colloquial, almost sentimental phrase to appear in official diplomatic language. But in the Chinese context, those words have a very specific meaning. Most often, they refer to high-profile foreigners whose actions have helped the Chinese Communist Party in one way or another. The most famous of these is Henry Kissinger, who led the way for American rapprochement with China.

That the CCP gives various foreigners this honour is revealing of China's priorities over the decades, but also of its attempts to co-opt foreign forces to its cause. Think back to the United Front strategy, which we looked at on the podcast early in the year. To discuss this honourific now, I'm joined by Professor Anne-Marie Brady, a China expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who was among the first to look at China's old friends as a serious political concept some 20 years ago.

and Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, a journalist based in Hong Kong who has also written about it. Anne-Marie and Ryan, welcome to Chinese Whispers. Thank you. Thank you. Now, Anne-Marie, what is it to be an old friend of the Chinese people then? Well, 中国人民的老朋友 in Chinese is the phrase. The origins are from the Soviet Union. And so the Soviet Union created the literal terminology of 朱雀

is a political friendship. It's not like normal friendship. It's a relationship that has political connotations. It's really closely connected to Leninist ideas, actually, on the United Front. So it's the Communist Party, not members. It's not an individual thing. The Communist Party designating certain individuals as

politically acceptable, who are not themselves party members usually. They are outsiders, but they are friends. So if you've read Lenin's famous article on leftist infantilism, you'll understand the basic strategic concept of the United Front and the CCP and

and the Soviet Union and the Vietnamese Communist Party are always forming united fronts. And part of that united front is designating either groups or individuals as your temporary allies. So that's what it means here when we're talking about when the CCP says that someone is an old friend, that means that they have a tactical relationship with them for political purposes.

Is there a way in which this concept has become nativised in China since the CCP has adopted it as well? Because when I read about it, it reminds me of that old Confucian saying, 有盆自远放来不亦乐乎, expressing pleasure at the arrival of friends from afar. No.

I'm Chinese people. I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic in my first book as well. So I've written two books on this topic and then I've done a lot of writing on, I mean, I had front work. And I talked to a lot of Chinese people during my research about whether they distinguish between this political friendship and ordinary friendship, and absolutely they do. And the CCP very lightly occasionally will drag in some phraseology from China

Confucianism, but not that often. There's some techniques there in the hosting of foreigners that's very Chinese, and that's about the banqueting is really strong because it's such a big deal in Chinese custom to host people, and then it creates reciprocal relationships. In Chinese, they talk about huanqing. Returning the favor. Well, that's an asset relationship. That's a kind of basic technique.

tactics of developing an obligation. But the Chinese banquet has got many, many layers of culture to it. But not all friends of China necessarily are going to be at a banquet. It's a terminology and it's very much a political term. It's quite distinct from the genuine friendships that Chinese people have with each other and with other foreigners.

And it reminds me of what Henry Kissinger said, being one of the most famous old friends that China has said that after a meal of Peking duck, I can sign anything, which is not necessarily reassuring. Ryan, let me bring you in here. I'd love to get your thoughts on how genuine or transactional this friendship is as well. Actually, Anne-Marie, in your book, you mentioned a quote from Max Greenwich, an American communist who went to the USSR and China.

And he said that the old friend Monica was like an Indian in America rubbing blood together till death do us part. I mean, that seems, you know, over-sentimentalised to me. Well, he didn't speak Chinese and he didn't read the CCP documents like I did. He was someone who got the friendship rhetoric used against him.

So I wouldn't take him as authoritative on what youyi means. I would go look to the Chinese documents that I have read, Chinese language documents. And you'll find them within stuff on weishi, particularly. Foreign affairs. Well, weijiāo shìwǔ, foreign affairs. Or shìwài, shìwài gōngzuǒ.

So it's a different idea of what we mean in English about foreign affairs. It means everything to do with foreigners in China, which is managed by the CCP. So, yeah, Greenwich was someone who was beneficiary in his later years from this pleasant sounding language, but he certainly wasn't an expert on friendship or the Soviet term.

Yeah, luckily we can be very precise about our understanding of what it means to be an old friend of the Chinese people, because this is a phrase that has occurred on the pages of the official People's Daily for decades since 1949 and beyond. And it's important to remember that there's no

accidental use of language in that newspaper newspaper that proudly calls itself the whole show of a mouthpiece or throat and tongue of the communist party you know every phrase that's used in there has a very precise meaning and as it's used more and more over the years and decades we get a pretty clear idea of what it means and i thought it was interesting the way um that's what how this relates to confucianism as well because although you know i think there's

I'm sure there's much to be said about the Confucian ideal of friendship. Like Anne-Marie was saying, this differs from it quite starkly. It is very utilitarian. It has a very precise political meaning. And I think you only have to look as far as other Confucian societies, say Taiwan or Hong Kong, to see clearly that this idea does not exist in the same way as in other societies. Societies that have...

the Confucian ideal of friendship, but you know, never speak about 台灣人民的老朋友 or 香港人們的老朋友. So this is very specific to

communist ideology and the People's Republic of China. And as you say, if we go by the People's Daily, I found a stat that says that by 2010, some 600 foreigners have been given that honour, that label. So Ryan, can we talk about each generation of old friends and try to basically probe what it tells us about China of each era? The oldest generation, do they tend to be soldiers? Do they tend to be doctors? Do they tend to be missionaries or journalists? What can we say about them?

It's quite interesting to look at the number of old friends of the Chinese people over the years and where they come from. Because, you know, they do tend to spike at very particular times. For example, this phrase tends to be used with increasing frequency when China wants something from an international community, whether it's international recognition after the founding of the People's Republic or investment, foreign direct investment after reform and opening in the 80s.

or you know a rekindling of international relations after the brief freeze out after the attainment of square mask in 1989 all the lead up to um applying for wgo membership in 2001 so they do tend to speak typically suddenly they need friends yes exactly i mean the earliest generation you

If you look back to the 20s, 30s, 40s, they tend to be people like James Ellicott, Norman Bethune, sort of the international volunteers who came for communist aid to serve as doctors, soldiers, folks, people for the party, earning it, friends and recognition abroad.

In later years, old friends of the Chinese people are more elite. They're political leaders, people like Kissinger or George Bush. And sometimes it can be very dramatic, even amusing reversals in who becomes an old friend of the Chinese people. A great example is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore during the 60s and 70s.

Lee Kuan Yew, as you might know, turned on the left wing of his People's Action Party after violent left-wing labor strikes in Singapore to try to make it appeal to a broader base of Singaporean society, to make it appeal to all ethnicities in Singapore, and to reassure the international community that Singapore was not about to become a domino and go red. So at that time, if you read the People's Daily, he's constantly referred to as a dog, a puppet of US imperialism.

And suddenly in 1980, when China's opening up and it's getting a lot of foreign investment from Singapore, suddenly he becomes a 中国人没得老朋友. So yeah, both in terms of where they're coming from, when the term comes up, and even statistical exceedance of the time can tell you a lot about who is and is not an old friend of a Chinese people.

Well, I just wanted to add on to what Ryan was saying, that some friends of China were always friends of China, despite whatever was going on, although Rui Ali in the Cultural Revolution and a few other, you know, actually the Agnes Medley was...

still around, no, she wasn't around, but it was Anna Louise Strong. Anna Louise Strong was there in the Cultural Revolution. She was always a friend of China. You can read the pamphlet that she put out and the Red Guards statements that were made about her and the Dazibao. So there are some people that are always regarded as friends of China, but some of them, like Sid Rittenberg, for example, was very important in the Cultural Revolution and then he was suddenly designated a spy for

And so it could be quite risky being someone of high profile. But the people that Ryan is talking about and that you mentioned, you know, hundreds of people getting this designation of Friend of China, this is something a bit different again. These are not individuals who are known to the leadership. These are foreigners who've been useful in China and China wants to give them some sort of pat on the back. So they give them this label. So there's sort of different categories of Friends of China.

I mean, Mao Zedong did have some relatively amicable relationships with a couple of foreigners, and one of them was Ted Hill, who was the leader of the breakaway Australian Communist Party, the Marxist-Leninist, because it didn't get the full name after the Sino-Soviet split happened.

And Mao Zedong thought he was all right and used to meet with him and really praise him a lot. But they weren't really friends. And he was a Marxist, so he wasn't a friend of China. So all these other foreigners who met Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai at different times, there's such thing as party discipline. I mean, it was really hazardous sometimes.

for the leaders and to be avoided, to develop any close relationship with a foreigner, even a Russian foreigner. So, you know, there were senior leaders who were, a couple of them were married to foreigners and that was absolutely disastrous for them in the Cultural Revolution. It is a saying in the CCP, I mean, part of the foreign affairs system is managing, the key thing is managing the relationship between Chinese and foreigners. And they talk about, insiders and outsiders are different.

So the party is very, very much elite party. They have very selective relationships and interactions with foreigners. It's like the equivalent of being an elite intelligence organisation and that you don't meet with ordinary people. And if you do meet with anybody on the outside, you'll always have someone with you as a witness to what you said.

So it's totally tactical, but some foreigners stayed in China a long time. They were very useful, so they always got the moniker. What we're seeing now, though, actually, is more people claiming to be friends with Xi Jinping, which is rather weird. Our former prime minister in New Zealand, John Key, claims to be friends with Xi Jinping and gets Christmas cards from him.

And perhaps that's people believing what they were told. Because as I said, this is a party that's... Mao Zedong talked about the three magic weapons. One of them is united front work.

And the other two are armed struggle, in other words, the PLA. The third is party discipline. That's absolutely essential. And that includes the rules on how to deal with foreigners and treat them as, well, potentially a spy at all times, even if you've called them your friend, your old friend. Well, let's follow that line of inquiry then. Ryan, what determines if an old friend falls out of the ranks of an old friend? Because...

It occurs to me some of the most famous old friends of the CCP have been apologists for some of the worst parts of its history. For example, the journalist Edgar Snow, who was the first to interview Mao, denied that there was a famine happening in China when he went to visit in 1960. Others have defended Tiananmen later on, or the general direction that the party was taking the country down.

Are those just the ones that remain in the ranks of the old friends? And if you start to disagree, do you then stop being celebrated? It's interesting. I think a number of the old friends of the Chinese people have sort of followed that trajectory if they live long enough. But yeah, Endicott is another one.

It does help to die early, I think. Exactly. He went on to spread disinformation about biological chemical weapons in the Korean War, like Joseph Needham did. He went on to become an apologist for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And, you know, for no reason, they become sort of detestable in Korea.

their own home countries. I think the exceptions are people like Norman Vufion, who died in 1939 during the War of Resistance, in an arguably laudable cause. He didn't live long enough to see the civil war thereafter or the Communist Party take power.

Ryan, Bethune was a Communist Party member himself, so he's not really a friend of China. And this is a bit tricky. Like, Britain doesn't have anyone like Royale. Every country is supposed to have a friend of China. And Canada's got a Canadian Communist Party member who's

So it doesn't quite fit. It was tricky for China in that they like to have these symbolic figures and when they want to improve relations with China. But what they did have is Pierre Trudeau. I mean, they had old political figures who then could be highlighted as these people being friendly. I mean, as you've talked about some of the other ones like Kissinger, who is absolutely a hawk.

But he was useful to China and helped to usher in a different policy towards China. It's these political figures who are not Communist Party members who are likely to get the label of old friend of China. And the CCP is very careful about it. They do not just hand it out to everybody.

As you said, there's no accidental language in People's Daily and there's no accidental Friends of China when the CCP is saying it. You know, someone might say it casually as a joke or as a sort of a bit of flattery in a situation, but if it's a formal setting, this is very... Your wording, what your stance is on the issues of the day that are important to China will indeed have been checked. And if you are someone who starts...

talking about, for example, in the present day, you know, the terrible oppression of the Uyghurs or the dire political situation in Hong Kong or how Taiwan is being put under a kind of a military blockade at the moment. We talk about the... I'm saying all the taboos at once now. He's saying that Taiwan is, in effect, a sovereign state now

although it doesn't declare itself, is that it has de facto independence. If you were to say any of those things, if your name was one of those politicians who'd been getting nice praise from China, you would go off the list immediately and irreversibly, unless you became very useful and you stopped saying that stuff. You corrected yourself by saying, you know, I think one China is very, very important. Oh, it'll all be all right again because that's politics. It's not a real friendship. Yeah, I think

Edgar Snow is kind of a funny example as well, because in 1970, Bad Song invited him to preside over National Day celebrations at Tiananmen Square with him. And this was supposed to be his big opening to signal to the United States that he was ready for rapprochement.

But, you know, no one in Washington really picked up on the signal because at that point, Edgar Snow was just so irrelevant in the US. He was not a serious person. So they had to wait until the next year to invite the American ping pong players over to actually get the message across. These ping pong players were more relevant at that point to the United States than this great old friend Edgar Snow was.

You're quoting my book. And it's fascinating to hear both of you have read my work so thoroughly. I can tell you that when I did this research for my PhD, people at ANU said to me, this is not political science. They didn't understand why it was important. And it is important. And this is the problem is, is that you've got to look at

from the point of view of how the CCP sees things, not how we understand it. This is the big, big, big challenge that there's still to this very day when we're trying to explain about united front work and why it's really important. Yes. And I just want to follow up on that point about Edgar Snow and his irrelevance because another old friend, one that I had heard quite a lot about when I was inside China is someone called Martin Jacques.

who is a British journalist who wrote the book When China Rules the World. And now the Chinese love him and think he's a real big deal. But in the Western China watching world, his name is really very low profile. People don't generally know him. So Ryan, I guess my question is, how effective is this strategy anyway? Because it does seem like the Chinese kind of build this echo chamber of these foreign friends, but actually that the foreigners don't really know who they are. They don't really have any influence.

I mean, I don't think it's effective at all internationally, but I don't think that's the main audience for it. I think it's more to signal to people in China that, you know, the Communist Party has so many friends abroad, that they have so many supporters abroad. Anne-Marie might have, you know, more insights on this. But I always thought it was very interesting how during the Soviet era as well, you know, they were,

created all of these societies of supporters of the Soviet Union abroad that they referred to as, I think, friendship societies, as friends of the Soviet Union. And I think, you know, this is a big conversation we're having right now across the world. And we talk about them as agents of foreign interference, not as friends, but it's also kind of a way to mask those intentions. And the Soviet Union as well spoke about, you know, friendships.

with places like Czechoslovakia at the same time that they were sending the tanks in there. They talked about friendship

among the peoples at the same time as they were forcibly relocating ethnic minorities. So, I mean, yeah, this touches upon what we were saying earlier about how this is sort of a concept that's really baked into the communist bloc as a whole. They talk about friends and friendship. Well, I would say about Martin Jareks, I read his book and I think at the beginning he talks very critically about China. His wife died in an awful situation in Hong Kong and he believes it was because of racism towards her family.

And he is, in fact, quite critical in the book in some parts towards China. But the title was very popular to the Chinese government. I would just correct you, Cindy, it's not the Chinese who love Martin Jacques. It is the Chinese government, in other words, the government of the Chinese Communist Party. And it's really, really important that we distinguish that because it's

You know, the people of China have their own views and have no say on who the Chinese government says is a friend of China. But the CCP very specifically has promoted Martin Jacques. I think I remember watching his trajectory and he seemed a bit bewildered initially at all the attention that he was getting and he seemed to love it.

But, yeah, I read his book very carefully and I think it's really the title that's the bit that China has taken on because it suited their narrative at the time. So there was this really important series done by CCTV which came from internal briefings given to the Politburo Central Committee, which was about the rise and fall of the great powers in

And so based off that briefings in that series, the sort of conclusion was, well, we've learned all the mistakes and all the good things that worked from the great powers and next great power coming up is China, who is going to rule the world. And there a foreigner has said so, so it must be true.

So, you know, it's so familiar from these books I've collected from the Cultural Revolution, which is full of foreigners saying wonderful things about Mao Zedong. And now we're getting foreigners saying wonderful things about Xi Jinping. And, you know, it's a bit tragic, really, because, you know, Chinese journalists,

And Chinese academics are a lot smarter than that. But the CCP keeps coming back to these areas which they're comfortable with because they want to control

foreigners in China and Chinese people's experience of the outside world that's called the foreign affairs system and having these controllable foreigners these biddable foreigners like Rui Ali in the Mao Zedong era and Martin Jarks and Kerry Brown in this era who will go on CGTN and say what China is allowing a foreigner to say that is very helpful yes it's

Anne-Marie just brought up this distinction between meaningfully being a friend of the Chinese people and a friend of the Chinese government, of the ruling party. I think it's a good point to talk about what China actually means about the people. If you break up the phrase, all friends of the Chinese people, you can even break it up into the smaller components. And what does China mean by the people? And it's actually, it's not as we would think of it as English speakers, that the people is just

everyone resident would have been in a particular place. When China says the people, it also has a very, very specific political meaning. And you can track that out through its whole trajectory as well. In the early days of the Communist Party, they would talk about the people like we do today as just everyone at a time when they were trying to win converts and allies and build a sort of a broad tent for all of Chinese society. But that definition narrowed over time.

You had to be anti-Japanese to be one of the people. You had to oppose imperialism and the bourgeoisie and landlords to be one of the people. And by 1949, you had to oppose all of those and the KMT and the bureaucrats to be counted as one of the people. So who does that leave? It's just Communist Party supporters who are the people. If you're not, then you're not the people. You're the enemy.

So, even when we're talking about these very common phrases, they have very special meanings. Yeah, it certainly is a strategy from the CCP to equate itself or the state with the Chinese people. It reminds me of another phrase when the government says, you've hurt the feelings of the Chinese people in description of some kind of foreign policy conflict or something like that. But I would just push back on two points that Anne-Marie, that you mentioned earlier.

One is the idea that the Chinese people didn't like Martin Jacques' book, or at least the thesis that the book title suggested. I do and did know a lot of Chinese people who were quite interested and felt quite bolstered by the title of his book.

So I don't think that was just a state-led thing. And then the second thing is, you know, you mentioned that someone like Kerry Brown is biddable. I wonder if that's not quite fair, because we do have to consider, I think at least, the competence and the expertise of the people that we're talking about, just because they have come to similar conclusions to others who are less expert, but are nevertheless sympathetic to some of China's

arguments doesn't mean that everyone who has those arguments is necessarily biddable. I mean, as listeners to this podcast will know that Kerry is one of the UK's leading experts on China at King's College London and a friend of this podcast. So I'm not sure I'm very comfortable with the idea that just because he tends to be on a sympathetic end that he is therefore biddable.

Well, that's your take on it. I was just talking about how the party has politically acceptable foreigners and only politically acceptable foreigners can appear on CGTN. So it's always a sign if someone is on there.

Right. Well, I think we'll leave that one there. And Emery, I wanted to pick up on what you were saying about the different categories of old friends. You mentioned that these hundreds of old friends at the People's Daily tallied up aren't really the same as your Kissingers. Other people who have had similar monikers put on them are people like Graham Allison from Harvard or Elon Musk has been dubbed an old friend at one point and Bill Gates as well. What differentiates these different labels, if anything?

Well, when you raised those three names before the interview, I looked them up in Chinese and in English, and I didn't find any indication that, at least in print, that Elon Musk is called a friend of China. Oh, interesting. But maybe someone has said that to him at a dinner event.

But I don't know where you got that from, that he's called a friend to China, because I don't find it in any Chinese language government sources. And I look there. I think Li Qiang has called him an old friend before Li Qiang, formerly the Shanghai Party secretary, who is now the premier. But I think maybe that's more of a personal capacity old friend rather than the old friend of the Chinese people. No, I mean, if he said it, then that means he thinks that Elon Musk is politically acceptable. And obviously they do because they let him do business in China.

and the kind of business that he does, which is on a strategic technology. But I've seen that Bill Gates is repeatedly called a friend of China, whereas Graham Ellison, I just saw in passing, someone had mentioned that, like you would say to an actual friend, we've known each other a while kind of way. So I think this is a bit different from what Brian and I have been talking about. There were always, in the Soviet Union and China, there were always business figures who were useful to the party and

And even, you know, regardless of the ideological approach at the time, they still did have some degree of contact with the outside world. And so there were these business figures who were acceptable to the party. And so I think that's the category of those three people, or two of them anyway, business figures are acceptable to the party. Graham Ellison is someone who's an academic figure.

who has written things that suit China's narratives. And he didn't write them for China. He did them because that's what he's interested in. And the same with Martin Jacques, too. He wrote a book that was something he wanted to say, but the CCP has picked it up.

I mean, when that happens, it depends on how you respond to it. Some people obviously really enjoy it and continue, make that their career. And that seems to be what happened to Martin Jarks is that became his thing, was going on Chinese TV.

and saying, you know, the latest thing that China wanted you to talk about. So not everybody is going to do that whose narrative or whose research has suited an agenda that China's promoting. So let's be clear about the terminology then. So we are talking about the People's Daily and what is being written on that. Is that the ultimate marker of what is an old friend of the Chinese people? Well, not necessarily.

Clearly, but, you know, it could be if Xi Jinping says it, that means something. But laopengyou is just a saying. Chinese people talk about laopengyou as well.

An old friend of the Chinese people, that's like getting, you know, Knight of the Realm or something. You know, that's an actual title. Seriously, it's an actual title. So that's not handed out. That is designated. So Lao Pai Yu is just something you'll say, you know, is a nice Chinese language is full of positive language is what the linguists call it.

And so it warms things up when you say that to someone. But it's not all the same as being called an old friend of the Chinese people. That means something. Or guo jiyouren, international friend, is also significant. So I did write about this, the categories in my book, Making the Foreign Serve China, if people want to read more. I talked about the different categories there.

of the foreign friends and they are ranked. It won't just be people's daily, but it will appear, you know, as if it was your, you know, like a,

you've got one of those awards from the queen or something and you get to put something after your name like OBE, then you'll get to have old friend of the Chinese people next to your name or it'll be talked about as these, where Xi Jinping met the international friends, so-and-so. But it would be very common at a banquet if a politician had come once before to China that when they came the second time, they would say, oh, so-and-so is our old friend.

So that doesn't mean that you've been saying pro-China narratives. It just means that you've come more than once to China and you're meeting the same people again and they're saying nice things to you about that. And Ryan, just going back to that People's Daily tally of the 600 or so old friends, I was struck by how few Russians there were and just quite how many Japanese there were.

Yeah, it's a bit funny how China seems to have the most old friends in the least friendly countries to it, which also tells us a lot about what they mean by old friends and what uses they have.

The most, but yet by far, in Japan, over 100. And second most, with just about half that, was the United States, followed by the UK and France and Germany. And yet very few old friends in places like Albania or Pakistan, you know, sort of countries that have been by China's side, the People's Republic's side for the longest time.

I think that tells us that China looks for its old friends in places where they can be useful, where they can be used to sort of nudge their governments, hopefully in a direction that's amicable to the Chinese Communist Party. And so they invoke these old friends at times when they can be useful in the places where they can be the most useful.

I'd just like to add in something about Albania and Pakistan, actually, because I've been studying them a bit and also their pre-Mao era relationship and their post-Mao era relationship with China. So Albania and China, that was a very temporary relationship and they were comrades in that period. You know, it's a Sino-Soviet split. So they're definitely not going to be... Well, I mean, they did talk about friendship, actually, and it was between the peoples, but not so much the leader, but...

And Hodger famously kept a diary. It's not really clear if that was him really writing it, but there's a lot of negative stuff about China in it, and it was published later.

So nowadays, I wrote a paper about this published with Synopsys a couple of years ago. China does use the friendship language towards Albania, but I think the Albanians are a bit like someone who's been married to someone before and then they still have to associate with them. They know them all too well. And there are a few people who are slightly susceptible to the political friendship language, but most of the politicians aren't.

And so they don't really get into it very much. It's really interesting. They're very canny, the Albanians. And then on Pakistan, I mean, they were useful to China in getting nuclear technology. But they're very, you know, Pakistan, you've got the military interests and you've got the state interests. And certainly certain politicians have been called old friends of China.

I have feeling that Imran Khan has been called a friend of China, but their relationship is quite a unique one, a balancing one. The numbers of Japanese, if there are a lot of Japanese called friends of China, there've been a lot of Japanese who've done a lot of work in China and China

does a massive amount of united front work towards Japan. I did a study with a student on China's united front work or foreign interference towards Japan, and every single political party

in Japan had people who were brought over for political tourism, who've got business opportunities and they've got so much of the friendship cities. And so they've been absolutely saturated with the friendship language and the various organizations that will create these, from China's point of view, create the relationship that they want with Japan in order to co-opt

and influence Japanese foreign policy, that's the goal.

So, you know, each country has a different relationship with China and they've got different population mix and different proximity. And so that will be a factor as to more or less numbers. And then that history factor, like with the Albanians and their painful period of being, you know, they were the tiny country that because of Hoxha, he defied Stalin and

And so Mao Zedong offered Albania a few advantages for a while.

And then they split over ideology. And so it took quite a while for there to be any kind of a tactical relationship with modern Albania and China today. And they were briefly in the 17 plus one. Well, they have been in 17 plus one, but they didn't take any BRI loans. They had all this big talk about it, but they didn't take a cent.

And so that was an indication to me of a very canny government. And they had different governments, but they're quite canny on the risks of being a friend of China. Anne-Marie Brady and Ryan Hoker-Patrick, thank you so much for joining Chinese Vistalist. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

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 is Incuby. As the Chinese say, 再见, we will meet again.