The trouble with China is that it is not at all what it appears to be. It is run by a body that calls itself “The Chinese Communist Party” (CCP for short) and so you would expect it to be a communist state. When I was young, everyone knew what that meant, and the distinction between communist and capitalist countries was plain and simple. In a capitalist country, businesses were owned by individuals, families or large numbers of public shareholders (some of which were actually other companies). Their main job was to survive and make a profit, usually by selling something. Most employed people were employed by such companies. The government’s duty was to collect taxes and finance law enforcement and the army (and sometimes a health service as well).
In a communist country, all businesses were owned by the state and all employed persons worked for the state. Usually there was a great show of democracy (Democratic Republic of... and People’s Republic of... were common in the names of such nations) but actually most, if not all, communist countries were police states. So admittedly were a lot of capitalist countries in those days, especially those in South America. However in a capitalist state, there were rich people and poor people. In a communist state, there were poor people and party officials.
I don’t know if there are any authentic communist states left today. Perhaps Cuba. But all the European countries that were forcibly occupied by the USSR after the Second World War and turned into communist dictatorships have now become capitalist democracies. The USSR itself has dissolved into a collection of democracies and kleptocracies, with Ukraine now in the former group (it wasn't always) and Russia and Belarus as the best known members of the latter. None of these countries still calls itself communist.
In Asia, things evolved rather differently. The communist name has survived in both North Korea and China, but not the communist reality. North Korea has degenerated into a neo-medieval religious state ruled by a hereditary priest king who is the grandson and current incarnation of their national god Kim Il-Sung. Everybody who is not a member of the Holy Inquisition (oops! I mean the Party leadership) is starving and terrorised. If there is any property still left in North Korea, then the government owns it, but I doubt if either Marx or Lenin would recognise this as communism.
China, on the face of it, has become an oligarchy, somewhat similar to Russia. The Communist Party still exists and rules with an iron hand, but it is no longer interested in promoting communism either at home or abroad and has become more like a Chinese version of the Mafia. Its sole purpose seems to be keeping itself in power and ensuring that the current leader comes from its ranks. The overall economy is now capitalist and very successfully so. China has the fastest growing economy in the world and one of the largest. There are a lot of big Chinese companies and rich Chinese businessmen. But they are very different from western businessmen. Their first duty is to serve China and not themselves and they take this duty seriously. Any information about us that any Chinese company acquires is automatically at the disposal of the Chinese government.
Most Chinese people take it for granted that China is the oldest and greatest civilisation in the world. They have never had any real respect for those who are not Han Chinese, which makes them some of the most uncompromising and unapologetic racists in existence. That is why they treat non-Han minorities like the Uighurs so abominably. They call us Europeans barbarians, and they have been quietly angry for a long time about the way the West treated them during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now they are finally in a position to take revenge but they seem to be going about it very slowly and carefully with several different branches to their strategy.
For a start, China has become the workshop of the world. Every second thing you buy seems to be made in China. As a result, China has received a fantastic inflow of money from the West. This money is being used for systematic worldwide bribery. A lot of it goes to Africa in what is called the Belt and Road initiative. China “generously” builds infrastructure such as ports and railways, ostensibly for trade, but the real purpose is to get African governments into debt so that they will eventually have to do whatever the Chinese government tells them to. Africa is the main source of most of the world’s cobalt and nickel and many rare earth elements too. Without these, a lot of modern tech can’t function. There are in theory alternative sources of cobalt and nickel via the mining of metallic nodules from the deep sea bed but it is uncertain whether that would ever be practical, and it might cause an unacceptable degree of oceanic pollution.
A lot of Chinese money goes to the UN as well and to its various subsidiaries, particularly the spectacularly incompetent World Health Organisation. The UN has long outgrown the shining idealism of its youth in the aftermath of the victory over fascism, and has become an international embarrassment. Its inability to do anything about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because the aggressor has a non-removable veto in the Security Council, made it a laughing stock. The USA, its original main paymaster, now pays as little money to the UN as it can legally get away with, and China has been happy to fill the gap. In return UN bodies increasingly say whatever China wants them to.
China also donates generously to various prestigious Western universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, via the so-called Confucius Institutes, to fund educational programs that teach students to admire Chinese history and culture and despise their own. To be fair, a lot of this ideology originated in America and not China, but any country that hates our way of life stands to gain if we can be persuaded to hate it too. All British universities love foreign students because there is no limit to the fees they are allowed to charge them (which is not the case for British students). But when 20% of all students at an institution (that’s 1 in 5) are Chinese, that begins to look like financial dependency.
Chinese tech is just as massive an infiltrator as Chinese money. Whether it is online social media, electronic networking hardware or nuclear reactors, the Chinese make it and will sell it to you at a temptingly low price. Our partnership with the French company EDF for the purpose of constructing nuclear reactors like Sizewell C used to involve the Chinese company CGN as a third party, until someone pointed out that giving China a potential back door into the control systems of your nuclear reactors was not a very good idea. In the same way we very nearly embedded Huawei electronics into our 5G mobile networks until warned against them by the US. As to TikTok, several Western governments including the USA have banned it on all official government devices and the UK has now done so too. Quite apart from its mind-rotting addictiveness, it makes its money (as all social media do) by collecting and selling information about its users, with the additional wrinkle that its parent company ByteDance is also obliged by Chinese law to pass on all such information to the Chinese government on demand.
Finally there is China’s geographical closeness to Taiwan, the world’s manufacturing centre for practically all the microchips on which modern IT depends. Taiwan of course claims independence from China and has matured over the years from a kind of American-financed retirement home for exiled Chinese dictators and their families into a real and successful democracy. China regards it as a breakaway Chinese province and has frequently announced its intention to take it back, by force if necessary. Taiwan has promised to defend itself vigorously if invaded, and Ukraine has shown the world what such a patriotic defence is capable of achieving, but Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine and depends heavily on American promises to intervene militarily in the event of an invasion. Somehow I doubt if the USA would actually risk that intervention, given that it might lead to a nuclear exchange with China. And of course the UN would be helpless in that situation for the same reason as it was helpless over the Ukraine invasion: China also has a non-removable veto in the Security Council, similar to the one held by Russia. Ironically this veto used to belong to Taiwan (formerly known as the Republic of China) but it got transferred to the mainland People’s Republic in 1971. So China could rather easily get possession of the world’s microchip supply to add to its other powers of control.
I wonder what Xi Jin-Ping would do after that. In my more imaginative moments, I rather fancy he might end up declaring himself Emperor of China. After all, he’s already the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Tse-Tung, and Mao was limited by the fact that he really was a Marxist-Leninist believer. He had idealogical reasons for sticking to the title of Chairman, even though it was of European origin. Xi has no such emotional ties to Marxism. China for most of its history has been a hereditary absolute monarchy that equated its empire with the civilised world, and Korea has shown how such a monarchy can be combined with a purely nominal communism. So the logical conclusion of a successful Chinese world hegemony would surely be the reestablishment of its ancient imperial glory with Xi as the new Son of Heaven. We are condemned to live in interesting times.
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