Francis Pike | The Spectator columnists & writers

China vs the US: who will win the chip war?

There is a joke in Taipei that if China invades Taiwan, the best place to shelter will be in microchip factories, because they are the only places the People’s Liberation Army can’t afford to destroy. The country that controls advanced chips controls the future of technology – and Taiwan’s chip fabrication foundries (‘fabs’) are the finest in the world. Successful reunification between the mainland and its renegade province would give China a virtual monopoly over the most advanced fabs. Given Xi Jinping’s designs on Taiwan, it is no wonder that the US government is worried. For this reason, in recent months the United States has taken various steps to thwart China’s attempts to make advanced semiconductors. New fabs are technically challenging to build, and eye-wateringly costly.

Pakistan is on the brink

On Tuesday I speculated that Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, now the opposition leader, was so popular that he might have to be shot by his enemies to prevent him from coming back to power. This was not a throwaway statement. After Sri Lanka and Lebanon, whose political murder rate since the second world war has been off the charts, Pakistan with 44 political murders comes a clear third, not including the peripheral hundreds if not thousands who have died in bombings. As if in sync with my warning, Tuesday afternoon saw another political murder in Pakistan. Majid Satti, the leader of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in Rawalpindi was gunned down by a group of armed assassins. Two days previously, the PTI politician Nargis Baloch was shot dead outside Quetta’s Balochistan University by a gunman riding pillion on a motorbike – a method of assassination popular across the subcontinent, particularly in Sri Lanka.

Is Imran Khan Pakistan’s Donald Trump?

Imran Khan, the cricketing hero, legendary lothario and deposed prime minister of Pakistan, is in trouble again. His political opponents in the police and the judiciary, in a manner not dissimilar to the judicial attack on former US president Donald Trump, have moved against Khan in recent days by accusing him of terrorist activities. In theory, these charges could carry the death penalty. Khan’s crime was to threaten retaliatory action against the police and the judiciary in revenge for the arrest of his chief of staff, Shahbaz Gill. Gill had been roughly arrested by police and his assistant allegedly beaten up. In addition, police had tried to apprehend former Khan acolyte and home affairs minister, Sheikh Rashid.

Nancy Pelosi went rogue in Taiwan

Old leaders can be among the best. Just look at Konrad Adenauer, who became German chancellor when he was 73 or Ronald Reagan who was days off 70 when he became president. But the United States’s political leaders are at risk of taking it too far. President Joe Biden has already regressed to childhood. Nowadays even the Democratic party do not consider him fit for purpose; he has lost credibility and authority. The 82-year-old US house speaker Nancy Pelosi, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday to much trumpeting by the West and much harrumphing by China, simply ignored Biden’s limp statement: ‘I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.’ Pelosi wears her age well, albeit she has had more repair work than a British motorway.

The European Union can’t fix its gas problem

Over a 20 year period, former German chancellors Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel, handed Russian President Vladimir Putin a vice-like grip on Europe’s energy security. Schroder, who enjoyed a well-publicised bromance with Putin, oversaw the start of Gazprom’s Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline. With unseemly haste, soon after he stepped down as chancellor, Schroder became chairman of Nord Stream AG’s shareholder board. Schroder’s successor Angela Merkel — the Russian speaking daughter of a Lutheran pastor who joined the East German communist youth party in her teens — was equally accommodating. She oversaw the development of Russian gas projects in the face of opposition from her Nato allies and particular the United States, who tried to warn her off putting German industrial interests before those of European security.

Shinzo Abe and the long history of Japanese political violence

Shinzo Abe, perhaps the most significant Japanese politician of the last 50 years, has been assassinated. The killing was carried out by Tetsuya Yamagamu, a youngish and apparently disgruntled former employee of the Japan’s Maritime Self Defence Force. It was a brutal and sordid end to what was an important if not uncontroversial life. Shinzo Abe was the dominant politician of his era. Forced to give up the prime ministership after just one year in 2007 because of ulcerative colitis, a congenital condition, Abe came back to win landslide elections for the Liberal Democratic Party in 2012, 2014 and 2017. In an era when many Japanese prime ministers have served for little more than a year, Abe was prime minister for a record eight years and 267 days.

How long will Xi Jinping rule China?

For some time now it has been assumed that in November the National Congress will rubber stamp Xi Jinping’s continued role as China’s supreme leader for a third five-year term, which would make Xi the first Chinese leader for a generation to serve more than two terms. Just a year ago his position as one of China's three pre-eminent leaders was confirmed when the 400 members of the Central Committee passed the third ‘Historical Resolution’ in the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year history. The previous two were organised by Mao in 1945 and Deng Xiaoping in 1981. The resolution highlighted the concept of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ as a historical equivalent to that of his two legendary predecessors. But a number of crises, international and domestic, have put a question mark against Xi’s continued omnipotence.

Why does India get a free pass for supporting Russia?

When Russia invaded Ukraine the Indian government rapidly launched ‘Operation Ganga’. This was not a military operation, nor did it aim to supply Ukraine with weapons – it was an operation to extract the 500 Indian students stranded in Ukraine. After Prime Minister Narendra’s Modi’s video call with Putin, the Russian president ordered his invading army ‘to ensure the safe exit of Indian nationals from the armed conflict zone.’ The Indian government quickly dispatched civil servants, not weapons, to Poland, Hungary and Romania to assist their fleeing citizens. Since February more than 22,000 have been repatriated. Otherwise, Modi’s attitude to Ukraine has been decidedly non-committal. He proffered his ‘deep anguish about the loss of life’ and called for dialogue and a cessation of violence.

China’s pact with the Solomons is a direct threat to Australia

Tulagi, a 1.5 square mile island in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands, is perhaps the most remote place on the planet to have a repeat role in world history. On 4 May 1942, Emperor Hirohito’s Japanese forces landed on Tulagi – then the capital of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate – to attempt to cut off Australia from American supplies. Worse still, Australia feared invasion. These goals were ultimately thwarted in the naval and land battles of Guadalcanal. Not surprisingly, then, the news today that China has signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands has horrified the Australians. Canberra says the deal could ‘undermine stability in our region’ and Australia would ‘seek further clarity on the terms of the agreement, and its consequences for the Pacific region’.

Can Imran Khan cling on to power in Pakistan?

In the brief interlude of Chechen independence between the Russia-Chechen Wars of the 1990s, I travelled with Imran Khan from Grozny to Baku, where we were due to meet Azerbaijan’s finance minister. We had different reasons for our visit. I was interested in the business potential of the countries of the Caucasus, while Khan, a former cricketer turned fledging politician who had recently formed the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI), was keen to support the then independent Sufi Islamic state of Chechnya. To get to Baku we had to catch a plane from the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan. Our Chechen hosts told us that we did not need papers to get across the border. The result was a terrifying shouty standoff between our convoy of Kalashnikov-wielding bodyguards and Russia’s border patrol.

Turkmenistan may emerge as a global powerbroker

While the world is watching Ukraine, there is another former Soviet republic that has quietly undergone regime change. Turkmenistan’s 65-year-old former president, known, in the manner of a comic book superhero, as ‘The Protector’, stepped down in February. With Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov's departure, the Mejlis Assembly duly called for elections on 12 March. As regime changes go this one was hardly revolutionary. The Protector's son, having just turned 40 (the minimum age at which a candidate can stand for the presidency) won the election at a canter. The only surprise was that Serdar, 'The Son of the Nation', won just 73 per cent of the vote compared to his father’s 97 per cent winning mandate in 2017. His nearest challenger was an anonymous university official who won 11 per cent.

Was the Kazakhstan uprising an attempted Jihadi takeover?

The Kazakh uprising is over. The stench of burnt-out vehicles and bombed out buildings in Kazakhstan’s most populous city and former capital, Almaty, has begun to dissipate. Life is returning to normal. Banks have reopened. Salaries and pensions are being paid. The internet is up and running again. Almaty airport is expected to reopen today. As the fog of war lifts some clarity about these events is beginning to emerge. Officials have reported that 100 businesses and banks were destroyed along with 400 vehicles. Seven policemen died and hundreds more were wounded; 8,000 people have been arrested. Some 164 civilians were killed. The government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has survived and with some ease as it turns out.

What’s happening in Kazakhstan?

Since the start of the new year, riots have spread throughout Kazakhstan. In the former capital of Almaty, the airport has been taken over and the mayor’s office stormed. Dozens of security forces and civilians have been killed in violent clashes while hundreds have been wounded. Is this Kazakhstan’s Tiananmen Square moment, in which the government is shaken to its roots but survives? Or will it be like the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in which a pro-Russian ruler was overthrown by the mob? The main cause of the uprising is not dissimilar to Tiananmen Square. It is not a demand for democracy, which some inept journalists at the BBC and CNN ascribed as the main cause of China’s urban uprising in 1989. In China it was the rise of food prices, the classic cause of urban revolt; in Kazakhstan, it has been rising liquid petroleum gas prices.

The case against Aukus

Just weeks after the denouement of the West’s misadventure in Afghanistan, Boris Johnson is again committing Britain to a risky international venture. Aukus, the naval partnership between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, appears to tie Britain to an Indo-Pacific strategy that is militarily and geopolitically flawed. In December 1941, the catastrophic sinking of the then imperious new battleship HMS Prince of Wales along with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse off the coast of Malaya led to the loss of Singapore and brought the curtains down on Britain’s Asian Empire. Britain was over-stretched and unable to commit resources to the defence of the Pacific. History rarely repeats itself exactly. Nevertheless, it must be asked whether Britain, which is a relatively far weaker power now than in 1941, is again risking overreach in committing itself to the Indo-Pacific.

The Edition

New world order: can Britain, America and Australia contain China?

43 min listen

The Edition

New world order: can Britain, America and Australia contain China?

43 min listen

Did Chinese fentanyl kill Michael K. Williams?

Did Chinese-manufactured fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, kill Michael Kenneth Williams, the man who played ‘Omar’ in The Wire? Within minutes of his death being announced yesterday, speculation was circulating on Twitter. New York Police Department sources have told the Daily Mail they suspect fentanyl was involved. The world only seems to notice when a celebrity overdoses. In 2016, Prince's death from a cocktail of fentanyl and other substances was an important milestone in awakening America to the horrific opioid drug epidemic that had crept up on the country since the 1990s. But lots of non-famous people are dying all the time because of fentanyl from China, which has flooded the US criminal scene in recent years.

Would Japan defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack?

In a parliamentary debate in early June about Covid, Japan’s prime minister Yoshihide Suga said that Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan had been 'imposing strong restrictions on privacy rights.’ Whether by mistake or on purpose, Suga had crossed the Rubicon of acceptable China-Japan diplomatic language by implying that Taiwan was a country. If it was a mistake, it was one he repeated several times. China’s response was immediate. A foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, accused Suga of a flagrant breach of ‘the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country.’ It is a precious tenet of China’s foreign policy – indeed it is written into their constitution – that Taiwan is only their province.

What kind of empire is China building?

As Britain’s small fleet, headed by HMS Queen Elizabeth, cruises towards the South China Sea, there remains a question over the nature of China’s geopolitical ambitions. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2013 it was assumed that China would follow the relatively unthreatening path begun by Deng Xiaoping. But Xi was intent on following a different agenda. Xi’s brutal clampdown on corruption showed that there was a new sheriff in town. High profile politburo members were imprisoned. Such was the scale that Qincheng Prison began to run out of cells. Expensive wristwatches suddenly disappeared from the arms of modestly paid bureaucrats. The West applauded. Xi’s reform of China’s state owned enterprises was further positive news; so too the Belt and Road Initiative which was seen as a positive contribution to global economic growth.

Chairman Xi and the Communist party’s delusional centenary

The emperor has new clothes. Arriving at a meeting to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping came dressed as Chairman Mao. His light grey tunic suit, four front pockets and five buttons to the neck cut an imposing contrast to the Politburo’s Standing Committee in their familiar dark suits and sober ties. This was no subtle message; ludicrous it might seem, but it was fancy dress hiding an iron fist. One can’t imagine Boris Johnson addressing the Conservative party wearing the frock coat, winged collar and white tie stock of Sir Robert Peel. It would be equally laughable if President Macron addressed the French people wearing a Napoleon-style bicorne hat and the uniform of a colonel of the imperial guard’s light cavalry.

How China won over the Middle East

In April, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi embarked on a six-nation Middle Eastern tour to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman. ‘Belt and Road’ cooperation, economic development and the Covid pandemic were the topics of discussion. The treatment of China’s Muslim Uighur population in detention camps, which some in the West have described as genocidal, didn’t come up. Both China and Saudi Arabia cleave to the belief that internal affairs are nobody else’s business — or at least as long as there are overriding economic interests at stake. Compare the silence of Muslim countries on the Uighur issue with the loud faux anger when the Danish newspaper Jyllands--Posten published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005.

Is Britain heading for war over Taiwan?

It is billed as a once-in-a-generation review of Britain’s foreign policy and defence strategies. ‘Global Britain in a Competitive Age’, Boris Johnson’s ‘new chapter’ for Britain, identifies two main adversaries: Russia — an ‘acute threat’ — and China — a ‘systemic competitor’. And while it nods at a geopolitical ‘tilt’ towards the Indo-Pacific, the more hawkish Tory MPs are disappointed, thinking Beijing should have also counted as a threat. They should perhaps be careful what they wish for. The Prime Minister is sending more than harsh words in China’s direction. In two months’ time, the Royal Navy will send a battle fleet to Asia for the first time since the start of the Korean War in 1950. One of the navy’s two new £6 billion aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, will head up an allied task force in what’s described as a British ‘pivot’ to the Indo-Pacific with ‘a greater and more persistent presence’ there ‘than any other European country’.

China vs America: the struggle for south-east Asia

Is Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden’s secretary of state, preparing to abandon Barack Obama’s powder-puff Asian foreign policies? It is now widely agreed that Obama, under whom Blinken served as deputy secretary of state, ceded to China uncontested control of the South China Sea. Obama’s so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ was all talk and no trousers. Blinken, who believes that diplomacy must be ‘supplemented by deterrence’, may be about to implement a more aggressive foreign policy in south-east Asia and elsewhere. In his first speech as general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, Xi Jinping made his intentions clear. He stated his commitment to ‘accepting the baton of history and continuing to work for realising the great revival of the Chinese nation in order to let the Chinese nation stand more firmly and powerfully among all nations’.

Is Kazakhstan capable of transitioning to democracy?

In the dramatic ‘reveal’ of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the lead character, private dick Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) violently extracts the identity of the young girl hidden in the house of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Evelyn, after being beaten and thrown across the room by Gittes, explains, ‘She’s my sister and my daughter’. The penny drops and Gittes realises that Evelyn has had a daughter by her father. Incest is shocking enough in a film. When incest allegedly involves Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan, and his daughter Dariga, the speaker of Kazakhstan’s Senate, the revelation is jaw-dropping. The reveal of this hard-to-believe accusation was even more extraordinary. It was posted on Facebook by Aisultan Nazarbayev, the president’s grandson, who in February 2020 sought political asylum in Britain: ‘My mother [Dariga] kept my grandfather on the hook because I am his son.

Coup de grâce: the downfall of Aung San Suu Kyi

Coup? What coup? The early morning takeover of Myanmar on Monday by the Tatmadaw (Burmese army) barely deserves the name. The word ‘coup’ suggests that Myanmar was being ruled by a civilian and democratic government before now. It was not. Although Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in ‘free’ elections in 2015, the constitutional revision implemented by the military in 2008 meant that Tatmadaw retained 25 per cent of seats in both houses of the national assembly. More pertinently, whatever the outcome of elections, Tatmadaw reserved its rights to three ministries: home affairs, border affairs and defence. Furthermore, in a move aimed squarely at Suu Kyi, who was married to the Oxford academic Michael Aris, Burmese citizens were barred from a presidential position if they were married to a foreigner.

Duterte Harry: why is he the Philippines’ most popular ever leader?

If you thought Donald Trump was rude to journalists, hang on to your hats. Miffed by a journalist’s temerity in asking about his health, president Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines exploded: ‘How is your wife’s vagina? Is it smelly? Or not smelly? Give me a report.’ Duterte, a 75-year-old provincial politician who revels in the sobriquet ‘Duterte Harry’ after Clint Eastwood’s cop, arrived in national politics in June 2016 with all the media hullabaloo of other internationally reviled populist leaders such as Viktor Orbán and Recep Erdogan. The foul-mouthed Duterte, clearly a coprolaliac, is just as brutal with his political opponents. After obtaining a tape of his leading senatorial antagonist, the former justice secretary Leila de Lima, having sex with her driver, Duterte announced on television that she ‘is not only screwing her driver, she is also screwing the nation.

Cold war: Russia’s bid to control the Arctic

It may be time for Father Christmas to look for a new home, before the Russians kick him out. ‘This is our Arctic,’ declared the Russian explorer Artur Chilingarov when he went to the North Pole in 2003. Four years later, another Russian expedition, again led by Chilingarov, planted a titanium flag on the seabed 2.5 miles below the Pole. It was a symbolic gesture of a geopolitical ambition. The jingoistic Chilingarov proclaimed: ‘Our task is to remind the world that Russia is a great Arctic and scientific power.’ Since 2013, Russia has invested heavily in seven military/naval bases along its Arctic coast to strengthen the country’s power and influence. ‘The Americans think that only [they] can… make the rules,’ Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated.

Was 2008 the year China triumphed over the West?

Although China's economy remains smaller than the United States’s in terms of nominal GDP (albeit ahead of the US in terms of GDP on a purchasing power parity basis) has it already surpassed it in another sense? Since 2008, China's energy and momentum has arguably led to it overtaking its rival. A hundred years from now, historians are likely to look back at the financial crash as the turning point in the balance of power between the West and China. The sub-prime mortgage crisis of that year, followed by president Obama’s high-tax, over-regulated economic management, saw America cast into a prolonged recession and an anaemic recovery. At the same time, the US had dissipated financial and military strength as well as diplomatic credibility on president Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which, at best, only brought marginal benefits.

Erdogan’s game: why Turkey has turned against the West

Six years ago, at the celebratory opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely football star emerged. The red team’s ageing, six-foot tall centre-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal; a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he expected to become his country’s 12th president. For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world record’ Yangtze River swim at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make him as much a cult as a politician.

The Edition

Divided nation: will Covid rules tear the country apart?

37 min listen

The Edition

Divided nation: will Covid rules tear the country apart?

37 min listen

In this second round of restrictions, the lockdown is no longer national. But a regional approach is full of political perils (00:45). Plus, the real reason to be disappointed in Aung San Suu Kyi (12:50) and is Sally Rooney's Normal People just overrated (26:15).With The Spectator's political editor James Forsyth; Middlesbrough mayor Andrew Preston; historian Francis Pike; the Myanmar bureau chief for Reuters Poppy McPherson; journalist Emily Hill; and The Times's deputy books editor James Marriott.Presented by Cindy Yu.Produced by Cindy Yu and Max Jeffery.

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