Ian Williams | The Spectator columnists & writers

The extreme heatwave wreaking havoc across China

China is struggling to limit the impact of its longest and most widespread heatwave since records began more than 60 years ago. Temperatures have reached the highest the country has ever recorded and a drought is wreaking havoc across much of southern China. It is compounding the multiple economic challenges facing China’s communist leaders, including the fallout from strict Covid-19 lockdowns and a bursting property bubble. Maximiliano Herrera, a weather historian who monitors extreme heat around the world, has described China’s soaring temperatures as the most severe heatwave ever recorded anywhere. The authorities have declared a drought emergency, warning that the critical autumn harvest is under ‘severe threat’.

The Chinese spy ship and the dangers of debt-trap diplomacy

A Chinese spy ship that docked in Sri Lanka on Tuesday in defiance of Indian and western protests is the latest symbol of China’s power and ambition in the Indian Ocean. It is also a stark demonstration and warning of the harder edges of Beijing’s debt trap diplomacy. The Yuan Wang 5, bristling with satellite dishes and antennas, is described by China as a ‘research and scientific vessel’. In reality it is one of the latest generation of space-tracking ships, able to monitor satellites, as well as rocket and intercontinental ballistic missile launches. There is speculation that it carries a fleet of underwater drones. It is in other words, a formidable piece of surveillance kit. For days the Indian and American governments pressured Sri Lanka to keep the ship away.

Americano

Is Chinese espionage a threat to US democracy?

26 min listen

Americano

Is Chinese espionage a threat to US democracy?

26 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Spectator contributor, Ian Williams, author of Every Breath You Take: China's New Tyranny and Nicholas Eftimiades, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and professor of Homeland Security. On the podcast, they discuss the scale of Chinese espionage infiltrating Western society. Has the problem been ignored for decades? What kind of a threat is it to America's democracy?

China’s Taiwan tantrum is already backfiring

Chinese social media is full of anger and frustration – because the military didn’t shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane. As she headed to Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whipped up a wave of rabid online nationalism. Influential commentators led by Hu Xijin, the former editor of the CCP’s Global Times, suggested the speaker of the US House of Representatives could be taken out, a view that was widely applauded. Nationalists have a lot of leeway on China’s tightly-controlled internet, in large part because their views are shared by the increasingly chauvinistic CCP. But after Pelosi’s plane not only landed, but left Taiwan in one piece, they exploded in outrage. How could she be allowed to get away with it, they fumed, dismissing the military drills that followed as too little, too late and a sign of weakness.

Taiwan tells China: we’re not scared

China has launched a new round of military drills near Taiwan, having previously announced they were ending on Sunday. The People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theatre Command said it was ‘continuing joint training under real war conditions, focused on organising joint anti-submarine warfare and naval strikes’. A social media account of the nationalist tabloid Global Times said exercises around Taiwan might continue, since the summer is a popular drill season for the PLA. Taiwan said it was closely monitoring the exercises, but that so far Monday no Chinese ships or aircraft had entered its territorial waters. Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister, said in an interview with the American broadcaster CNN that the island was not scared, even though the threat from China was ‘more serious than ever’.

The UK is just waking up to the scale of Chinese espionage

The scene could have come straight out of a spy novel. An ornate Chinese garden with temples and pavilions, built at one of the highest points in Washington DC – a gift from the Chinese government. At its heart, a 70-foot high white pagoda – perfectly positioned and equipped to eavesdrop on communications at the heart of the American government below. China offered to spend $100 million to build the garden at the National Arboretum. But the project never got off the drawing board. It was quietly killed off by US counter-intelligence after they discovered that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, meaning they could not be examined by US customs officials.

HSBC has answered the call of the Chinese Communist Party

HSBC was being more than a little disingenuous when it claimed on Thursday that Communist party cells don’t have much influence on the businesses in which they are installed. Try telling that to Xi Jinping, under whom the CPP has extended its tentacles into every aspect of nominally private businesses in China. The British bank was responding to a report in the Financial Times that it has become the first foreign lender to install a CCP committee in its investment banking subsidiary in China. While neither confirming or denying the report, an HSBC statement played down the importance of the cells, saying, ‘they do not influence the direction of the business.’ This is simply wrong. As Su Wei, a professor at a party school in Chongqing, has stated: ‘Party cells are set up to make sure the company’s operations are in line with the principles and policies of the CCP.

China’s economy is grinding to a halt

Economic growth in China is grinding to a halt. The days of soaring double-digit growth are over, and the malaise facing the country’s spluttering economy goes far deeper than the hit from Covid-19 lockdowns. Gross domestic product in the April to June quarter grew by a paltry 0.4 per cent from a year earlier, according to figures released on Friday, well below the forecasts of analysts. On a quarter by quarter basis, the economy shrank, down 2.6 per cent compared with January to March. It was sobering reading for China’s communist leaders, who derive much of their legitimacy from their management of a fast-growing economy. It is easy to blame the impact of the lockdowns. Restrictions were imposed on major cities across the country in March and April.

China’s Ponzi banks are teetering

What began as a run on a handful of provincial banks is rapidly morphing into one of China’s worst financial scandals, threatening the stability of the country’s heavily indebted financial system. It poses a serious challenge to a Communist party obsessed with social order, which has thuggishly cracked down on desperate depositors demanding their money back. At the weekend, protesters in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou were charged, beaten and dragged away by unidentified security officials dressed in white shirts and dark trousers, who appeared to be working in concert with uniformed police. An estimated 1,000 angry depositors had gathered in front of a branch of the People’s Bank of China, carrying banners that read ‘We are against Henan government’s corruption and violence’ and ‘No deposits, no human rights’.

China’s increasingly authoritarian Covid pass

A Chinese health app, developed to enforce the Communist party’s draconian Covid-19 restrictions, is being repurposed to tighten political control on dissidents and others deemed to be troublemakers. Only the very young and very old are exempt from the compulsory National Health Code System. The ‘traffic light app’, as it has been dubbed, assigns Chinese citizens a colour code: green, yellow or red to signify Covid infection risk. Those with green are free to move around; red can mean instant quarantine. The app requires users to submit information about their health status and other personal details, while at the same time harvesting online behavioural and location data. The precise way people are categorised is far from clear, but the authorities, including public security, have unfettered access.

Xi Jinping and the Chinese rumour mill

The Beijing political rumour mill has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, seizing upon every nuance and reading between every line for signs of the impending downfall of ‘Xi dada’ (Big Daddy Xi). All kinds of stories are being circulated about President Xi Jinping's health, with reports over squabbling over his likely successor. Chinese premier Li Keqiang is being tipped. The predicted replacement of Xi by Li has its roots in differences on the economy and Covid-19, so the rumours go – and there does appear to be a split of sorts. In his public pronouncements Xi has doubled down on zero-Covid above all else. He has made little mention of China’s economic hardships, urging officials to stick with his Covid elimination strategy as a mark of loyalty.

Inside Taiwan’s plan to thwart Beijing

Taipei Nowhere is watching Russia’s faltering attempt to crush its democratic neighbour more closely than Taiwan. The Ukraine war is seen in Taipei as a demonstration of how determined resistance and the ability to rally a global alliance of supporters can frustrate a much larger and heavily armed rival. Taiwan has spent the past few years planning how it would cope if China attacked. It is developing a doctrine of defence warfare right out of the Ukrainian playbook. China was carrying out military exercises off the east coast of the island last week when I met Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister. ‘They keep circling in that area,’ Wu says. ‘Nonstop for two weeks, and it is very threatening.’ There were also reports of China carrying out missile training exercises in its remote northwest, simulating attacks on a Taiwan naval base.

The Edition

Inside Taiwan’s plan to thwart Beijing

37 min listen

The Edition

Inside Taiwan’s plan to thwart Beijing

37 min listen

China’s zero-Covid horror show is inspiring Taiwan to open up

Taipei Nowhere is watching the zero-Covid horror show unfolding in China more closely than Taiwan, where it is encouraging the island to ease restrictions, even as cases of the infectious Omicron variant spike. Taiwan’s premier Su Tseng-chang has said the extreme measures being imposed on the other side of the Taiwan Strait are ‘cruel’ and his country would not follow suit. From next week, mandatory quarantine for arrivals in Taiwan will be cut to seven days from the current ten, as the island moves gradually towards a policy of trying to live with the virus. The Covid shackles are now coming off across Asia, with most countries relaxing or lifting restrictions completely. This week New Zealand reopened its borders to vaccinated and Covid-negative visitors from more than 60 countries, after two years of closure.

Xi has made his choice: he is sticking with Vladimir Putin

Xi Jinping has made his choice. He is sticking with his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin, and no end of Russian atrocities or wishful thinking in the west is going to alter that. Their axis of autocracy presents a far-reaching challenge to western democracies, which the UK in particular is struggling to come to terms with. There has been a chorus of western voices calling on China to act ‘responsibly’, exercise its influence with Putin, and generally live up to its supposed commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. That will not happen. Those principles were always a myth, but fundamentally Xi and Putin have too much in common. China’s state-owned media has continued to echo Moscow’s denials of war crimes.

China’s demographic time-bomb is ticking faster

The latest warning was stark – that China’s population will shrink this year, more than a decade faster than forecast, and the country will become a ‘super-aged’ society by 2035. The economic implications will be a ‘huge thing’. This came not from what Beijing has dismissed as ‘western doomsayers’, but from Zheng Bingwen, director of the Center for International Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one of China’s most respected observers of population trends. He said the ratio of pensioners to workers will rise to 25 per cent in 2030, is expected to exceed 43 per cent in 2050, and is happening much faster compared with other countries. He warned that the declining workforce will hit savings and investment and that China’s welfare system is unable to cope.

The battle for zero-Covid is being fought in Shanghai

Confusion is infecting Shanghai. The authorities are dithering over a promised easing of severe lockdown rules in the face of record cases of Covid-19 and widespread anger over their cack-handed way they have handled the crisis. The city has become a test for China’s faltering zero-Covid strategy, with nervous Communist party leaders sending mixed signals – announcing a change in the rules, while insisting they will stick to what they now characterise as a ‘dynamic’ zero-Covid policy ‘without hesitation or wavering’. At the weekend, vice-mayor Zong Ming announced a reclassification of Shanghai’s districts according to the severity of the outbreak. But the plan is short on detail and residents of ‘low risk neighbourhoods’ have been told that while they can now move around in their compounds, they could not go out to the streets.

Is China beginning to distance itself from Russia?

The read-outs from Friday’s two-hour call between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were so different, that you have to wonder whether the two leaders were on the same line. The White House version had Biden bluntly warning China of the consequences of providing assistance to Russia, while Beijing’s take presented Xi as a peacemaker ‘The Ukraine crisis is something we don’t want to see,’ Xi reportedly said. ‘Conflict and confrontation are not in the interests of anyone.’ The American read-out focussed narrowly on Ukraine, China’s on the broader relationship between the two countries. Global Times, the usually strident Communist party tabloid, described it as a ‘constructive interaction’. This comes amid a subtle shift in the way Chinese state media is covering the conflict.

Will China come to Putin’s rescue?

Joe Biden appears to be trying to force China’s hand over Ukraine. This follows days during which Beijing has tied itself in knots, offering to play a ‘positive role’ for peace, but refusing to criticise Russia – avoiding even calling the invasion an invasion, and echoing Moscow’s justifications. US Officials at the weekend briefed American news outlets that Russia has asked China to provide military equipment, and requested additional economic assistance to help cushion the impact of Western sanctions. The officials, keen to protect their intelligence sources, declined to say precisely what Russia was seeking, nor what China’s response had been. But they said they were watching closely and warned of ‘consequences’ should Beijing come to Russia’s aid.

Xi Jinping and the plight of Chinese nationals in Ukraine

The plight of desperate Chinese nationals in Ukraine has further battered Xi Jinping’s credibility, testing his continued refusal to condemn the barbarity of his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin. There have been unconfirmed reports that four Chinese students were among 13 killed when a Russian rocket hit a dormitory of Kharkiv’s Academy of Culture. Students took to social media to plead for help when none came from the Chinese embassy in Kyiv. ‘The embassy never comes, no plane comes. We can only save ourselves. They abandoned us,’ said one post on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. A video post claimed students were being shot at indiscriminately by Russian soldiers. Another appeal came from the basement of the Kharkiv Aviation Institute, saying that 188 Chinese students were sheltering there from the shelling.

China is tying itself in knots over Ukraine

A few hours after Vladimir Putin sent his tanks into Ukraine, Beijing announced that Russian wheat, previously barred because of fungal contamination, was now disease-free and large scale imports to China would begin. It was a first tangible sign of Xi Jinping’s willingness to cushion the blow of western sanctions on the Russian economy, and in effect underwrite Putin’s Ukrainian aggression. Russia is one of the world’s biggest wheat producers, and trade is highly vulnerable to western restrictions. China’s wheat lifeline followed the signing last month of a 30-year contract for Russia to supply natural gas to China’s north east and a commitment to far greater energy cooperation. Significantly, the gas deal was in euros rather than US dollars, the usual currency of the resource markets.

Unmasking ‘panda diplomacy’

The star of the Beijing Winter Olympics wasn’t an athlete: it was Bing Dwen Dwen, the spacesuit-clad panda mascot. It was deployed to cover the harsher political edges of the games, and was romping around on the ice at the closing gala. Bing Dwen Dwen is only the latest example of China’s use of ‘panda diplomacy’, so successful over recent decades. The Chinese Communist party has long used them as envoys to potential partners. A bill now wending its way through the US Congress strikes at the heart of panda diplomacy. If it passes, it will keep American-born giant panda cubs in the US, which would break China’s monopoly on these vulnerable animals. ‘We do need to think outside of the box in terms of dealing with [the CCP’s] aggression,’ said Nancy Mace, the Republican congresswoman who introduced the bill.

China breaks new records in the Surveillance Olympics

Never before have the participants in a major sporting event been so closely monitored as in this Winter Olympics in Beijing. The 1980 Summer Olympics in Soviet Moscow were nothing in comparison. Athletes are competing under a blanket of observation, ostensibly to keep Covid at bay, yet imposed by a paranoid Communist party for whom critical words or thoughts are as dangerous as any virus. Everyone attending the games, including athletes, support staff and media, must install on their phones an app, My 2022, which harvests a wide range of personal data. It has the ability to censor and track its users, according to cybersecurity experts who have examined the app. The app is used to submit health information such as Covid test results and vaccination status.

The dangerous alliance between Russia and China

The growing alliance between Russia and China is something we shouldn’t lose sleep over, their long history of mutual suspicion runs too deep – or so we are told. Such a view is too complacent by half. China and Russia’s mutual hostility towards the West and their opportunism also run deep. And even if their burgeoning alliance is a marriage of convenience, it is still a very dangerous one. As Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, the nightmare for western strategists is that Vladimir Putin’s actions are being coordinated with those of Xi Jinping in and around the Taiwan Strait, where China’s military intimidation of Taiwan has reached new levels of intensity. Last Sunday, Taiwan reported the largest incursion for several months by Chinese fighter jets into its air defence zone.

How China spies on the West

In December last year Oxford University students were offered £15,000 in prize money if they could solve challenges relating to the surveillance and tracking of devices and their users. ‘Huawei welcomes a selection of top-of-the-class students to their 2021 University Challenge’, the invitations read. The company added that the technology would be used for ‘business intelligence’ and ‘security services’. The invitation to the ‘hackathon’, as Huawei described it, was aimed at data science students, and was relayed by Oxford’s careers service just a few weeks before Christmas. When one student questioned whether it was appropriate for the careers service to be passing this on when Huawei’s technology was implicated in the repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, she received a perfunctory reply.

China’s zero-Covid policy is becoming unsustainable

With just three weeks until the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Covid-19 is creeping ever closer to the capital. The Communist party is seeking to isolate Beijing from the rest of the country to keep the virus at bay and the games on track. But its zero-Covid policy, a desperate game of Whac-A-Mole with the virus, is looking increasingly unsustainable. All routes between Beijing and Tianjin have been closed after an outbreak in the port city, which is adjacent to the capital. Flights and high-speed train services in and out of a city of 14 million people have been cancelled and highways closed after the discovery of 126 cases in recent days, all of them the highly contagious Omicron variant. A third round of mass testing has been ordered.

Britain is finally waking up to China’s influence operations

The biggest surprise in Thursday’s security warning about a Chinese agent seeking to influence British politicians is that it came as a surprise at all. The Chinese Communist Party operates a vast and growing influence operation in Britain, which has pretty much been allowed free rein. The warning came from MI5 in the form of an ‘interference alert’ sent to House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsey Hoyle, which he then passed on to MPs. It warned that Christine Lee, a lawyer, was ‘knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist party.’ Lee was accused of attempting to influence several MPs from the Labour, Lib Dems and Conservative parties through donations or ‘donations in kind’.

China could be more dangerous than ever in 2022

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

Why is China turning its back on the world?

China reacted to the news of the US government’s diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics with predictable fury — a foreign ministry spokesman described it as a ‘naked political provocation’. He then added that US officials had jumped the gun because they had not even been invited. That seemed like a bit of added petulance, but it is entirely in keeping with China’s growing mood of self-isolation — a mood that is beginning to have some bizarre and dangerous consequences. The Chinese Communist party has always been a paranoid organisation, with a deep suspicion towards the outside world, but President Xi Jinping has taken this to new heights. Western policy-makers are alarmed. Richard Moore, the new head of MI6, alluded to this in a speech last month when he warned: ‘Beijing believes its own propaganda about western frailties and underestimates Washington’s resolve.

Friday

Thursday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Monday

Wednesday

Saturday

Sunday

Tuesday

Tuesday

Saturday

Thursday

Sunday

Sunday

Sunday

Wednesday

Saturday

Monday

Sunday

Saturday

Tuesday

Tuesday

Friday

Sunday

Sunday

Friday

Friday

Thursday