Chilling truth about China, where spies actually live in your house

President George W. Bush’s defence secretary donald rumsfeld mused that there are some things we know and some things we know we don’t know.

But then there are lots more things we don’t know we don’t know. We have no idea of the depth of our own ignorance, for example.

some would say this was especially true of George W, a genial man with a brain like a colander.

the sheer scale of our ignorance about the world’s most populated country was brought home in China: A New World Order (BBC2).

this was an hour of revelations about things that most of us couldn’t possibly know, because we’ve never imagined we didn’t know we don’t know . . . as donald r might say.

true, the name Xi Jinping is familiar. it ought to be: he’s been China’s president for the past six years. And though i hadn’t exactly realised he came to power on a wave of popularity following the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it makes sense.

But as this documentary, the first of three, revealed time and again, the gaps in our general knowledge about this vast country are more like deserts. the recent protests in Hong Kong have been widely reported here, for instance, but i had no idea about ethnic riots in the country’s north-west, near the Kazakhstan border.

there, a mainly Muslim people called the Uyghur live in an autonomous territory called Xinjiang. to quell unrest, President Xi’s government has billeted spies on thousands of families — Chinese agents who sleep in the house and help themselves to food from the kitchen.

A million Uyghur, some as young as 13, have been sent to ‘re-education’ camps where they are tortured into renouncing their culture. Women are forcibly sterilised with drugs, and children are rounded up to be sent to state orphanages.

the documentary didn’t use the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ but it didn’t have to: nothing could be clearer evidence of cultural brainwashing than the footage of a classroom where dozens of men and women sang along in english to if You’re Happy And You Know it Clap Your Hands. that’s torture, wherever you are on the planet.

there were hints of these human rights outrages from the beginning of the programme, but the real evidence was not presented until the last 20 minutes. that was a mistake: the first half was too bland, too much like an educational film for students.

Feeble excuses from Communist party officials were dull viewing, made more soporific by the soundtrack of ringing bowls and plucked strings.

For most people, the best chance of really learning something from this documentary was to tune in halfway through.

Historian James Holland on World War Speed (BBC4) wanted desperately to tell us things we didn’t know, but countless sensationalist shows have covered this ground before.

the digital channels History and Yesterday do these flashbang documentaries on World War ii so much better — all whooshing graphics and stormy reconstructions. James was agog at the notion that German pilots were wired to the eyeballs on methamphetamine, and that British troops were routinely issued with benzadrine tablets.

in fact, anyone who watches any show about the nazi high command, airing almost nightly in the more rarified parts of your Freeview box, has long known that Hitler and his cronies gobbled pills like tic tacs.

And fans of the James Bond novels will remember that 007 relied on drugs even more than martinis . . . a habit no doubt left over from wartime. All this talk of speed was slow news.