Former MI6 director charts the rise of a powerful nation

THE GREAT DECOUPLING: CHINA, AMERICA AND THE STRUGGLE FOR TECHNOLOGICAL SUPREMACY Nigel Inkster

Hurst, £25

CHINA has “a heart of glass” according to Nigel Inkster. Despite commanding immense power, its government is prone to taking childish offence at real or imagined slights by foreigners. We saw an example recently when Chinese agents posted doctored images of an Australian soldier apparently murdering an Afghan child. The Australians had aroused Beijing’s wrath by calling for an independent UN investigation into the origins of Covid in Wuhan.

China has refused to countenance any investigation not conducted by its own agencies, which, are of course, directly answerable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Inkster is satisfied that, while China did not invent coronavirus, it tried to cover it up. Chinese authorities delayed informing the World Health Organisation about the spread of Covid-19 in Wuhan and gave misleading assurances that it was not being transmitted between humans.

This kind of secrecy comes naturally to an authoritarian state in which officials fear losing their privileges

– or worse. The death penalty is still widely used in China, which, according to Amnesty International, executes more people than the rest of the world combined.

When they finally admitted to the scale of the epidemic, the Chinese authorities instigated a military-style lockdown of Hubei province and its 60,000,000 inhabitants. It worked. A year on, China appears to have virtually eliminated the disease.

Indeed, as Western economies sink into post-Covid depression, China is once again powering ahead. Inkster fears that the pandemic could mark a major milestone towards what is called the “Chinese Dream” of global economic hegemony. This would be secured partly through the Belt and Road Initiative – a $8 trillion network of infrastructure and client states being established by China across the world, often through a kind of semi-colonial debt servitude among countries like

Sri Lanka. It would also involve the Digital Silk Road: China’s project to become a technological superpower and remake the internet in its image. The state-backed telecoms giant Hauwei is seeking to establish global Chinese dominance of the means of communication through providing the infrastructure of 5G telephony.

Inkster writes that China is also determined to become a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI), having spent billions on the means of technological surveillance and control. It is a world leader in facial recognition. Every significant public space in the vast country is being placed under 24-hour AI-enabled video scrutiny according to Inkster, who says Chinese citizens routinely receive text messages informing them they have been fined for petty crimes such as jay-walking or dropping litter.

Under the Orwellian Social Credit system, 1.4 billion Chinese citizens are each being given digital scorecards indicating how good they have been. Being a good citizen in China means paying taxes, working hard and, of course, not criticising the government. Speech is tightly regulated. All this is justified in terms of supposedly Confucian virtues of respect for authority, community solidarity and civil order.

CHINA has made a mockery of claims the internet would break down national borders and undermine authoritarian governments. Its bureaucrats realised early on the reverse is true: the internet allows for greater social control than analogue dictators like Stalin could ever have dreamed of. In 1995, Bill Clinton famously said trying to control the internet would be “like nailing jello to the wall”. “A decade later,” says Inkster, “Chinese walls were covered in jello.”

First of all, they set up the Golden Shield project, known in the West as the Great Firewall of China, to block externally-generated content. China now has the world’s largest online user community and digital economy through Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, the CCP-controlled versions of Google, Amazon and Facebook. The internet has become a means of monitoring and suppressing all forms of intellectual dissent.

Yet, if modern China sounds like hell on earth, Inkster says there is widespread public acceptance of this degree of social control. People feel secure. There is less crime, pornography and hate speech. Freedom of thought, democracy and individualism are seen as alien vices that can lead to chaos and unhappiness. Mind you, in such a tightly-controlled country, can anyone claim to know what people really think?

The absence of overt dissent may be largely a product of thought control. There is certainly no shortage of dissent right now in Hong Kong,

Tibet or among the one million persecuted Uighurs in Xinjian province being held in re-education camps. There is the bitter memory of Tiananmen Square in 1989 when hundreds, perhaps thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by Chinese troops.

President Xi believes the surest way to avoid dissent in future is to deliver economic growth and a consumer society. The Chinese economic miracle is genuine enough. From an essentially peasant society 40 years ago, it’s become the world’s second-largest economy, and likely to soon surpass the USA. That this capitalist economic miracle has happened under communist government may appear to be one of the great paradoxes of modern history. However, since the days of Mao Zedong, the interests of the CCP have always come first and socialism second. If political stability requires a dose of Western capitalism, so be it.

Decades of double-digit growth were based on cheap labour and regimented

THE CLOSEST THING TO FLYING

Gill Lewis

Oxford University, £5.99

What is the book about?

After Semira, aged seven, left Eritrea with her mother, the two are still under refugee status. They live with a controlling, cruel man who lies that he’s Semira’s father. Because they have to move around a lot, Semira regularly changes school. Before starting at the newest school, she

GEMMA McLAUGHLIN

goes to the market and buys a Victorian hat with an oddly familiar green, stuffed bird. Hidden in the hat box is the diary of Hen, the daughter of the maker of this hat, from over 100 years earlier.

Who is it aimed at?

Those aged 10 to 14 years.

What was your favourite part?

The one thing that stood out to me through the whole story was this unwavering theme of hope.

Least favourite part?

I loved reading this. The only thing that made me put it down briefly was seeing the struggles they both went through.

Why should someone buy this book?

This is the kind of book that will let any reader make lasting connections to the characters, provide a sense of comfort and leave them thinking. It’s the kind of book I always want to recommend.