The divided, distracted and deluded West is allowing China to take over

Europe and the US prefer to luxuriate in self-inflicted chaos than come up with a strategy to beat Beijing

Unlike Western elites, people in China seem to know what they should truly fear. That, at least, was my impression on reading some of the products of the recent explosion in Chinese science fiction. Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang predicts a ruthlessly authoritarian future in which the Earth rotates to give three social classes contrasting levels of sunlight. In An Excess Male – inspired by China’s one-child policy – Taiwanese writer Maggie Shen King explores a world with 40 million more men than women.

It’s not that Western fatalism has rubbed off on the Chinese market. These stories shame Hollywood’s pulp about evil robots and Armageddon floods. Rather, in China, the genre has taken on a life of its own as a popular way to mull the dystopian future of totalitarianism. And it tends to work from a single premise: that the Chinese Way will prevail over Western ideas like democracy and freedom.

The West, tortured by every super-catastrophic risk going, apart from China, has lost sight of the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is now its biggest threat. That much is clear as it passes up a golden chance to confront

Beijing, luxuriating in self-inflicted chaos instead.

The signs are everywhere. Take Europe’s self-immolation over climate change as it destroys its energy security in its blind transition to net zero. It is not just Britain which has been caught out by a combination of criminally low levels of gas storage capacity and green policies. In between squabbles over the EU’S overreliance on Russian gas, member states are pleading with Brussels to rethink bans on fracking and to classify nuclear as green.

America may be avoiding the sharp end of energy mayhem, but its economy is stumbling thanks to the US leadership’s mishandling of the Covid pandemic. Washington’s growth forecasts have been slashed amid a delayed recovery in consumer spending, while dismay has set in on the unforeseen, permanent impacts of the Covid experiment in remote working.

As its economies reel, the West’s politics have become pathologically trivial. Joe Biden – once pitched as a unifying leader – is too busy lurching between autocue gaffes and legislative psychodramas in Congress to lead the free world through a historic crisis. Any hope of Macron and Johnson stepping into the breach as an alternative power couple has faded, as the French president sulks over “slights”, from Aukus to Brexit sausage rows. Blinkered Remainers, meanwhile, nostalgically agitate for fresh civil war in Westminster.

All the while, China creeps ahead. While European politicians squander precious time in tussles over who will shoulder the costs of surging energy prices, Beijing gobbles up gas supplies, instructing its state companies that price is no object. It has the vulnerable West doubly over a barrel. It knows too well that the net zero gamble is only viable if China cooperates, and is clearly happy to use its leverage while continuing to pump out fossil fuels, not least in advance of Cop26.

And it is quietly making vast strides in the all-important technological race. In the latest example, the Pentagon’s ex-software chief Nicolas Chaillan has revealed that he resigned last week in protest, because he could not stand to watch Beijing overtake America in AI – now a “done deal” he alleges. We are well beyond a world where the only tech threat from China is that it might steal advances made in the West.

The irony is that there has never been a better time to challenge China. It has overreached in the Asia-pacific. As the developing world faces ruin amid travel bans and failing Chinese jabs, its global reputation is at an all-time low. Yet our declinist leaders are nowhere near coming up with a strategy. That is partly because, in their crisis of confidence over values like liberty amid Covid-19, they have failed to grasp the simple secret to triumph over China: to demonstrate that the free, democratic Western system is superior.

The CCP perceives this notion as the biggest threat to its existence for good reason. Its citizens are more susceptible to ideas like liberty and more horrified by the tyranny of the Chinese leadership than outsiders appreciate. China’s recent transformations have been almost entirely propelled from below. The CCP’S shift from communism to capitalism was not a top-down directive but driven by peasants who defied the law to decollectivise and create the first markets after Mao. Illegal mass urban migration, a millennial sexual revolution, rampant low-level law breaking, not to mention a 5,000-year history of toppled dynasties and peasant rebellions, hint that the CCP’S ideological supremacy is much weaker than assumed.

Yet that can never be exploited so long as the West remains so fatally distracted. Consider AI. The British Armed Forces, faffing around with vanity naval projects, and the bureaucratic US military, need to get it in their heads: whoever leads in AI by 2030 rules the world. The EU with its clunky GDPR regulations, is a lost cause, but America can regain its edge with a purge of military dinosaurs and massive deregulation. The UK should follow suit on the latter, so that its world-leading AI startup culture can reach its fuller potential, attracting more talent, cash, and investment in complementary sectors like quantum.

Any spare energy should be put into challenging China’s attempt to recast the global system in its image. Its latest project to undermine free trade – an application to join the Pacific trade zone, the CPTPP – should be shut down. The West must also master the art of picking the right battles to reform global bodies compromised by the CCP. A bid to improve the WHO’S internal accountability has been derailed; focus should shift to radically narrowing its remit, and rattling China with a boost to Taiwan’s power in the organisation. It is time for radical thinking on winning over Africa (an indispensable source of UN votes for China): aggressive vaccine shipments, cancelling debt, and an end to the EU’S neocolonial trading practices should all be up for debate.

One line has stayed with me from my binge on Chinese dystopian literature: “Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance,” the master of the genre Liu Cixin taunts in one of his novels. For all our doom-mongering extravagance, we are failing to confront the one thing that should genuinely petrify us. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.

‘The irony is that there has never been a better time to challenge China. Its reputation is at an all-time low’