Pakistan needs friends, but they are in short supply. Since Partition in August 1947, the Government has fabricated a national identity hinged around despising India. Delusions of grandeur followed — and now they are starting to shatter.

The secession of Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 after war with India should have been a rude awakening. It should also have binned the narrative that India is trying to annex its territory, since New Delhi facilitated the transition of East Pakistan to an independent Bangladesh, instead of gulping it down as war spoil. The creation of Bangladesh should also have disabused Pakistan of the farcical notion that adherence to Islam can forge a single national identity — if indeed that weren’t obvious from the presence of two separate Muslim-majority states along Pakistan’s western border.

Instead, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who led the country post-1971, Pakistan Islamised the constitution, propelled jihadist groups towards Afghanistan in search of more geopolitical influence, and invited investment of freshly-minted Arab petrodollars. Since then, Pakistan’s leaders have enabled the establishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Talibanisation of Pakistan itself, and the radical Islamisation of Kashmir, as well as multiple jihadist attacks on India. Yet even after decades of jihadism backfiring on Pakistan, the country’s leaders still won’t rethink their extreme, religionist narrative on India. Incumbent Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari doesn’t hesitate to use Islamist rhetoric in discussing Kashmir; Imran Khan confidently urges Indian Muslims to pick up arms against the state.

The trouble is that Islamist policies created Pakistan, rather than the other way around. Hostility towards India, therefore, is not temporary opportunism on the part of Islamists, but the consequence of centuries-old political and theological narratives. Once the British Raj took over, the Muslim elite of India became increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of eventually living in a Hindu majority nation, and struggled for religionist separation. This became the ideological raison d’être of Pakistan, in the form of the Two Nation Theory: “Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations that cannot live together.” For the past 76 years, “Muslim” Pakistan let this narrative direct its relations with “Hindu” India.

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Today, the nations’ differences are most obvious in the economic realm: Pakistan and India have foreign reserves of $3 billion and $600 billion respectively. While pointing this out might have been met with accusations of treason in Pakistan until a couple of years ago, recent events have led to the beginning of a massive rethink. After Imran Khan’s government became the latest to be ousted by the military’s machinations last year, anti-army sentiments have been simmering. But even more critically, the extent of Pakistan’s ongoing fiscal crisis has made people question the army’s grandiose rhetoric, including the gross impracticality of any ambitions for Kashmir, given the economic strides India is making. Pakistan is missing out on at least $37 billion worth of potential trade with India annually, owing to its obstinate fixation with self-inflating Islam-centric narratives.

With the already limited trade with India largely frozen since the border skirmishes of 2019, Pakistan has instead looked to China. The $62 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is Beijing’s biggest-ever overseas investment. Part of the Belt and Road Initiative, CPEC was supposed to be a fiscal lifeline, but it has instead metamorphosed into a debt trap, owing to skewed agreements predominantly dictated by Beijing. CPEC is starting to seem more like a neocolonial venture, a front for the Chinese takeover of Pakistan, which is leading to human rights abuses and mass appropriation of resources. The Chinese stranglehold has left Islamabad with little choice but to continually express gratitude to Beijing over partial loans to pay import bills issued mostly, of course, by China.

For Pakistan, which has persistently chosen to alienate all its neighbours, the only rational way forward would be to actively work towards regional cooperation — beginning with the subcontinent’s largest country. The longer Pakistan takes to come to this conclusion, the harder it will be. Today, better ties with India aren’t something that Pakistan can simply ask for; Islamabad would need to offer some incentive. It would have to right those wrongs that leaders in Pakistan have openly confessed to: the provocation of wars, the facilitation of India-bound jihadist groups such as the JeM or the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated, among others, the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Gaining India’s trust will be very, very difficult.

Moreover, Pakistan will face internal resistance from the jihadist superstructure it has buttressed for years. Every time there are ostensible steps towards initiation of peace with India, that structure responds with a coordinated manoeuvre. After the 2001 Agra Summit, there was an attack on the Indian Parliament; after Narendra Modi’s visit to Pakistan in 2015, there was the Pathankot raid. If Pakistan is to develop strong, productive ties in the region, it must stop supporting jihadist outfits of any variety. Pakistan will also have to start acknowledging the simple reality that the Indian subcontinent has a shared history spanning millennia — and hence overlapping cultures, languages, and customs. Finally, Pakistan’s economy would have to reinvent itself as growth-oriented, rather than heavily militarised and reliant on foreign aid. These steps could usher in a future of better politico-economic collaboration — and put an end to the submissive, extractive alliance with China.

Unfortunately, the supposed peaceniks in Pakistan have instead been fixated on their own anti-India agenda. For them, the recent surge in Hindutva nationalism driven by Delhi, and the targeting of Muslims, vindicates Pakistan’s separation. They tend to gloss over the fact that religious minorities are disproportionately looking to leave Pakistan for India, while Indian Muslims aren’t exactly queueing up to move in the other direction. They ignore, too, the fact that, despite Hindutva ambitions to reconvert disputed mosques into Hindu temples, there are over 300,000 mosques in India, with numerous under construction or renovation. By contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed over the past 76 years in Pakistan.

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Even leaving aside the possibility that the increasing marginalisation of Indian Muslims could be a side-effect of Pakistan’s creation, a country founded and sustained on Muslim nationalism has little grounds to criticise Hindu nationalism. And besides, all this bickering over whose nationalism is more toxic, and whose treatment of Kashmir is worse, pales into insignificance when one considers the glaring difference in the two nations’ global standing.

More than anything else, the success of Pakistan’s “bleed India with a thousand cuts” policy can be gauged by the volumes of blood the country has shed of its own people. More than 80,000 Pakistanis are direct victims of jihadist attacks. But where glorification of death in the name of “martyrdom” has belittled the colossal loss of life, Pakistan’s rapidly emptying coffers might leave the nation with no choice but to surrender — especially with Saudi Arabia pulling the plug on jihadi funding. The still-rising defence budget suggests that the Pakistan army is refusing to let go of its delusions of grandeur. It is only a matter of time, though, before it caves. At the end of the day, governments need money to run a country, and for that they need allies. A nation cannot live on stories alone.

The tight-lipped statement didn’t mention Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. But that’s hardly surprising. For much of Europe, the outcome of the war is existential: all eyes are currently on China to see if it will back Putin. Just days before Russia’s invasion, Xi Jinping and Putin announced that the friendship between their two nations had “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation”. Yet in the weeks since, Xi has been distracted: he has far more pressing issues to worry about than war in far-off Ukraine.

While bombs rain down on Mariupol, Covid remains the main story in China. Much of the rest of world has opened up, including India, but China and Japan remain major outliers. This week, the mega-city of Shanghai, with a population nearly half that of the UK, is being locked down; first, its futuristic eastern zone of skyscrapers and towers, and next week, its western half defined by its British-style art deco waterfront, the Bund.

Stories of commuters emptying shelves in supermarkets fill the headlines, just as in Britain in spring 2020. Hong Kong’s politics is no longer dominated by the struggle for democracy. Instead, public anger, still more freely expressed than in the mainland, has attacked Chief Executive Carrie Lam for a policy that has seen the city isolated from the world and the Chinese mainland for weeks, but still ravaged by growing deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated and elderly.

The economic and social turmoil that Covid has brought to China has shaped its reaction to Ukraine. It is certainly true that China will seek to strengthen its geopolitical position where it can — as indeed does every other major power. However, right now, any decisions on Ukraine will almost certainly be filtered through a domestic lens first and foremost. What will any decision do to the economy? How will it affect the march toward a third term in office for Xi, a decision unprecedented in the modern era but likely to be achieved this autumn at the Party Congress? These are hard questions to answer: no wonder that Xinhua readout was so short.

China’s relationship with Ukraine is part of the equation. Since 2019, China has been Ukraine’s largest single trading partner. And Ukraine is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, along with Russia. For years, Ukraine was proof that European powers at odds with the EU could find friends in Beijing; Serbia being another example.

China also imports grain from Ukraine, not in a way that makes it dependent on that supply in the way that some Middle Eastern countries are, but usefully nonetheless. And it has invested heavily in projects in Ukraine such as a metro rail system and wind energy farms, which it would presumably want to keep going in the event of a peace deal. A settlement that allows China to restore Ukraine to its existing place in its economic matrix would be welcome; whether Putin will permit that is another matter.

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There are also small, but significant opportunities for China to burnish its global image in its handling of the Ukraine crisis. It has plenty of peacekeeping experience via the UN, and actually has more peacekeeping troops trained than any other permanent member of the UN security council. In theory, then, its troops could be part of a UN force that keeps order, assuming that Russian soldiers would be unacceptable to the Ukrainians.

However, this remains unlikely, even if the UN does play a central role in any potential settlement. Past experience shows that China is uncomfortable with the political aspects of peacekeeping — particularly post-civil conflict resolution in sub-Saharan Africa — as it involved bringing civil society and opposition groups into authorised dialogue with government, something which China does not do at home.

Overall, China is much more comfortable talking about physical and economic reconstruction, as it did when it offered to build roads for the Taliban regime last year. But cash alone is not going to settle the Ukraine situation. As its relative distance from the current talks in Istanbul have shown, China is not yet ready to step up as a prominent mediator with a democratic state, just as Western actors have sometimes struggled in the past to deal with hybrid or semi-authoritarian states.

There is another area where China may use Ukraine for political rethinking: on Taiwan. It is far too simple to read Taiwan as a direct analogy to Ukraine, and Beijing does not do so. It has been thinking about the Taiwan issue for years, and regards it as a matter of internal politics, not an external breach of sovereignty. However, one revelation from the past month should surely have set alarm bells ringing: the massive miscalculation by Russia’s political and military elites about the nationalist sentiment and will for resistance of the Ukrainian people.

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The case of Russia suggests that a propaganda echo chamber does not produce good intelligence; if you only listen to your own propaganda, you can’t be surprised when it turns out to be wrong. There are thoughtful voices in the Chinese foreign policy world, muted but audible, that have suggested that China should take its own rhetoric about the decadence and weakness of the West with a pinch of the delicious weijing that makes much Chinese food so sharp.

The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly introduced a programme in selected universities and schools to educate children on the correct approach to understanding the “tragedy” of the Ukraine situation. The overall message is that the crisis is the fault of the West, and Chinese sympathy should take Russia’s feelings into account. Yet the programme still pulls its punches, and it’s still a long way from all-out support for Moscow.

According to the South China Morning Post, one university pledged to provide “positive guidance to ignite their learning passions as the Russia-Ukraine situation remains a hot topic for students,” while another addressed “the fundamental causes to Ukraine’s national tragedy.” But a clear direction on who is right and who is wrong is singularly lacking.

Like the rest of the world, China is going through a period of maximal uncertainty. Just as in recent years the British have adopted the term “permacrisis” to describe the endless rolling news cycle, the Chinese now speak of the world “going through major changes not seen for a century” (“bainian weiyou zhi da bianju”). China may have a five-year plan for its economy, but right now, regarding Ukraine, it appears that Beijing is as uncertain as the rest of us as to what the next five minutes might bring.

White House staffers, and Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would ridicule Biden’s repetitious perorations that simply ignored the expert consensus: both the civilian and military chiefs in the Pentagon, backed by leading “think tank” experts, fully agreed with Generals McChrystal and (Dr.) Petraeus. They were the commanders in Afghanistan who believed that progress was accelerating as more and more Afghans were rejecting fanaticism to embrace progress… and the first-class experts agreed with them! Petraeus would soon promulgate his Counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 ( my review: “counterinsurgency as military malpractice”).

On April 1 2011, when Mazar-i-Sharif demonstrators attacked the UN Assistance Mission, they killed three “Christians” including the female Norwegian colonel Siri Skare. This after President Karzai (yes, him) had denounced a Koran-burning incident in the United States. At no point did Petraeus stop and deplore the Koran burning, nor the murders, or the responsibility of made-in-USA Karzai for the fiasco.

Biden’s Afghanistan problem was that he could not persuade Obama because Obama was already fully persuaded. But as a new President new to Washington, new even to politics Obama simply refused to oppose the Washington consensus of  media-savvy generals, would-be tough think-tankers and CIA-friendly columnists. It all had to wait till Biden himself became President, but by then his Afghanistan policy (evacuate) had become Trump’s and so…

But in 2009, Biden’s other problem was even bigger: one more reason he wanted the US out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to focus on China as a rising threat, when very few Americans agreed with him, and none in the White House. At that very time — the worst of the financial crisis — the US was asking the Europeans, Japan and also China to pump up public spending to save the world economy that was falling into a depression. The Europeans were skeptical (“Crisis? What crisis?  Just your Lehman crisis, you fix it”, was the European response). Only the British responded, and the Chinese, who immediately launched Belt and Road, and other projects that deliberately employed tens of thousands with shovels — not just bulldozers. Obama was grateful and the US Treasury Secretary Geithner was ecstatic —it took two years (!) for the Europeans to react, and even then they moved very slowly, and spent very little.

In this climate, Biden was again isolated when he pointed out that China’s helpful public spending included very fast-growing military spending that contradicted its Peaceful Rise policy proclaimed in 2004. Having long chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden heard warnings from several experts including the present writer [The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy Harvard U Press 2012] and more importantly, Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, who explained that China’s leaders believed that the fatal “General Crisis of Capitalism” had finally arrived. It had come too late for the USSR but just in time for the PRC to become the world’s most powerful state.

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When Obama White House aides plaintively asked (the Treasury was more dignified) for fast spending from the PRC, its leaders took it as their licence to assert China’s power in all directions. Of that I received a personal intimation from Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying 傅莹. She had always been a charming lady, but when I met her in Beijing at the height of the 2009 financial crisis she was almost shouting: “America is down! China is up!”. When I later complained to Zheng Bijian author of the Peaceful Rise policy he replied: “Shīkòng de mǎ”, 失控的 — “runaway horses”.

Rudd’s opinion was especially weighty because he was considered pro-Chinese (he happily speaks Chinese and even has a Chinese name, Lù Kèwén). In that year, 2009, Australia published a Defence White Paper that called for a broad coalition to contain China. At the time, India’s PM Singh refused to be diverted from the economy, Japan had its first neutralist government and Washington liked China better than Europe. It was only later that Japan’s 2010 Senkaku incident — which resulted in anti-Japanese riots, border intrusions in the Himalayas, and incidents at sea — changed attitudes. And it was only at the end of 2011 that Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State spoke of rotating out of the Middle East to focus on China, with Susan Rice on Obama’s staff strongly disagreeing… until Xi Jinping ‘s 2015 visit ended all illusions.

Again, as on Afghanistan, Biden’s China policy was anticipated by Trump, who in his own blundering way finally implemented Kevin Rudd’s coalition strategy, meeting Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe even before his inauguration, and India’s Modi as soon as he could, building up the alliances; while his White House staff cut off China from the US technology pipeline, in spite of Silicon Valley’s resistance. So it is only now that Biden can finally implement his 2009 policy — covered in opprobrium because the Afghan army had turned out to be a fraud exactly as he had predicted, leaving him only the cruel choice between sending troops back to Afghanistan or chaotic flight. But on China at least he has full support at home, and in every country around China except for Pakistan — which will not receive one cent more from Biden.

Driving this increasingly confrontational approach is a view of China as a monolithic, authoritarian state embarked on a long-term strategy to overthrow US hegemony. Compared to Western states — riven by factional strife, paralysed by democratic deadlock, flailing about in the Middle East and seemingly unable to plan beyond next Tuesday — China certainly seems a fearsome challenger. Its plans cover everything from domestic Artificial Intelligence development to global infrastructure, while the top-down China Communist Party (CCP) regime ensures strict implementation and compliance. Some analysts have even suggested the existence of a 100-year strategy to displace the United States, implying an incredible capacity for long-term strategic planning.

The trouble is: this isn’t true. The Chinese party-state does not work like this. As I explain in a new book, Fractured China, the party-state is much more fragmented than many Westerners believe. Indeed, central policymaking is often loose and vague, with many competing interests shaping what actually happens on the ground.

Under Mao, the Chinese party-state was highly centralised, with top-down “command and control” systems that allowed central agencies to micromanage China’s economy and society. However, in Deng Xiaoping’s post-1978 “reform and opening up” era, these institutions were dismantled to facilitate the turn to capitalism.

Power and control over resources was extensively decentralised to provincial and local governments, as well as the emergent private sector. Privatisation and corporatisation turned former government ministries into free-wheeling, profit-seeking enterprises whose overseas activities are often beyond the ability of Chinese regulators to control. And as party cadres moved into business, and business tycoons joined the party, competing cadre-capitalist networks emerged across the party-state.

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Over the past decade, policymaking has been fragmented across a host of national and subnational agencies, often with competing interests and agendas. Some previously domestic agencies have acquired an international role, with even provincial governments having their own foreign and commercial offices.

Provincial governments have, for example, signed a number of trade and investment deals with governments in Asia and Africa. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then, is not in control of Chinese foreign policy, and often does not even know what other agencies are up to — until some crisis erupts, such as that in Ghana when the local government of Shangli county in Guangxi province deliberately “exported” tens of thousands of artisanal gold miners to offset local unemployment, sparking a populist anti-Chinese backlash and a government crackdown.

Of course, central leaders do still retain some powerful mechanisms for coordinating the fractured party-state. And these all have some effect on how the system works. But they do not add up to strategic, top-down control of every aspect of Chinese behaviour. Top leaders may convene “leading small groups”, committees bringing together different agencies in a given policy area, to try to cohere them around common purposes. But these purposes are often left vague to accommodate competing interests and agendas.

Equally vague are CCP elites’ speeches and slogans, which set an overall “tone” and direction for policy. Subordinates must orient themselves to these slogans to win policy support, funding and promotion. But they are so general that they usually require extensive interpretation to work out what they mean in practice.

Central agencies’ policies are likewise frequently loose “opinions” that local governments must adapt to local conditions. This all creates enormous scope for subordinates to interpret central “directives” in ways that actually advance their own sectional interests, rather than any geostrategic grand strategy. Indeed, the system actively encourages experimentation within loose guidelines — what former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping called “crossing the river by feeling for the stones”.

The most important cohering mechanisms are the CCP’s powers of appointment, appraisal and discipline, which leaders can use to encourage loyalty and punish wayward cadres. Xi Jinping is making particularly strong use of these powers — having, for example, prosecuted over two million cadres for corruption. That such purges seem necessary reflects the epochal transformations in China’s party-state, which, while spurring rapid economic growth, have also weakened central control, undermined the regime’s authority, and enabled massive local corruption.

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Such dynamics have, for instance, played out in the current strife over Xi’s drive for “common prosperity”. Everyone must orient themselves to this agenda, but no one — probably including Xi himself — really knows what it actually means, and everyone tries to wrap it around their own personal preferences. Hard-line leftists in China have interpreted “common prosperity” as unleashing a long overdue attack on the rich, terrorising many business tycoons, who have quickly donated billions to state-linked good causes. But others insist that “common prosperity is not egalitarianism,” and will not involve “robbing the rich to help the poor”, bashing the Left for “triggering ideological confusion and panic”.

Or take Xi’s call for a “toilet revolution” in 2015, in a speech lamenting the often-dreadful state of China’s public lavatories. Local governments seized on this vague utterance to justify splurging a staggering $3bn on toilet upgrades over the next 18 months, doubtless enriching many state-linked construction companies, before the horrified State Council reined them in.

Indeed, Chinese local governments are especially adept at exploiting their autonomy to further their own interests, leading to highly irrational outcomes, which are often misinterpreted as some kind of cunning strategy.

For example, Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, the shadow Asia minister, recently accused China of “deliberately overproducing steel” to dump on Western markets. In reality, overcapacity has been endemic across most basic Chinese industries since the 1990s — reaching 20 to 30% by the early 2010s — as local governments competed against one another to develop local industries and infrastructure through debt-fuelled over-investment. This is why China now has more airports per square kilometre than the US, and is awash with “ghost towns” and loss-making roads and railways, and why many local governments and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are effectively bankrupt.

But it is China’s BRI that provides the best example of how these dynamics play out internationally. Western commentary tends to depict the BRI as Xi’s cunning grand strategy, designed to undermine US leadership and ensnare developing countries through “debt-trap diplomacy”. Detailed maps give the impression of a strategic blueprint being faithfully rolled out by officials and companies.

The reality is very different. “One belt, one road” emerged as a slogan in 2013 following two speeches by Xi, which largely just described what China was already doing: investing and building infrastructure in developing countries. But quickly, everyone piled in. Over the next two years, provincial governments and state-owned enterprises lobbied ferociously to get their pet projects incorporated into the BRI. Consequently, the project’s guidelines are remarkably vague and capacious, involving no clear objectives, no timeline, no dedicated resource commitments, and no real prioritisation. Practically every party-state activity has been squashed in.

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Even today, there is no official Chinese map of the BRI, and unofficial ones were banned in 2017. There is not even a clear definition of what constitutes a BRI country or project: different agencies use different metrics to suit themselves. BRI projects are not devised in Beijing, according to a strategic blueprint. They normally originate with foreign governments, seeking funds to accelerate infrastructure development, which may also be useful for securing electoral support or fuelling patronage networks through dodgy construction contracts. And they are often egged-on by Chinese SOEs — not because they want to advance China’s geostrategic interests, but because they want to win lucrative tied aid contracts. Consequently, projects are as likely to occur outside of the six broad “corridors” sketched in the BRI guidelines as inside them.

Indeed, oversight over the BRI is remarkably weak. Chinese policy banks and regulators have very little capacity to evaluate projects’ feasibility, and consequently approve many “white elephants”, such as the notorious Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Half of China’s overseas projects are loss-making. Regulators also have no real capacity to scrutinise projects’ implementation, relying instead on host countries to supervise them. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is barely involved in decision-making, and is typically only brought in when these problems spark major diplomatic incidents. China is still crossing the river while feeling for the stones, but it is stubbing its toes as it goes along.

And so responding to the behaviour of every Chinese entity as though it were intentionally planned and sanctioned by the top Chinese leadership is clearly misguided. The Chinese party-state is not monolithic — it is fractured, even when it comes to Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative.

Rather than confronting an imaginary strategic monolith, then, Western analysts and policymakers should develop a much more nuanced understanding of China and the internal struggles animating the party-state. In some policy areas, the interests involved do make cooperation difficult or even impossible. But elsewhere, there are forces and agencies that want to work constructively with foreign partners, creating scope for collaboration and mutual learning.

The UK’s decision to join and shape China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), for example — rather than boycotting it, as Washington demanded — is a good case in point. The AIIB has adopted similar standards to existing multilateral development banks, while also trying to drive up the standards of China’s overseas projects.

A new Cold War will only isolate and immobilise these groups, empowering nationalist and paranoid factions who are convinced the West cannot tolerate China’s rise. Unless we tread carefully, and develop a more realistic understanding of China, we risk provoking a confrontation that we might not be able to win.

It is beyond doubt that a reckoning is merited. Since the SARS outbreak in 2002, virologists have warned that the “large reservoir” of viruses in horseshoe bats, along with the Chinese custom of eating exotic mammals and using them for traditional medicines, has been “a time bomb” for the world’s health. Yet not only did China do nothing to clamp down on this danger before Covid-19, it has done nothing since.

The only state action in China’s notorious wet markets since they reopened has been the recruitment of security guards to stop visitors taking photographs of the insanitary conditions.

While many of the West’s useful idiots have praised the scale and speed of the Chinese response to the outbreak, we know that Beijing’s first response was to deny there was a problem and silence the medics who tried to blow the whistle. In those vital days, millions of people left Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak, making it inevitable coronavirus would become an international danger. China refused to engage with the World Health Organisation and left other countries guessing the characteristics of the virus. Now, its diplomats and state-backed media outlets are spreading fake news, claiming coronavirus began in Italy or America.

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This behaviour should not come as a surprise to anybody who has watched Beijing since China was allowed into the world’s system of international trade. China has abused liberal trading rules by over-producing goods and dumping them on other markets. It has engaged in mass industrial espionage. It has set debt traps for other countries to win leverage over them. The prosperity earned through trade has not made its state more liberal or democratic, but even more oppressive. It has developed technologies made possible by international trade and used them to control its people. And it has abused the openness of other economies to undercut rival businesses and blackmail governments.

So a reckoning is not only deserved, but long overdue. The question is, what can we actually do?

There are limits, of course. China is a world power, with a population of about 1.4 billion people. It has nuclear weapons and a military with more than two million active personnel. Its Belt and Road Initiative spans 65 countries, covers more than 60% of the world’s population, and involves investment plans reportedly worth $900 billion. It owns more than $1 trillion of US public debt, and has made itself a vital investor not only in the British economy but in our critical national infrastructure.

But this does not mean we can do nothing. By our own actions, and by working in concert with our friends and allies, there is plenty Britain can do to protect our citizens and interests from China’s actions.

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The most immediate step should be to reverse the decision to allow Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, to run parts of Britain’s new 5G network. Whatever ministers and officials have convinced themselves, Huawei is not some benign company from a conventional market economy. It is subsidised by Beijing’s autocratic, communist regime so it can find its way into the most sensitive parts of other countries’ critical national infrastructure. Britain should change policy so – like the United States, Australia and other security allies — we ban Huawei from our system.

Critics will argue that the alternatives to Huawei — Nokia and Ericsson — are unable to provide the same equipment and services, and relying on these Western companies will take longer and cost more. But if officials believe we have been forced to make this awful choice because of a broken market, this is an argument not for strengthening Huawei but for making sure we do not destroy the market share of Nokia, Ericsson and other Western firms. It means we need to overcome our adherence to free market ideology and, working with allied governments, reform the telecommunications market, invest in new entrants, and make sure the West has tech capabilities to rival and surpass China’s.

Telecommunications is only one part of our critical national infrastructure we should be thinking about. Chinese companies are now huge investors in Britain’s energy sector. They part-own Britain’s gas piping network, and are funding the construction of the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. As part of the deal agreed by David Cameron and George Osborne, Hinkley is the first stage of China’s “progressive entry” into the British nuclear system, allowing them to take on operational functions in future plants at Sizewell and Bradwell. And of course, Beijing’s investment strategy comes with a bill attached. Not only are the returns on the Hinkley deal absurdly generous, China uses Britain’s dependence on its investment as leverage in diplomatic and geopolitical controversies. We need to limit this leverage and curtail China’s role in our infrastructure.

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This requires a different approach to economic policy and, in particular, a new form of industrial strategy. The coronavirus crisis is showing us not only that over-dependence on countries like China is dangerous, but that we need to keep certain industrial capabilities closer to home. British researchers are playing their part in the global effort to find a coronavirus vaccine, for example, but Britain has precious little capacity to manufacture vaccines at scale.

If and when a vaccine is discovered, experts have warned that we will need to wait in the queue to get it. Similarly, one of the reasons Germany is so far ahead of Britain in its testing strategy is, ministers explain, that the Germans have Roche, one of the world’s biggest diagnostic companies. Britain’s smaller diagnostics firms are dependent on Germany and the United States for their supplies.

Overall we need to build greater national resilience and far more state capacity to protect us from danger. The NHS will need more investment and capacity, but so will other state services, such as border control, and key parts of our social infrastructure, such as local authorities. The Government’s defence review, which is now effectively on hold while the state puts all its efforts into fighting the pandemic, will need to reflect the beyond-obvious fact that China — more than Islamist terrorism or Russian or Iranian aggression — is the West’s greatest threat and strategic rival.

Together with our allies, we need to wean ourselves off our over-dependence on China, with more manufacturing production and assembly work shifting to other Asian countries, such as Vietnam, lower-cost European countries, such as Poland and Portugal, and back home in Britain. Both governments and businesses will need to shorten the stretched global supply chains that serve the modern economy.

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Of course there are limits to what Britain can achieve alone and, like the rest of the West, we desperately need the United States to return to its role as the leader of the liberal democracies. Without stable and sensible American leadership, we are all weaker. We need to build new alliances with countries that share similar interests to our own. Japan and South Korea — prosperous democracies with neighbourly concerns about China — are obvious examples. As Tom Tugendhat, the Chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, points out, there is an opportunity for us to cooperate with what he calls the “new Indies”, independent states with an interest in the international rules-based order, including Japan and South Korea, but Chile, Kenya, Nigeria and others too.

And Britain can play an important role in forging a new multilateralism, in which the rise of new powers — not just China, but the likes of Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico — have the global voice they deserve. We can lead the creation of new institutions to ensure peaceful economic competition between East and West. And we can help to establish a new forum in which democratic governments can work together to regulate cyberspace and protect the internet from autocratic regimes. Predictably, China continues to seek a New Internet Protocol, which, in the name of “digital sovereignty”, would put the internet under the control of states. They must be stopped.

Compared with undemocratic states like China, it is often assumed that the democracies cannot act strategically and lack the state strength to get things done. But while there are many ways we can improve the way we are led, this is unnecessarily defeatist. Autocratic states lack legitimacy, democracies do not. They rely on fear, while we rely on our own choices to work with one another. They have alliances based on intimidation, while we have friendships based on shared values and interests. We will have to learn to live with an important and powerful China, but we must also learn to assert ourselves and protect ourselves from the very serious danger Beijing represents.

Nick Timothy is the author of ‘Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism’ (Polity)

Well, Chinese people, obviously. As for us in the West, though, I have my doubts. China has scores of major cities with millions of people that most westerners have never heard of. Wuhan, for instance, is home to around ten million people, larger than London or Paris, and were it in Europe or North America, it would have already been a household name like Berlin, Los Angeles or Toronto.

However, when it comes to Chinese cities of equal or even greater size we’re incredibly ignorant. Yes, most people have heard of Beijing and Shanghai; some of us will be familiar with Guangzhou and Xi’an. But test yourselves on these: Tianjin, Qingdao, Xiamen, Chongqing, Chengdu. Ring any bells? Could you place them on a map? Say anything about them?

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You might think that’s unfair — that beyond the most prominent Chinese cities, the rest is specialist knowledge — yet these are places that could change the world (and in the case of Wuhan, unfortunately, already have). Indeed, they are changing the world. So what stops us from getting our heads round the very basics of Chinese geography?

To be fair, it is a daunting task. By one count, there are 65 Chinese cities with more than a million people. Language provides another barrier. Not being attuned to the tonal qualities of spoken Chinese, let alone the symbolic significance of the written characters, we only hear and see Chinese place names in one dimension. It doesn’t help that there are several ways of transliterating Chinese names and words into our alphabet, and some of the earlier attempts weren’t very accurate — giving us Peking and Canton, for instance, instead of Beijing and Guangzhou. Then there are sounds (like those written as ‘q’ and ‘x’) that have no equivalent in English (‘ch’ and ‘sh’ are inadequate approximations).

This article is an attempt to provide a rough guide to ten Chinese cities you ought to know about.

*

First, though, a quick primer.

China is almost the same size as the United States of America. In fact, there’s a debate as to which one is bigger — it depends on precise territorial definitions. In any case, China is big.

It also occupies much the same latitudes as the contiguous United States, although the southernmost parts of China are at Mexican latitudes and the northernmost at Canadian latitudes. So China ranges from the bitterly cold to the steaming hot.

But while America stretches from “sea to shining sea”, China stretches from the Pacific Ocean to Central Asia. In fact, the most inland place on the planet is in the far north-west of China.

There’s something called the Heihe-Tengchong line that bisects China from the Russian border in the far north-east to the Burmese border in the south. Remarkably, just 4% of the country’s population lives west of the line. So, when you look at China on a map, remember that almost everything is going on in the eastern half of the country.

Here’s another really important line: the line of latitude that lies thirty degrees north of the equator. It’s on or near this parallel that all four of the world’s oldest civilisations — ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley civilisation and ancient China — got their start. Later civilisations arose further north or further south, but the earliest ones were all at this crucial latitude.

River valleys were another essential ingredient. Whereas in ancient Egypt it was the Nile, in ancient China it was the Yangzi (or Yangtse), the third longest river in the world. Unlike the Nile, however, it runs east-west along the 30th parallel, allowing civilisation to spread and stay connected over a wide area sharing the same sort of climate. Furthermore, not too far to the north is another great river — the Huang He (a.k.a. the Yellow River). Even better, the land through which both rivers flow is fertile not arid. Tributary rivers (and, later, canals) helped to link up the Lower Yangzi Plain and the North China Plain into a vast and cohesive Chinese heartland.

It was there that Chinese civilisation developed over the millennia and from there that it spread out in all directions.

1. Wuhan — the crossroads of China

Which bring me back to Wuhan. The city is known as the cross-roads of China for a very good reason.

It sits on the Yangzi about a thousand kilometres inland; a thousand kilometres to the north is Beijing; a thousand to the east (i.e. downstream) is Shanghai; a thousand to the south is the Pearl River delta, which includes Guangzhou and Hong Kong; and a thousand to the west (i.e. upstream) are the mighty Sichuanese cities of Chongqing and Chengdu.

Wuhan is also where the Han river flows into the Yangzi — the Han being the birthplace of the Han dynasty, which in turn gave its name to the Han people i.e. China’s majority ethnic group.

Wuhan, therefore, is the most central city in the most populous country on the planet. There couldn’t have been a worse place for the coronavirus to take hold. Whether the city is where it all started remains to be seen.

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2. Kaifeng — an ancient connection to the West

From Wuhan, it’s about 500 kilometres north to Kaifeng, one of the eight ancient capitals of China. It sits on the southern bank of the Huang He — or rather a safe distance further back from the notoriously flood-prone river. Almost a million people live there, so it’s not an especially big city by Chinese standards. It is remarkable, however, for its Jewish community, whose history stretches back a thousand years or more.

The city’s synagogue has long since disappeared and centuries of intermarriage have meant that those claiming Jewish ancestry are as Chinese as their neighbours. And yet Jewish traditions persist, though to what extent is unclear. Episodes of persecution — most recently, Xi Jinping’s crackdown on unregulated religion — means that the community is once again hidden from history.

3. Lanzhou — the gateway city

The ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews presumably travelled to China along the Silk Roads (note the plural). Heading west out of Kaifeng (i.e. upstream along the Huang He), we pass the much bigger cities of Zhengzhou (6 million people) and Luoyang (2 million). We leave the North China Plain and move on to higher ground. The Huang He itself takes a dramatic turn to the north, but a key tributary keeps going west. It’s there, along the Wei river, that we come to Xi’an, home to 7 million people and the Terracotta Army.

At this point we’re 500km west of Kaifeng, but we’re going to keep going all the way up the Wei and then a bit further until we rejoin the Yellow River. It’s here, about 600km from Xi’an, that we find Lanzhou. This city of 3 million people was the Northern Silk Road gateway to and from the Chinese heartland. It is the anchor point of the Hexi corridor — a string of oasis towns squeezed between the Tibetan plateau and the Gobi desert.

This was the fragile artery through which Chinese goods eventually found their way to the Roman Empire. Today, Lanzhou is a vital node in the Belt and Road Initiative — the massive infrastructure programme designed to extend China’s commercial power across Eurasia.

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4. Tianjin (and Beijing) — at the head of the nation

Instead of continuing westwards into Xinjiang province (home to the persecuted Uighurs), we’ll retrace our steps all the way back to Kaifeng.

Downstream of Kaifeng, the Huang He turns north-east, eventually reaching the Bohai Sea (the innermost part of the Yellow Sea). A little way up the coast we come to the port of Tianjin, one of the biggest cities in the world — with a population of about 15 million. It also has the highest per capita income of any Chinese city. So why isn’t it a household name in the West — up there with Shanghai and Hong Kong?

Well, one only has to look 100 km to the north-west, and Beijing, an even bigger city (a massive 21 million people) and China’s capital, overshadowing its coastal neighbour.

But why did Beijing come to rule the rest of China? Why not somewhere more central, i.e. one of the cities along the coast or the two great rivers? The answer is precisely because Beijing isn’t in the middle of the Middle Kingdom, but at the northern extremity of the North China Plain — on the frontline against nomadic invaders.

Protected by mountains, and later the Great Wall, there’s no doubting Beijing’s strategic significance. In commanding the defence of the heartland (or as serving as a capital for successful invaders), the rulers of Beijing have grown used to a position of absolute authority.

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5. Harbin — the ice city

Mongolia (Inner Mongolia is a Chinese province, ‘outer’ Mongolia an independent country) lies north-west of Beijing. To the north-east is another vast land — Manchuria, where China butts up against Russia and Korea.

The Japanese have also vied for control of this territory. In 1931, they invaded — setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The man they chose as its puppet ruler was Puyi — the deposed last emperor of the China and, as the member of the Qing dynasty, an ethnic Manchu.

Today, the Manchus are a small minority, and Manchuria itself — the focus of industrialisation in the Mao era — has become China’s rust belt, left behind by the frenetic growth of the coastal cities further south.

The biggest city in the region, with five million people, is Harbin. Situated a 1,000 kilometres north-east of Beijing it makes the most of its freezing winters with its spectacular ice sculpture festival.

But even being that far north, Harbin is still 500 kilometres south of the Russian border and the northern end of the Heihe-Tongcheng line (see above).

Did I mention China was big?

6. Qingdao — Germany’s long lost Hong Kong

Returning to Beijing, we should say something about China’s Grand Canal, the world’s longest. It connects the capital to Tianjin (although it  continues all the way down to Hangzhou, a city of 9 million people), and from Tianjin we head down the coast, past the mouth of the Yellow River and to the Shandong peninsula, which sticks out towards Korea. 

At the tip of the peninsula was a forgotten fragment of the British Empire — Weihaiwei. It was leased by Imperial China in 1898 to the British, and finally returned in 1930. The territory even had its own flag — featuring a Union Jack and some mandarin ducks.

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On the south side of the peninsula is the major port city of Qingdao (population 6 million — larger than Berlin or Madrid). Again, not a household name in the West — though you may be familiar with the older spelling of Tsingtao, the name of the beer founded by Germans here in 1903.

It’s a reminder that, for a while, Qingdao was the German Hong Kong — yet another “leased territory” extorted from China by predatory foreigners. At the start of the First World War the city was seized from the Germans by the Japanese with British help. It was returned to China in 1922, but in 1938 the Japanese took it back again.

There is a reason why the Chinese resent outside interference.

7. Wenzhou — China’s Jerusalem

Let’s carry on hundreds of kilometres down the coast. We’ll go past the mouth of the Yangzi, and also wave without stopping to Shanghai and its neighbouring cities (total metropolitan population, 34 million). 

South of the great river, we’re into a different China. The climate is warmer, of course, and wetter; the terrain is hilly, sometimes mountainous; and the main crop is rice not wheat.

There’s a theory that rice farming, because it is so challenging, has shaped a different cultural mindset — interdependent and holistic (as opposed to the North’s rugged individualism). That said, the South also has a strong mercantile tradition. Not having the broad open plains of the North, the coastal cities have tended to look outwards to the wider world.

They’ve also been where the wider world has come to China. For instance, Wenzhou, a city of three million people, almost 500 kilometres south of Shanghai, is known as “China’s Jerusalem” because it is a long-established centre of Chinese Christianity.

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It is also a focal point for Xi Jinping’s crackdown on religion. Though the persecution is not as bad as that suffered by the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, hundreds of churches have been demolished or vandalised. The Communist authorities are especially keen on tearing down crosses.

8. Xiamen — launchpad of the Chinese diaspora

Further down the coast, across the sea from Taiwan, we come to the port city of Xiamen (better known to us as Amoy).

It’s long been a departure point for China’s emigrants. Over the centuries, the Chinese diaspora has drawn heavily from the southern provinces, including Fujian (of which Xiamen is biggest city). It’s why the Hokkien language and culture of Xiamen is spoken in Chinese communities across the world — and especially Taiwan and Singapore.

A quirk of Xiamen’s geography is that Taiwan is almost 300 km away across the Taiwan Strait but also just 2 km away. That’s because the Taiwanese government still controls the nearby Kinmen islands — a strange remnant of a frozen conflict.

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9. The Pearl River delta — capital of the world?

Heading even further down the coast we come to another special territory — Hong Kong. But as special as it is, it’s also part of a bigger urban conglomeration: the cities of the Pearl River delta, among them Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Jiangnan and Macau, slowly growing together into a mega-city of some 60 million people.

United by proximity, they are however divided by politics — Hong Kong and Macau being Special Administrative Regions — and also language. Southern China is a place of great linguistic diversity. Cantonese, Hokkien and other languages of the region are more than mere dialects. In their spoken form, they are mutually unintelligible with Mandarin Chinese.

10. Chongqing and Chengdu — deep China

If we travel 1,000 kilometres north of the Pearl River delta we end up back where we began — in Wuhan, on the banks of the Yangzi. From there we’ll make one final journal — upstream. As we head west, the terrain gets mountainous, but we’re not at the Tibetan plateau yet. Long before that, we pass through the Three Gorges and into the Sichuan basin, a large and fertile lowland region surrounded by mountains on all sides.

It is the breadbasket of China — but also home to two huge industrial cities: Chongqing in the east and Chengdu in the west.

Chongqing is sometimes listed as the world’s biggest city. That’s a bit of a misconception, because its official boundaries encompass an area the size of Austria, including all the smaller cities and towns therein. Even so, the actual urban area of Chongqing is a vast growing metropolis, home to 18 million people.

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Some 400 kilometres onwards, at the far end of the Sichuan basin, we reach Chengdu (population: 12 million). This is la Chine profonde, the national redoubt. In the Second World War, it is where the Chinese government fell back before the advancing Japanese. It was also the last mainland city to fall to the Communists.

And not far from Chengdu, just before the Earth rises up to form the Tibetan plateau, we find one final refuge — the last habitat of the giant panda, and the most fitting place to end this journey.