The star of these Chongqing streams is Long Haotian, an internet celebrity who competed for China in breakdancing at the Youth Olympics. His girlfriend-slash-streaming colleague is Yao Yao; she talks in a squeaky baby voice and emotes like an animated character on a video-game loading screen. The couple has enjoyed a strange TikTok virality in the West in recent weeks, spurring imitations and parodies and racking up millions of views. Many clips taken from their videos on Chinese sites receive tens of thousands of likes; one has half a million, and its comments overflow with baffled enchantment. “Understood nothing but could not stop watching,” says one. “This is so bizarre but I will watch them in full,” says another. “Why do I keep watching these,” asks a third. Over the course of these streams, precisely nothing of note happens. Regardless, China watches. The revenue of tuanbo, meaning “group or team livestreams”, is expected to leap from 15 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) last year to 40 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) this year. And now, we watch too.

The Chongqing dancers aren’t a one-off: whenever tuanbo makes it over to Western TikTok, we are rapt. The format is finely tuned for hyperstimulation: bright colors, catchy music, constant interaction with a hidden viewership. Elsewhere, the livestreaming models are even more overt in their roles as meaningless revenue-generators. In one video, pavements are studded with ringlights, each illuminating a pretty Chinese woman who speaks into her phone, collecting donations from viewers or selling plastic products. In some streams, performers float surfboards on wave machines; viewers spike when they fall off. Some have line-ups of four or five girls in their teens or early twenties, each of whom can be made to perform the same dance again, and again, and again. Occasionally they pass out or cry from exhaustion, fake or otherwise; this in turn keeps viewers watching. Other videos stage high-stakes scenarios, such as nonsensical factory work under the scowling gaze of a hated boss. In many cases, the audience is mesmerized by the satisfying repetition. Often these “livestreams” are in fact recorded loops: viewers rarely notice, so unvarying is the format.

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The appeal is rarely that these streamers are especially sexy, or outrageous, or original — it is that they are absurd and perform on demand. The emptier the logic of the streams, the more engagement they drum up. We are accustomed to Western influencers behaving like miniature celebrities — the principles of authenticity, glamor and charisma are piped in directly from Hollywood — whereas Chinese idol culture is about cohesion. Tuanbo performers make themselves generic and perform robotically, often literally moving like automatons. There is no interest in intimacy or sincerity. Like our baby-voiced Yao Yao, they are stock characters. On the Western internet, the individual is the star; on the Chinese internet, success means operating as a highly efficient whole. And so the two forms of content reflect the philosophies of their alien worlds.

Still, it takes a lot of effort to look that flat. China’s streaming stars are working their asses off to come across as catchphrase-bleating idiots while carrying out meticulous and highly choreographed set-pieces. The finished product more closely resembles a call center or production line than a television show. In this, the streams mirror the country’s industrial and military prowess. There is often something borderline martial in the videos’ regimentation. No other country attracts foreign viewers with the spectacle of men marching in a city square. 

Since the Nineties the West has watched, enthralled and aghast, as China has churned out vast factories, corralled hyperefficient workforces and thrown together cities seemingly overnight. Online, a similar thing is happening to pop culture. If the Californian dream of the internet was about liberating creativity, creating a boundless Eden of artists and independent agents, tuanbo offers an alternative future: content that resembles manufacturing. The livestream host is a worker in a vast attention economy, laboring under the same prerogative for efficiency that transformed the country’s factories into the workshop of the world. The principles of Chinese social media are ruthless visions of the future: hyperrationalism and scale, mass production. We are glued to them as horrified Victorians would be glued to the vision of industrial textile mills. They show us how quickly we become cogs. 

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I’d wager that Chinese streaming culture has more influence on the West than any CCP messaging. The CCP does not control these streams, of course, nor are they propaganda in any normal sense of the word. And yet, indirectly, they are engines for Chinese soft power: overt diplomacy efforts are always boring and suspect, whereas new media forms quickly become part of Western culture without anybody caring. These spectacularly weird livestreams haunt and hypnotize Western viewers just like American AI slop of talking fruits, or quasi-sexual ASMR. The difference is that China’s productions have emerged from a far less permissive social-media culture in which censorship is pervasive and brutal, and major tech firms are expected to align with state priorities.

Aside from merely degrading the quality of pop culture — a lost cause anyway in the age of TikTok — what makes tuanbo so unsettling is that it breaks down our understanding of the role of the internet as an ocean of creators, free individuals operating without limits, replacing it with a homogenized bloc of content producers and consumers who are, by definition, unsubversive. China’s novel model of scaling and optimizing online videos may in the future outcompete the Western model of individual creativity. After all, this is the country that conquered industrialized manufacturing; culture, too, could one day be “made in China”. This, I’m sure, would suit Xi Jinping’s agenda just fine. 

Maybe one day, when Xi’s forces inevitably invade Taiwan, the generation of young people who would have turned out on the streets in protest will instead be preoccupied with their phones, watching a squadron of beauty-filtered men in stacked shoes. “When the bass gets bumpin’ up in the club…”

I was there as a student and when I returned in 2023, to teach, a great deal had changed. The air base was long gone — it had been shuttered under Russian pressure in 2014 — and the US presence in nearby Afghanistan had vanished as well. The swaggering military contractors were getting drunk in some other bar somewhere else in the world. And the NGO sector that, as one interlocutor put it to me in the 2000s, was “growing like mushrooms after the rain” had all but disappeared. I currently live next to the old Soros Foundation building — which closed its doors in 2024 following the passage of a Russia-inspired “foreign agent” law. It’s a large complex and it looks beautiful, but I’ve never seen anybody go in or out; it feels like a mausoleum for a whole generation of hopes about Westernization and liberal democracy.

My experience living here has largely been about pondering an absence, one which has become all the more striking since Trump’s re-election, the closure of USAID last year and the near-termination of US soft power in the region — even before the White House made explicit their focus on the Western Hemisphere with this week’s daring raid on Venezuela. I can count on one hand the number of Americans I’ve met who live here and, probably on two, the number of Americans I’ve met who’ve even passed through. It’s a part of the world that is about as far away from the contiguous United States as it’s possible to get but that had at one point seemed integral enough to the Pax Americana for a base to be set up and for a certain amount of soft power to flow through here, both to lend logistical support to operations in Afghanistan and to radiate power deep into the territory of the former Soviet Union. Now that the tide has gone out, the question is: what does a society look like if it’s basically untouched by direct American influence?

Why the US should be expected to have any contact with a country like Kyrgyzstan is a fair query to start with. Look at a map zoomed out and the country seems to be swallowed in an embrace by China to the east and by Kazakhstan and — more distantly — Russia to the north. The country is poor, with a nominal GDP per capita of under $3,000, and has limited natural resources. It’s mountainous and largely rural, with proud nomadic traditions, a culture taking in elements from the Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Turkic worlds, and its history couldn’t be more remote from America’s. But spend time here and a certain US influence becomes obvious enough. I am able to teach my journalism course in English at an international university with good comprehension from my students. My students routinely make fun of me for how behind the curve I am in following P. Diddy’s trial or not quite being able to explain who Charli XCX is. Many of them fantasize about living in the US. If I’m in a cab, it’s routine for the driver to suddenly put on speakerphone a brother or cousin who’s living in the States so that we can trade pleasantries with one another. Bishkek is filled with malls that give me flashbacks to the time I spent living in Los Angeles. And, as an American, I am treated with a respect and an interest that I don’t think I’ve quite experienced anywhere else in the world — there’s just a curiosity about Americanness that I think much of the rest of the world has moved past. Actually, my number one complaint living here is about the tinny American music played in coffeeshops that I am forever asking waiters to change or at least adjust the volume on.

If that influence seems superficial — just the flotsam of 21st-century pop culture — it can also deeply influence people’s life choices. Agnieszka Pikulicka, a Polish journalist who has published widely on Central Asia and writes the Turan Tales Substack, certainly thinks so. “Thanks to US involvement, a whole generation of Central Asians — not only Kyrgyz — had a chance to build their own NGOs and media, study in English according to Western curricula, travel abroad and absorb democratic values,” she tells me.

It’s not always so easy to know where to assign attribution, but those democratic values seemed connected to a relatively open culture where crime and corruption have steadily decreased and the economy has for years had reliable growth. The quiet but effective tourist slogan “You’ll Like Kyrgyzstan” gives a general idea. Meanwhile, in the region as a whole, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan finally, in the last decade, transitioned out of their Soviet-era authoritarian leaders — the latter in particular has undergone an eight-year period of striking liberalization.

If I were writing this piece a year or two years ago, that’s probably where I would have ended it — with America’s direct influence on the region ebbing away but with the region making progress on its own terms and in a way that was not incompatible with liberal democracy. Now, though, I am far less sure. Kyrgyzstan has, since I have been here, arrested opposition figures; closed the leading independent media outlet; fallen into a pattern of repossessing private property based on a reading of arcane laws; installed new “firewall” systems for controlling web access; and fallen deeper into “not free” status in Freedom House’s annual report. The notion of Kyrgyzstan as an “island of democracy” — flung around in international circles just a few years ago — is giving way, under President Sadyr Japarov who came to power in 2021, to a creeping authoritarianism. To give a very small but telling example: when I first came here, I really enjoyed jogging in the main sports stadium — the one also used by the national football team. The track would always be full of people, and it would be a really nice time — people jogging or working out in the exercise park. When I would talk about what I liked about Kyrgyzstan, that would be the kind of thing I would point to — I never in my life in America had the opportunity to go for a jog in Yankee Stadium. About a year ago, though, when I went to take my usual run, the gate was closed and an intimidating guard shouted at the high school team who had come for their workout that the stadium was now closed to the public and closed for good.

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I don’t want to draw too many inferences from events that are tied to Kyrgyz domestic politics, and it’s not as if there’s a clear cause-and-effect between, say, Trump’s election or the end of the war in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian turn in the 2020s. But what clearly is true is that a sort of ideological vacuum showed up with the waning of US influence in this part of the world, and I suspect, in many other parts of the world that are in a similar place of choosing their geopolitical identity. The sense in the 2000s was that the future lay in the direction of capitalism and liberal democracy — as an irresistible trajectory for a developing country like Kyrgyzstan. That was far from seen as unequivocally a good thing — I remember concerns about “runaway capitalism” and about the loss of traditional culture — but it just seemed like a fact. That’s now far from the case. When I first returned to Kyrgyzstan in 2023, I was struck by how many more hijabs I saw around than I had noticed in the 2000s. The most visible manifestation of soft power in Bishkek is a gleaming mosque built and funded by Turkey. Chinese influence can be felt above all in large-scale infrastructure projects, such as roads and railways, financed by the Belt and Road Initiative. Russian influence is, not surprisingly, ubiquitous in a country that was part of the Soviet Union, with Russian widely spoken and Russian state media popular particularly among older people, but becomes distinctly more noticeable in the recent adoption of foreign agent laws or the Putinesque consolidation of political power around the President.

The deeper point I would make is that, in the battle to conceptualize the future, it now looks far less like an episode of American TV. One of my students, when we were going around the room introducing ourselves at the start of the semester, said as his kind of statement of purpose that he was “opposed to the LGBT agenda”. The phrase “human rights”, which seemed to be making its bid towards universalism in the 2000s, now — under the barrage of Russian state media — is understood as being inextricable from Western soft power. The US and its gold-paved streets might still figure in my students’ airy post-graduation plans, but they’re as apt to say something about Dubai or China — and the difficulty of getting student visas under the Trump administration has shifted their attention away from the US. Whatever the US was supposed to stand for — even if J. Lo can comfortably sell out her Kazakhstan tour, and the Back Street Boys can “get nothing but love” on theirs — is now in recession.

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Whether you think this is a deep loss or not reflects, of course, your underlying point of view. For Pikulicka, America’s inward turn directly undermines Central Asian civil society. “With Donald Trump taking a more authoritarian turn himself, those [NGO] groups have also lost arguments in their struggle against authoritarianism and local regimes, all of which have been tightening the grip over freedom of speech and — in the case of Kyrgyzstan — small but hard won democratic achievements,” she says. For Peter Leonard, a long-time editor at Eurasianet who now writes the Central Asian-themed Substack Havli, Trump’s reassessment of priorities may paradoxically lead to closer ties to Central Asia. “His vocal rejection of ‘woke’ politics is particularly appealing to conservative leaders in the region,” he tells me. “The president of Kazakhstan recently invoked Trump’s coolness toward LGBT values in an approving manner. This strongly suggests that US influence under Trump actually has room for growth, at least in political-cultural terms.” That new affinity with Central Asia seemed to produce surprising results at the end of last year in the C5+1 Summit in Washington where all five Central Asian countries signed far-reaching agreements with the US, including the eye-popping pledge for Uzbekistan to invest $100 billion in the US rather than the other way around.

Leonard’s is a very subtle point of view — that it’s not so much as if America’s influence in the region has waned as that the “brand” has shifted. Trump has a certain alignment with Central Asia that the more progressive NGO sector often didn’t. But living in Bishkek, where the volume of American influence is turned far down from where it was even a few years ago, I find myself reflecting on a vacuum— on the sense of something or other having been lost. What it is, I suppose, is some notion of the US as a force for good on a global scale. It’s not always so easy for me to tell if that’s something that Central Asians actually saw in the US or just what I hoped Central Asians saw, but there’s no question that propaganda from Russia has had its effect in depicting America as the origin point of various global conspiracies, while, especially with the closure of USAID, there is very little soft power initiative emanating from the US to counteract that impression. As Leonard thoughtfully says, there is a constructive role that the US could in theory play in the region. “It stands to bring investment with fewer political strings attached,” he says. “It brings knowledge transfer. And the US is legitimately, if self-interestedly, committed to advancing institutionalized integration among Central Asian states, which would make the region more sovereign and less dependent on China and Russia.”

There was a point in time when, no matter what else it might be, America was it — the future. Now that it’s become clear that capitalism no longer necessarily ushers in democracy and that the “American way of life” is not everybody’s cup of tea, there is a great lacuna in values on the international stage. Russia has been very aggressive in framing a vision of the future around conservative values; and China in doing so around a kind of state-managed technocracy. It’s far less clear now what the US stands for or why anybody should buy what it’s selling.

Today, China has something different, and more sinister, in mind under President Xi Jinping. In speeches Xi and other party officials have repeatedly emphasised the need to “tell China’s story well.” That responsibility — until very recently — has been outsourced beyond the parties propaganda agencies.

The Communist nation sees film not as a weapon, but as the ultimate in soft power. A way to assure citizens and woo skeptics alike that China’s way of life is superior. Obey the state. Never think for yourself. Silence dissent. Is it any wonder it needs glamorous stars to spin those bleak messages?

But which stars? The answer for most of the 2010s was: Hollywood’s. The studios are only too happy to play along with China, assuming all those checks keep clearing. Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy is a terrifying portrait of a slugfest for hearts and minds around the world. It’s one the West is losing. Badly.

Casual observers know how Hollywood genuflects to the Chinese film market. They chuckled over John Cena’s apology, in Mandarin, for suggesting Taiwan was a nation. Others noted that the upcoming Top Gun sequel removed a patch from Tom Cruise’s iconic jacket for the same reason. Those with longer memories will recall Paramount changing 2013’s World War Z to ensure China wasn’t the source of the zombie outbreak, like it was in Max Brooks’ novel of the same name.

These humiliations only hint at the geopolitics in play, and the long game enacted by China. Schwartzel fleshes out the bigger picture, revealing a nation keen on weaponising pop culture’s ability to impact thought on a global scale. It’s also the world’s biggest bully, using its fiscal might — and enormous market of movie watchers — to turn capitalism against itself. “Propaganda” doesn’t do justice to the thought control aimed at by Chinese policymakers.

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They first opened their borders to U.S. films in the 1990s, without ever losing sight of the prime directive: Chinese supremacy. China’s cinematic market exploded in the 21^st century, pulling U.S. film studios towards them in the process. Think of all the money you’ll make from our film-frantic citizens. Stateside flops became hits after opening in China — remember the World of Warcraft movie? It sank in every market other than China’s, where it banked nearly half a billion dollars for Universal Pictures.

How much extra coin did Disney earn by opening Avengers: Endgame in China? Try $629 million. Stars have sold their souls for far less.

Except not just any film is allowed into Chinese theatres. Gay themes are quickly excised, as is any excessive violence and nudity. Puritanical censors are one of the many hurdles American films have to jump before they are screened in China. Films defying authority or suggesting the CCP is incompetent are verboten. It’s a miracle anyone suggested a Red Dawn remake where China is the villain, as MGM did in 2008. So China became North Korea before the film was released in 2012 — one of many examples of China’s ability to warp storytelling that  criticises the party.

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China is by no means the first country to put pressure on Hollywood. A fascinating chapter in Red Carpet looks back at 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The German government cajoled Universal to restructure Front to make it less critical of their efforts in the war. Universal did as it was told in order to access German theatres.

Decades later, Hollywood is once again ceding to a foreign power’s requests, but on a far larger scale than in the past. No US studio could ignore the fact that, before the pandemic, at one point China was building around 25 movie screens every day. So they censored their products. And it wasn’t just the studios. A-listers will lecture the American public on any topic that comes to mind — recall Robert De Niro’s splenetic interventions during the Trump era — except China.

It adds up to a chilling indictment of Western capitalism. When uncoupled from moral scruples, it plugs smoothly into China’s mainframe.

Authoritarians are usually afraid of their own citizens. If their leadership was so good, and so effective, they wouldn’t need to fiddle with every film that enters the country. But it goes further than censorship. The saga of Chinese actress Fan Bingbing’s fall from grace is deeply unsettling. This rising star had it all … until she incorrectly reported her film income, and the story went viral. The government erased her face from movie posters and placed her under house arrest, going so far as to observe her around the clock — even in the bathroom.

Her appearance this year in The 355, a girl-power actioner with Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz and Diane Kruger, came via digital trickery. Bingbing wasn’t allowed to be on-set during the shooting due to her banishment, so she was summoned on screen via green screen technology. You either play by the party’s rules, or your career is vaporised.

This authoritarian approach to cinema — a blend of puritanical censorship and pro-state cheerleading — is spreading. “If you want to change a nation, change it through stories,” the head of Kenya’s Film Classification Board tells the author in another segment of Red Carpet. Since 2006, China has loaned Kenya the best part of $10 billion for infrastructure projects — but Chinese influence is now more than roads and bridges. It’s culture, too.

In moviemaking, as in diplomacy, China is increasingly striking out on its own. Hollywood’s slavishness is no longer as effective as it once was. Some US movies now don’t get a Chinese debut despite endless diplomacy and backpedaling. And China is accepting fewer Hollywood imports than it has for years. Last year it blocked all four of Disney’s Marvel movies from release in its theatres.

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American fare that does get past the censors is regularly rejected by Chinese audiences who a decade ago lapped it up. Blockbusters like Wonder Woman 1984 now generate a fraction of the cash they once did in China. (2017’s Wonder Woman generated $90 million compared to $25 million for its 2020 sequel.) The recent Matrix Resurrections belly-flopped in China with an $11 million haul to date.

Instead Chinese audiences are turning to more blatantly nationalistic movies. Take The Battle of Lake Changjin, made in co-operation with the CCP’s propaganda department, and the most expensive film ever made in China. It tells the bloody story of Chinese soldiers thwarting American forces during the Korean War, with a cast of China’s biggest stars.

Luo Changping, a journalist famous for his corruption investigations, critiqued the film’s historical accuracy on Weibo as it stormed the box office. He vanished after was detained by police in October last year. In the end, this patriotic gore fest made over $900 million, making it the second largest global release of 2021, behind Spider-Man: No Way Home. Never has party propaganda been so effective, and so frightening.

Such brash patriotism is no longer the American style. We are a long way from the days of Capra and Ford. Hollywood stars routinely apologise for perceived sins, past and present. The wrong joke, the wrong political statement or just sharing the wrong virtue signal can spark an apology tour. When can we expect some mea culpas for an entire industry doing China’s bidding, while ignoring the country’s authoritarianism, militarism, and human rights abuses? Don’t hold your breath.

Red Carpet ought to be parachuted into the mansions and villas of Beverly Hills. Stars ought to emulate the courage of Richard Gere, who abandoned his mainstream movie career to speak up for Tibet. “Hollywood, once America’s most persuasive evangelist, remains beholden to another country,” Schwartzel writes late in the book. Ironically, that country is less and less interested in Hollywood. Gone are the days when American imports dominated China’s box office charts.

It’s a disturbing picture for US studios. Did Hollywood sell its artistic soul for nothing?

As seen and heard from abroad, that essentially means the BBC World Service. Given its impressive figures, any government, not just one facing the uncertainties of Brexit, would see the potential.

The BBC World Service currently broadcasts in more than 40 languages to a global audience — across radio, television and internet — now estimated at 426 million a week, with a target of 500 million. But the television audience for English-language programmes has overtaken the English-language radio audience worldwide, and — along with digital — it is growing faster. So far as international broadcasting is concerned, the present and the future are television.

But how well equipped is BBC World Service television — now, after various name changes, officially called BBC World News — to spearhead a UK “soft power” offensive? Having regularly viewed both the BBC and its competition during frequent travels in recent months, I would sadly submit: not very.

With its global reach, its glorious history, and the advantage that the UK is home to the English language, the broadcaster is lauded as unique to “brand” Britain. Times have changed, though, since the BBC World Service (then radio only) ruled the airwaves, and the now 30-year old BBC World Service television looks distinctly unimpressive from abroad.

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So why did the BBC’s global television service lose its edge? A more pertinent question would perhaps be whether it was ever the world-beater it claimed to be in the first place. Since its creation, in 1991, it is probably fair to say that a large part of its reputation was borrowed: it was automatically identified with the BBC World Service radio and allowed to bask, to an extent, in reflected glory.

But there were always big differences between the radio and television services. Where the radio had a long and distinguished history, and was funded until recently by a grand-in-aid from the Foreign Office (while running itself editorially), the TV arm was denied either government or licence-payer funding. It was set up, instead, as a commercial proposition, relying largely on advertising and subscriptions.

Because it uses many of the same correspondents and resources and benefits from the BBC brand, it has generally been treated with the same respect as the BBC World Service radio. But this respect hasn’t always been warranted. There have been questions, for example, about sponsored programming. But it has bred a certain complacency about the competition. For years, BBC World Service TV has been comparing itself favourably with American international broadcasters, such as CNN — which is not hard to do; the bar is not high —  while ignoring the growing appeal of European stations.

From what I’ve seen, the chief competition to the BBC today comes not from the US, but from the two premier European services: France 24 and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. While not a national broadcaster, the Lyon-based Euronews is up there, too.

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All three broadcast internationally in English (often with native English-speaking presenters) as well as in other languages. France 24 has French, Arabic and Spanish, and a combined audience of 61 million; DW has Arabic as well as German, and a combined audience of 135 million (compared with 101 million for BBC World Service television which broadcasts only in English). Both are growing fast.

Taking these stations as the competition, then, BBC World News falls down on a host of comparisons, starting with the absolute basic: timely and worldwide news coverage. BBC World News boasts that it breaks more stories from more places than any other channel. How much of a recommendation that is, however, depends on what those stories are and how they are treated.

Travelling in Italy over Christmas, and in East and Central Europe during the autumn, I found the BBC to be slower on fresh news than the competition, and to have less hard news in the overall output than soft-ish and often repeated features. If I wanted to switch on and know what was happening, France 24 was a much better bet.

A specific example was coverage of the Russia-Ukraine end-of-year prisoner exchange, which on the BBC lagged far behind the actual news and was given little context. US shootings took precedence – even though the service was billed BBC World News Europe.

There was a qualitative difference, too, in the content and tone of features. The ratio of relatively timeless features to news seemed greater, sometimes much greater, on the BBC than on the other channels. A striking proportion of the BBC’s output also seemed too focused on aid projects of various kinds, with a fairly obvious, but unspoken, didactic streak. Even more striking, compared with France24 and DW, was the paucity of features about life in Britain. Both European stations gave substantial glimpses of how life is lived in their countries and looked — sometimes critically — in the mirror.

To be fair, BBC World News did relay some of the crucial parliamentary sessions live, during the Brexit debates. Then again, so did most other international stations, as events in the UK were seen as having global significance. It was a pity, then, that BBC World News did not make a bigger effort to interpret what was happening for the benefit of non-UK viewers.

There are two other points that might be more important for viewers abroad than BBC HQ in London might think. First, quite a few of the presenters and reporters could do with smartening up. Some look downright scruffy, compared with their French and German counterparts. You may object on the grounds that sartorial negligence never harmed anyone. But when you switch from DW to BBC World News and the BBC guy’s shirt is unironed and the trousers don’t fit, I’m sorry, but authority is lost.

Which leaves my final point. The service doesn’t capitalise sufficiently on what could and should be one of the BBC’s greatest strengths vis-a-vis the competition: a wealth of native speakers to choose from. If you watch the BBC abroad, you might expect presenters and reporters to speak comprehensible English. Of course not demanding that everyone should speak the Queen’s English c. 1930, old Etonian or extreme RP. Nor am I saying that English shouldn’t be accented. But the presenter should be understandable. Someone who isn’t shouldn’t be reporting in the name of the BBC.

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Both France 24 and Deutsche Welle employ fluent English speakers for their English-language channels. So why can’t the BBC, with all the advantages that come from being the home side linguistically, do the same?

Perhaps, then, the top brass should set aside a few hours to view the competition in real time (I wonder if they ever have). That should focus minds.

But tweaks to the programming and a decent wardrobe consultant alone will not do it. These are pretty cosmetic fixes. BBC World Service television is not going to be an effective instrument of “soft power” unless there some rather more fundamental changes.

The first would be to bring World Service radio and televison under the same funding structure and editorial direction, so that it functions as one. At the moment, they are separate, with the radio and its foreign language services funded by the licence-fee and World Service television a commercial entity, funded by advertising and subscription, as it was when it was first set up.

The argument against bringing World Service television in-house was always the cost. But this could be changing. Five years ago, the then Government agreed to a BBC request for more money for its international services — to the tune of £89 million a year — to be spread across World Service radio, television and digital. This would suggest that World Service television is not quite as separate or self-sufficient as it was. With a government that is loosening the purse-strings generally, the time could be ripe for this change.

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The second would be to define the mission of this new unified service more clearly – as entailing the projection of a distinct view, or views, from London. This would have to be handled carefully, as it could encounter staff resistance.

While France 24 and Deutsche Welle are both directly state-owned and their staff well understand that they work for a state broadcaster, I suspect many BBC World Service staff — and I say this as a World Service staff member myself long ago — do not see themselves in the same way. I suspect, too, that they would take a dim view of the idea that the prime purpose of the BBC’s international services was to promote UK “soft power” as a potential threat to their much prized independence.

This could be an obstacle, but it is not insurmountable. The BBC is both aware of, and takes a certain pride in, being seen as a flagship of the UK’s “soft power”. But it regards this as a product of its quality and editorial standards, rather than the reason for its existence. There is no reason to alter this. What could and should be changed is to ensure that those standards are coonsistently upheld across all its international services — radio, television and digital — and that the voice of the BBC abroad is one that comes identifiably from the UK.

International broadcasting, especially television, is highly, and increasingly, competitive. The UK, through the reputation of the BBC World Service had a head start. It cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

Earlier this month it was reported that Beijing was growing increasingly concerned with British-based private schools monopolising the most talented Chinese pupils.

Britain’s public schools now run 47 campuses across China, educating almost 10,000 pupils, with the total number of institutions doubling in just two years, and pupil increasing by 10% in just one.

Wellington – at £41,580-a-year – operates schools in Tianjin, Shanghai and Hangzhou, while the even more expensive Dulwich College has two campuses in Shanghai, plus two more in Beijing and Suzhou.

In total there are almost 25,000 non-British students at overseas British schools, and it has become such an industry that the prestigious teacher-recruiting company Gabbitas has shifted its core business to tutoring pupils for independent school entrance, with offices in Russia, Japan and South Korea, as well as three in China. Large numbers of Chinese pupils are also educated in Britain, enough that boarding schools limit the number of Chinese children in each house.

Britain’s schools are an export market worth £1billion a year, hardly surprising when the private system has continued to maintain its place as the best in the world, even during the 1970s and 80s when the state system was at its worst. And yet Chinese parents often talk of their admiration not just for the education system but Britain and its culture.

Britain’s education industry is a key part of what’s referred to as “soft power”, national strength derived from cultural influence, but it is also a beneficiary of it, taking advantage of a particular idea of Britain and Britishness that attracts people from around the world.

The origin of this soft power runs deep. The ethos of the British public school owes much to Thomas Arnold, the early 19th century reformer who introduced the prefect system and made public schools far more civilised. But Arnold, a devout Christian whose son Matthew went on to write Dover Beach, also did much to create the English gentleman (before Arnold, public schools were violent in a way that now seems comically absurd, with regular riots in which troops had to be called in, and regular firearms-related antics).

The English gentleman was an ideal but it had tangible, real-world effects, contributing in part to the huge change in British behaviour between 1850-1950, when a very violent and boorish country became famously gentle; as Orwell observed, “in no country inhabited by white men is easier to shove people off the pavement”.

Such was the power of the this idea that the rising middle class around the world aped British mores, most noticeably in the adoption of the suit as the global dress – because that was how a gentleman dressed. It helped create an idea of Englishness, an attractive brand that the country’s institutions continue to benefit from.

But soft power is much older even than the Victorians. Long before disputes over burgundy and blue, UK passports weren’t even in English but in French, the language of high culture and diplomacy. This was not just a reflection of historic French military domination, but the leading position of Paris University in the Middle Ages. During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the likes of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great graced the Sorbonne, one-third of students there were English, who were even then stereotyped as drunks.

Although the Norman Conquest had a huge impact on our language, the great bulk of French loan words in English arrived much later, in the 13th and 14th centuries, a result of French cultural domination. (Whether the spread of their culture was of any benefit to your average French person is a matter of debate.)

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Today British soft power is likewise strengthened by our university system, which educates as many world leaders as the United States, but this probably has less influence than the country’s cultural capital, and in particular its stories.

For most outsiders, our island story has little to do with the things a nation tells about itself – usually victories in battle – but the narratives we tell; when people think of Britain they immerse themselves in Lord of the Rings, Wind in the Willows, the Narnia tales, James Bond or Paddington.

Places tangibly benefit from the stories attached to them; Edinburgh’s rich literary history aides its ability to draw in not just tourists but the talented people who allow it to compete globally. Dublin will live off the cultural royalties of James Joyce long after the family have stopped getting the cheques from Dubliners. Birmingham even benefits from Peaky Blinders tourism. Some stories grow so powerful that they come to define a country; Walter Scott’s novels didn’t just help Scottish tourism but helped to create the very idea of Scotland. Were it to leave the UK and go it alone, the country would still very much depend on the romantic legacy Scott left it.

Soft power matters more today because global elites are far more mobile, and freer to choose between a number of potential homes; countries are in competition to attract this small pool of talent, who all speak the same global language and could easily settle in any of 20 or 30 global cities. London has an advantage in that wealthy foreigners have a certain idea of England.

Again this is nothing new; the Arthurian tales, which became popular in the 12th century among the French-speaking aristocracy of northern France and England, had such an impact on the imagination that aristocrats like Roger Mortimer and Henry III’s brother Richard ended up spending vast amounts on building castles in the Celtic lands of Wales and Cornwall to indulge their own Arthurian fantasies, stories converting into currency for the local economy.

Stories are central to the human psyche, and for Britain there is one like no other when it comes to drawing people to these shores. When a writer from Times Higher Education visited Durham University and asked Chinese students why they had chosen the city, the young people all gave the same response, one that will be wearily predictable to parents across the land: “Harry Potter”.

Durham featured in the film series and its architecture and location, accessed by King’s Cross, gives it some of that cash-convertible Potter magic. Realising this potential, and with universities as competitive as cities in trying to attract global talent, the college has even taken to sorting its students into Hogwarts houses.

Harry Potter, it’s fair to say, is more than just a book; its fans – my daughters among them – treat it more akin to a religion, and it seriously influences their worldview and even politics.

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And the world J.K. Rowling created speaks hugely about the modern British brand. It is a curious mixture of progressive political values – Gryffindor v Slytherin is a thinly disguised conflict between liberals and reactionaries – and very traditional aesthetic styles, in particular its Gothic-Romanesque hybrid boarding school (not to mention the conservative idea of a boy chosen not for any great meritocratic abilities but who his parents were). Rowling’s vision is very much of the current year, but it certainly owes something to Arnold, that deeply ingrained idea of gentleness.

In this world tolerance is a key virtue, as much as “love” is for Pauline Christianity, reflecting its centrality to modern-day British culture. Indeed, when Tony Blair’s government started talking about “British values” in the 2000s as something to be taught to an increasingly fractured society, “tolerance” was presented as something inescapably British, as if other nations define themselves by their intolerance.

This modern idea of Britishness is very much seen in films like Paddington 2 or the revamped Mary Poppins, which curiously combine modern social mores – “it’s okay to be different” – with very traditional architecture and visual aesthetics. The Notting Hill of Paddington, with evenly-distributed ethnic groups and social classes living side by side in a friendly urban environment, is obviously a charming fantasy, and one that particularly appeals to 21st century Britain’s Bobo ruling class.

Yet Britishness now transcends geography, so much so that it can be replicated in Changzhou or Chengdu. This is something new, as for most people historically a country is defined by place, patriotism being a love of a particular spot, reflecting the Greek etymolgy of patri, “father land”. This is why the inherently conservative country music so readily fixes on a particular town or space, as do pretty much all folk traditions.

For those of a more progressive worldview, however, a nation is also an ideal, the land being merely the body beyond which there is a “soul” of a nation. This is certainly true of Britishness, which has developed into something far more than a physical country, let alone an ethnic group. Britishness has become a sort of idea – and a very profitable one at that.

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Today British values are intimately tied up with liberalism, the country being one of the most proselytising about gay rights, literally flying the flag from its embassies. Just as British national identity is in decline at home, facing both Scottish and English nationalism and – more damaging still – a university-educated middle class who regard national feeling as déclassé (something they’ve made quite clear since June 2016), so it has gained new life as sort of global ideology, inseparable from progressive values of tolerance. Britain has lost the Raj and all the flags have come down, but it has gained a spiritual empire.

History once again provides a template. After Rome fell it was still able to project its cultural values, worldview and language across most of Europe through the Roman spiritual empire, or as it’s better known, the Catholic Church. Christianity was relatively new to Rome by the fall of the western empire, and to a third century Roman it would have been as incomprehensible as the “British values” of gay marriage and trans rights would have been to our great-grandparents; yet the liberal doctrine of tolerance has become as intertwined with Britishness as Catholicism came to be with Rome.

We certainly benefit from the stories that have come to be associated with these islands, just as the Eternal City has done through the ages. While Game of Thrones is worth £200m a year to Northern Ireland, Harry Potter’s value to the UK economy is incalculable, but Rowling has arguably put more cash into the British treasury than anyone in history.

Perhaps it’s something we should be more aggressively profiting from; we could redesign Luton or Stansted Airport to look like Hogwarts and divert the trains so that visitors came into King’s Cross platform 9 or 10. Birmingham could certainly take more advantage of its Tolkien connections, not to mention the obvious trick of renaming its airport after Shakespeare.

Would that be to make England an amusement park? Perhaps. In Julian Barnes’s novel England, England an entrepreneur turns the Isle of Wight into a sort of miniature fantasy England, complete with recreations of the Battle of Britain and a scale model of Buckingham Palace; he even persuades the king to move there, but then the British royal family is, after all, ersatz anyway.

In the story the replica proves so successful that the Isle of Wight becomes a thriving independent state, while the rest of the country – Old England – turns into a depopulated hell. As one of the characters explains, people prefer the fake to the original these days; but then perhaps they always have. As T.S Eliot observed, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”.

There is, of course, a lot said about the rise of export-led Asian economies, especially China, but notice the framing of the issue. Despite the huge impact of Chinese industrial prowess on the global economy, western media narratives relegate the country to a supporting role in a drama that is still all about us: cheap Chinese exports servicing western consumer culture; Chinese capital flows feeding the West’s appetite for debt; the offshoring of manufacturing capacity as a business strategy for western companies.

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Meanwhile, we arrogantly assume that the process of globalisation-as-westernisation (i.e. the rest of the world becoming more like us) will carry on regardless. The idea that China might be able to exert ‘soft power’ influence in the other direction doesn’t much enter into our minds.

Here are three unrelated stories that should give us pause for thought:

The first starts with Ariana Grande, an American pop star so famous that even I’ve heard of her. When, earlier this month, she released her new single, it was expected it would go straight to the top of the charts – including the iTunes chart for digital downloads. But as Adam Minter explains for Bloomberg, that’s not how things worked out:

“Kris Wu, a superstar in China, not only had the No. 1 spot on the iTunes’ singles chart but also seven of the top 10 songs. It was an extraordinary achievement for an artist with almost no North American profile”

How, then, did he did he pull off this chart upset? There were allegations of hi-tech malarkey, but the explanation appears to be that Wu’s new album was released in America before China – and that his devoted Chinese fans found a way of downloading it from US websites. The episode is an illustration of the way that digital is creating a global media market place in which western tastes, and taste-makers, are no longer the be-all-and-end-all.

Now, onto a different kind of chart: The Economist reports on the growing achievements of Chinese universities in STEM subjects. The article includes a list of world universities ranked by the number of highly cited papers they’ve produced in maths and computing. China’s Tsinghua University comes in at number one – and of the top 15 universities, seven are in China (including one in Hong Kong), six are in America and two in Singapore. Europe doesn’t feature at all.

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Finally, a particular application of China’s STEM expertise: surveillance. Previously on UnHerd, I’ve written about the Chinese state’s advanced deployment of facial recognition technology and its all-encompassing Social Credit System. I also argued that such systems would be exported to, or emulated by, other countries.

Well, here’s a Reuters special report by Angus Berwick on Chinese involvement in Venezuela’s ‘ Fatherland Card’ – a smartcard ID system that “transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is increasingly linked by the government to subsidized food, health and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.”

One could also mention Singapore’s “Lamppost-as-a-Platform” project which is looking to install CCTV on the city-state’s 110,000 lampposts. Here, by Aradhana Aravindan and John Geddie, is another Reuters report on the story:

“Video surveillance networks are common in cities like London or New York. But Ian Wilson, a security lecturer at Australia’s Murdoch University said he believed that Singapore’s would be different in that it might involve extensive facial recognition technology.

“Such technology has become commonplace in Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai.”

Cities around the world could soon be looking like Beijing and Shanghai – looking right at you, in fact.

It’s not that the age of westernisation is over, but that it’s no longer the only force in globalisation – and nor does it have any right to be. For both better and worse, China, and other rising powers, will be shaping the way we live and not just in the economic sphere. 

So, one more reason to lift our heads from our immediate news fixations and take in the world around us.