China
Joe Biden’s skewed climate change priorities
It’s not hard to see why politicians like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson want to talk about climate change. First…
Beijing is quietly challenging Brussels
The new agreement between China and the US on climate change, announced this week, contained the usual worthy overtures. Both…
The Spectator’s Notes
The recent Sewell report on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been much abused and little read. It is full of…
War machines
Who can take on China in the tech arms race?
Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?
In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s…
What China wants from Britain
What are we to do about China? To turn a phrase beloved by the Chinese Communist party (CCP) on its…
Portrait of the Week
Home More than 30 million had received their first dose vaccination. The government remained confident of supplying second doses and…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Interior silence’ is not a phrase I associate with Sarah Sands, until recently the editor of the BBC Today programme…
The fightback
Western democracies must unite against China’s economic bullying
Why is New Zealand afraid of criticising China?
It is becoming harder and harder to ignore China’s aggressive behaviour. As I say in the magazine this week, China…
Beijing’s cruel attempt to stop fleeing Hongkongers
The Chinese Communist party regime likes to portray itself as the new superpower, displaying its strength on the world stage.…
Why the West should stop investing in China
The Prime Minister has called for an international coalition of free countries to oppose the growing influence of China’s authoritarian…
The EU’s decline is self-inflicted
In 1991, at the height of the first Gulf War, the EU demonstrated to the world its divisions and helplessness,…
Why does China think it can bully backbench MPs like me?
Does the Chinese Communist Party understand how our parliamentary democracy works? The evidence from the last 24 hours suggests not.…
MPs facing Chinese sanctions deserve our solidarity
The sanctions that China is imposing on various politicians, academics and think tanks in the democratic world are designed to…
The Spectator’s Notes
The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the…
Strait lines
Is Britain heading for war over Taiwan?
MPs question Johnson’s plan for Global Britain
Boris Johnson still has a journalist’s ear for snappy phrases — levelling up, an oven-ready Brexit, Global Britain. The PM…
Boris’s China plan is a missed opportunity
From Brexit to China, ‘cakeism’ – the idea that it is possible to govern without making hard choices – appears…
The West has lost its moral high ground
International travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test negative for Covid before the flight, and on return…
Infernal censorship
How Dante fell foul of the Chinese Communist party
The curious censorship of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland
Fortunes shift quickly in Chinese cyberspace. On March 1, Chloé Zhao, the Beijing-born film director, was the ‘pride of China’,…
Covid kids’ book pulped after China complains
World Book Day was last Thursday and now a leading German publisher has belatedly marked the occasion by pulping copies…
How the West can avoid Beijing’s propaganda trap
This time next year the Winter Olympics will have drawn to a close. Beijing will have become the first city…
The Spectator’s Notes
There is a ‘pervasive presence of Chinese military-linked conglomerates and universities in the sponsorship of high-technology research centres in many…
