China
Target practice
Britain is still too complacent about Chinese influence
Two reasons not to let Sir Tony rest on his Garter laurels
I’m picturing Sir Tony Blair enjoying a fitting of his Garter robes after watching Boris Johnson stagger through PMQs. ‘I’m…
An Olympic task
How China got stuck in a zero-Covid trap
China’s ‘useful idiots’ keep their honours
Ministers like to talk a good game on China. But, as the Commons witnessed just two weeks ago, all too…
The dangerous alliance between Russia and China
The growing alliance between Russia and China is something we shouldn’t lose sleep over, their long history of mutual suspicion…
No one should celebrate the decline of America
Where is America? Like an old friend who hasn’t been in touch for years, you wonder if its silence is…
Portrait of the week
Home Sue Gray, Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, having been asked by Boris Johnson to look into accusations…
The Spectator’s Notes
In May 2020, in the wake of the Barnard Castle story, Emily Maitlis delivered her famous Newsnight address to the…
China’s zero-Covid policy is becoming unsustainable
With just three weeks until the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Covid-19 is creeping ever closer to the…
Britain is finally waking up to China’s influence operations
The biggest surprise in Thursday’s security warning about a Chinese agent seeking to influence British politicians is that it came…
Was the Kazakhstan uprising an attempted Jihadi takeover?
The Kazakh uprising is over. The stench of burnt-out vehicles and bombed out buildings in Kazakhstan’s most populous city and…
The hypocrisy of Elon Musk
Tesla’s sleek, if expensive, electric cars are leading the battle against climate change. Its batteries are moving renewable energy into the…
China could be more dangerous than ever in 2022
Twenty twenty-two is the year that Xi Jinping plans to seize power for life, but it is not going according to…
The Pillar of Shame and the erasure of Hong Kong
In the dead of night one of the most prominent memorials to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Pillar of Shame,…
What happened to China’s missing tennis star?
Did a senior Chinese politician rape one of the country’s leading tennis stars? That certainly seemed to be the allegation…
China is right to laugh at the west
Signs of the enervating weakness of the west’s governing elites aren’t that hard to find but the case of the…
China’s growing influence over the Commonwealth’s armies
On Monday in the city of Bridgetown, Prince Charles will be forced to witness the spectacle of Barbados officially becoming a…
Fears over Mandarin shortage in Whitehall
‘China Spy Blitz’ blared the Sun this morning: ‘UK spooks hiring Mandarin speakers in cyber war.’ Spy bosses, the paper…
Peng Shuai appears in sinister ‘proof of life’ video
The Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai sits in a crowded restaurant surrounded by friends and her coach, who is going…
Letter from Taiwan
Normally, if the response to a speech of mine was that it had been a ‘despicable and insane performance’ from…
British MPs in the dark about Beijing’s threats
Following the killing of Sir David Amess, there has been much discussion in recent weeks about the safety of elected representatives. But…
Cold War, hot planet
Chelyabinsk is one of the most polluted places in the world. On 29 September 1957, an explosion ripped through the…
The Spectator’s Notes
At the National Trust’s annual general meeting last week, the voting was much more unusual than the public will have…
Don’t let China’s climate sins cloak its crushing of Hong Kong
China’s failure to bring anything new to COP26 surprised no one. The world’s worst carbon emitter offered no advance on…
China’s great log forward
Every year, China plants trees over an area the size of Ireland. The country may be the biggest polluter on…
