Is the East rising this Easter?
There is justifiable concern about the state of the West but what about the East?
The recent dramatic events in parliament - recalled for the first time on a Saturday since the Falklands War - raise yet more questions about the UK’s relationship with China. In Scunthorpe too, where steel workers prevented Chinese executives from the Jinye entering their plant. Indeed there was a rare coming together in the national interest of MPs and workers on this issue. The end result being to not-quite-nationalise but instead direct the Chinese firm (that somehow owns ‘British Steel’) to not obliterate what’s left of our primary steel making capacity. But how did we get ourselves in this mess in the first place; and what has it got to do with China?
Before answering that, it’s perhaps worth looking to China’s neighbours. As James Woudhuysen writes, a once politically stable Japan is entering turbulent times. With a ‘governing class in crisis’ following elections last year, and international tensions on the rise with, yes, China and also North Korea. Add to that an increasing problem with violent crime on its streets, a steep rise in immigration and a failing economy - and Japan is beginning to look a little more like us than it would like. Not long after those elections, South Korea did something rather out of character too.
Woudhuysen describes it as an ‘abortive coup’. Another otherwise stable Asian ally of the West facing political crisis, hostile neighbours, and unresolved economic problems. This time, rather than going to the ballot box, it declared martial law. While this was soon overturned as opposition representatives clambered into parliament to vote against it, amid the military build-up outside: it too suggested that instability has become the new normal. Or perhaps a return to the old pre-war normal that much of the world had a break from in the second half of the 20th Century. As Peter Frankopan writes in The Spectator, ‘we’re entering a new age of tension and change’ and the ‘headwinds are looking increasingly ominous’.
Particularly at sea. Whether it's the suspected sabotage of deep water cables or tensions over the choke points through which the bulk of world trade moves, watery war games are currently being played out. If this were just a local matter, the West might be less concerned. But between them, China (which now has a larger naval fleet than the US), South Korea and Japan, are building nine out of ten of the ships on which all of the world’s trade travels. In addition to China’s ‘military exercises close to Taiwan and Vietnam and confrontations with the Philippine coast guard’; the Middle Kingdom is increasingly making its presence felt off the coast of Australia.
According to Tom Sharpe in The Telegraph, we’re not safe from China on this side of the world either. He gives a rather sobering account of it building the largest aircraft carrier in the world - a ‘supercarrier’: effectively a floating air-force. If you think Putin is a threat to his European neighbours, you just wait. A hysterical Sharpe imagines how this nautical beast ‘accompanied by massive invasion motherships could be sitting off our coast’ in just a few years time. He is not entirely wrong. Why worry over the dangers posed by Russia, when the only power to even consider rivalling the US commands much less media attention outside Asia. Yet, as Woudhuysen says,
While Russia’s war with Ukraine and the ongoing conflagration in the Middle East are dominating the headlines, the US’s principal foreign-policy focus will continue to be China.
Indeed, it has been argued that Zelensky’s claim that China has sent troops to fight alongside Russian forces shouldn’t be taken at face value. And that it is far more likely that the soldiers he is referring to are mercenaries, on which Russia is known to rely (rather than put its own men through the infamous ‘meat-grinder’). It is, so the argument goes, a claim motivated by Ukraine’s need to connect its war with the Chinese threat that is so uppermost in the American mind. Particularly since that press conference, where Trump and Vance so publicly signalled their impatience for that costly, far away war to be resolved.
And one can, while disagreeing with its stance on Ukraine, understand why the new US governing elite regards China as its greatest threat. Not only is it displaying its power across the globe, with its growing (in size and number) ships, its multiplying ports, and its maritime manoeuvres. It has also recently significantly increased its defence spending, and Chinese representatives in the US have even raised the prospect of war:
If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight until the end.
This was in response to the 20% tariffs Trump imposed, apparently to persuade China to do something about its contribution to America’s fentanyl crisis. China raised tariffs on US exports to 84% in response. A move described by Treasury Secretary Bessent as an ‘own goal’ that ‘will affect their economy much more than it will ours’. Following which, in announcing a pause of 90 days on its various tariffs on exports from around the world; the US then lowered tariffs to 10% for nearly every country except China.
On which it imposed another, much higher, tariff of 125% (or 145% if you factor in the 20% anti-fentanyl tariff). But again, the reaction of the rather hysterical ‘free market’ right betrays their intellectual prejudices more than it explains Trump’s protectionist policies or their impact on the world economy. For Trump, tariffs are a means to an end: ‘I think that we’ll end up working on something that’s very good for both countries’, he said. And he may well be right. Time will tell. The fact that there was £429 billion worth of trade between the US and China last year suggests they need each other rather more than they want to fight each other, economically or militarily.
Nevertheless, as David Goldman explains for UnHerd, ‘the old bilateral China-US trade relationship is untenable’. Rightly or wrongly, the ‘neoliberal consensus’ stands accused of destroying US manufacturing jobs. It has proven ‘deeply unpopular with the working-class and lower-middle-class Americans who form the Trumpian GOP’s base’. While China is growing as a military power, the things it says don’t match up with the reality on the ground. The experts seem to agree that there is nothing new in the bellicose rhetoric coming out of the CCP; the US is still the world’s most powerful nation and its military spending ($850b) dwarfs that of China ($450b).
Still, the launch of DeepSeek - an alarmingly competitive language model - was enough to cause panic on the US and tech stock markets. That the response was as overheated as the AI sector itself, is a reminder of the challenge presented by what Woudhuysen describes as ‘China’s model of authoritarian dynamism’ to a divided and dilapidated West. In more confident times, we might have understood what has been dubbed AI’s Sputnik moment as following the trajectory of the original Sputnik. Like the space race that led to the moon landing, surely these ‘giant leaps’ will ultimately benefit all of humanity?
Which is why I am less persuaded by The Spectator warning darkly about this latest AI advance as the latest ‘means to weaken the West.’ Of course, we shouldn’t be naive about the ends to which these advances might be put. But the idea that it is China that ‘creates dislocation’ in the West, as the magazine’s leader piece insists, is just projection. The West was already weak and dislocated. China might exploit that fact. Indeed, it would be strange if it didn’t. But it isn’t responsible for the circumstances we find ourselves in.
The West is in trouble. But that’s not the fault of DeepSeek. Nor is it the fault of tariffs, military manoeuvres at sea, the ‘dumping’ of Chinese goods on Western markets or - for that matter - the intentions of Jinye and the future of British Steel. We need to stop blaming China for our problems and, at last, realise that we did this to ourselves.
Image: Milena Milenkovic
