Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
The message that popped up on my phone was a little shocking. It was late January 2020, and COVID-19 was hitting China hard. The note from my Chinese friend initially appeared to be analyzing the impact of the worsening crisis on the country’s GDP numbers. But there was more. He was trying to understand the rationale behind some of the Chinese government’s decisions and was troubled by what he saw. This was a system he knew from the inside out. Serving members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Chinese Communist Party’s top decision-making body, had once been his dining companions. He understood the way they thought. And his conclusion was a dark one. It seemed to him that the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.
Although I was skeptical, some of the moves Beijing was making were at least consistent with this analysis. Even as it locked down domestically, the government was demanding that countries around the world remain open to Chinese visitors and denouncing anyone that tried to stop them. China’s foreign minister turned up at a security conference in Munich to announce that “China has effectively curbed the spread of the outbreak beyond our borders” while hundreds of thousands of Chinese travelers fanned out across the world. Yet as an attribution of malign intent, this seemed a step too far. It felt like conspiracy-theorizing, though I knew my friend wasn’t prone to that. I reflected on the note occasionally in the months that followed, as the world was convulsed by the pandemic, wondering whether I had been sober-minded and judicious or simply failed to make the mental leap that understanding Beijing’s behavior increasingly required.
Then later that year I opened Bob Woodward’s new book and saw that the US deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger, the architect of much of the Trump administration’s China policy, had taken the warnings more seriously. “Several Chinese elites well connected to the Communist Party” signaled that they thought the government had a “sinister” goal, the opening pages explained. “China’s not going to be the only one to suffer from this.” I was sure that the same analysis had found its way to Pottinger, one of the few serving US officials to emerge from the Trump years with his reputation enhanced, not least for his critical interrogation of Beijing’s COVID-19 concealment efforts. It was among the reasons the United States shut down inbound traffic from China in February, virtually the sole element of Trump’s handling of the crisis that he could legitimately tout as a success. I shot my friend a note: “You’re in the first chapter of the Woodward book!” He replied with what I took to be the emoji equivalent of wry, dark laughter.
***
When we had first met in Beijing in the early 2000s, it was Zhongnanhai, the Party’s leadership compound, that brought us together. The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, was due to visit London, and we had embarked on plans to launch a new program of think-tank activities during his visit. China’s relations with Europe were heading into a new era, and we hoped to help sketch out some ideas for their future course. I was in China to negotiate the modalities of the event with my Chinese counterparts, including the sensitive matter of gaining Wen’s personal imprimatur. But the man who was handling the most delicate contacts with Wen’s staff, who had got the whole initiative started, was not one of the academics who were my ostensible opposite numbers. It was an intriguing figure from the Chinese business community.
Desmond Shum and his wife, Whitney Duan – to take the anglicized names that they frequently used – were a rarity in the Chinese corporate world. Most of their peers were monomaniacally focused on racking up as much money and influence as possible, with philanthropy only another instrument to facilitate these goals. They, by contrast, were seemingly also on a mission to improve the caliber of Chinese policymaking and intellectual life. This certainly did not preclude the money and influence. Most controversially, their proximity to the Wen family would blow up in a New York Times story that detailed Duan’s role as the white glove handling billions of dollars that flowed from their stake in China’s largest insurance firm, Ping An. But they had other priorities too. They were funding chunks of the economic policy work at China’s elite universities and think-tanks, such as Tsinghua and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. With China’s journalism scene flourishing, Desmond explored plans to put together a Chinese equivalent of the New Yorker. He was not satisfied with a hands-off benefactor role either. He was personally engaged in circumventing the layers of what he saw as ossified Chinese bureaucracy to channel ideas and advice directly to the leadership. This was where our work on the Sino-European relationship kicked in.
The early 2000s were a period of near-unabashed mutual enthusiasm among Chinese and European policymakers, and the Beijing of that time seemed physically to incarnate the sense of opportunity. Shanghai had already gone through the most dramatic phase of its transformation in the 1990s, driven by the natives of the city that were then running China. Now it was Beijing’s turn. In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, the skyline of this far lower-slung city was increasingly punctuated by architectural mega-projects, and the old atmosphere of wood-burning stoves and gritty street life was making way for shopping malls, luxury car dealerships and five-star hotels. For visiting European politicians, it was beguiling. The Chinese government had always done a masterful job at making its political visitors feel like they were far-sighted historic figures deliberating on the fate of the world. Now they could do it in high style too.
The sense of reform and opening was tangible. China had recently acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO), having accepted and seemingly delivered on the most stringent requirements any new member had ever faced, slashing tariff levels and opening up major industries to foreign competition. If European companies could gain even greater access to the Chinese market during the next phase of economic restructuring that everyone expected to follow, the future of entire sectors of the European economy would look different. Visiting CEOs were confident. The Chinese economy was still comparable to the likes of the UK and France in scale, and its companies complemented European industrial and technological strengths. Those malls and dealerships were selling European cars and luxury goods and were built with the invisible support of innumerable specialist engineering firms from across the continent.
Another group of foreigners was excited too. Few of the budding China hands I knew in Beijing at the time had come to the country because they wanted to prepare themselves for a role in a future great power contest. Instead, most were enthusiasts for the literature, the language, the food, the history, a different civilization, a different way of living and thinking and understanding humanity. As China was stepping out on to the global stage, it seemed that the rest of the world would also come to benefit from a richer immersion in all the things that had first entranced them.
The transformations spanned every dimension. Virtually every visitor in the early 2000s with even the slightest artistic curiosity would make a trip to the vast 798 Dashanzi factory complex that had been turned into a set of workshops and exhibition spaces for avant-garde sculpture and painting, while the likes of Ai Weiwei were already becoming familiar international figures. The so-called sixth generation of Chinese film directors, such as Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye, were making biting neo-realist-style masterpieces about contemporary urban existence.
From foreign policy to philosophy, the Chinese intellectual scene seemed to have an anticipatory fizz around it, as thinkers who had once toiled in international obscurity started to realize just how much their ideas now mattered to the world. Despite the political system, it was a China where spaces for self-reflection and critique seemed to be growing again. The mix was a heady one. The old China that people like me had first fallen in love with. A sense of burgeoning possibility for the country and for the rest of the world. The economic boom that never seemed to end. And the intellectual challenge of making sense of what it all meant.
