The West can no longer afford to ignore China's superpower status

Telegraph

26-04-2025

A month or so ago, I was invited to the glamorous Tanner Lecture at Cambridge as a guest of one of the speakers. The topic was what the future holds for the West as Chinese power grows across the board. In my circles, the dominant feelings towards China are suspicion and hostility, rooted in clear evidence of that state's enmity, inhumanity and threat, and the extremely real possibility of a world war in which they utterly devour us.
I therefore felt like a fish out of water as I was reminded just how intensely Cambridge is a hotbed of China love. It has an important contingent of Chinese students (2,000, the largest single foreign country represented), as all UK universities do; research partnerships and a host of schemes that encourage students from China to apply.
I sat next to a very pleasant gentleman at dinner who devotes himself to marketing his Cambridge college to Chinese school pupils.
Of course, Cambridge's close links to and warmth towards China are inseparable from Chinese students' contribution to the powerhouse that is Cambridge science and technology. They do very well in Stem subjects, and a proportionately high number go on to found or work in the start-ups in AI, robotics and genetics that have given the Cambridge region the name 'Silicon Fen'.
These same people act as a bridge between Cambridge and the Chinese heartlands of innovation. Backs on both sides are well scratched.
If my evening at Cambridge was a culture shock, the past few weeks have continued that shock, cacophonous with news about Chinese advances, power and military attempts at king-making.
It is now impossible to look the other way from China's cut-throat, fast-paced and deadly serious incursions into the commercial and geopolitical landscape. The latest foul play from the Ukraine war is that, according to Ukrainian intelligence, China is supplying weapons to Russia, which won't come as a surprise to anyone.
Meanwhile, last week I read about how Jingdong, the massive Chinese rival to Amazon the likes of which you or me may never have heard of but which is nonetheless a giant growing by the day, has its sights set on Britain. With eye-watering revenues of £120 billion per year, it's been poaching staff from Ocado, Lidl, Amazon, even Holland and Barrett.
Chinese electric car companies, such as BYD, are already outmanoeuvring all other makers abroad, and are widely seen on American, if not yet British, roads. As for DeepSeek, China's answer to ChatGPT, it's not going anywhere either. As the political podcaster and former Cambridge politics professor David Runciman wrote recently, 'Wow! … It's mind-blowing.' Despite all of the money invested into market leaders like OpenAI, DeepSeek is able to do all sorts of things Western chatbots can not.
Even, or rather especially, to a China disliker like me, it has become abundantly clear that we have two options: get real about China, or suffer. I listened on a podcast to veteran New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, one of the paper's few sensible people on issues like terrorism and Israel, insist that simply seeing China as an enemy is a 'huge mistake'.
Friedman, who had just been to the country and expressed his amazement at its technological advancement, has long been pro-China, but nevertheless what he said was clearly not untrue.
China should be seen for what it is and dealt with accordingly. We must learn to contort ourselves so that we maintain wariness and frankness about its myriad abuses of the values we hold dear, and its enemy status … but also act as realists. It's no good turning back the clock to a time when we could pretend China wasn't everywhere and everything.
Even as recently as a few years ago, during Covid, the place seemed finally to have stitched itself up with its own authoritarianism and to risk becoming a backwater.
But now, everyone who visits seems to say the same thing. China is leaving the West in the dust. Who can be surprised? Our cultural decadence, after all, has led us to continually die on the hill of stupid issues instead of throwing ourselves into hard work and innovation to win the future. Indulgent, nonsensical governance means our states are poor, which leads to less funding and investment in the areas that have seen China rapidly overtake the West, such as robotics and the manufacturing of chips.
It looks like Trump is rowing back on his insane 145 per cent tariffs on China, apparently realising – as the markets yowled in pain – that the policy was a laughable underestimate of America's economic role in relation to China, and thus an immediate means of impoverishing ordinary Americans and driving commerce to a halt.
For me, taking China seriously does not mean pretending it hasn't put millions of Muslim Uyghurs in camps and treated them sadistically, violently suppressed freedom in Hong Kong, operated numerous enemy spy networks up and down British institutions or embraced all aspects of a totalitarian state. On the contrary. It means knowing your enemy.
Years of ruthless, amoral intellectual property theft combined with a brutal approach to discipline, education and achievement, especially in the sciences, have got China where it is. We cannot just pretend, simply because it's easier and simpler to do so, that it will somehow keep to its own sphere.
The only way to maintain a decent boundary between the inhumane East and the liberal democratic West – and to put our own decline into reverse – is to look, lean, engage and compete.