GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
20 JULY 2026. CHINA POST #631
CHINA AND THE FOREIGN MEDIA
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CHINA POST #630 CONCLUDED AS FOLLOWS;-
“LAW AND ORDER – FREEDOM AND CENSORSHIP – DEMOCRACY OR DICTATORSHIP?
CHINA’S EMERGENCE AS ONE OF THE TWO MOST POWERFUL NATIONS IN THE WORLD PROMPTS CONSIDERATION – AGAIN – OF THE CHALLENGE OF WESTERN DEMOCRACY v AUTHORITARIAN DEMOCRACY.
GRAHAM PERRY”
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- THE CHALLENGE OF CHINA
China is a challenge to the Western World. The narrative commences – not in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was inaugurated – nor in 1917 when the Russian Revolution removed the Romanov dynasty. The challenge of China is founded in the publication in 1848 of The Communist Manifesto. This is the issue at the heart of tensions between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China and not just the economic rise of China – important though that remains.
Warning bells rang in Western capitals in 1848 when the Manifesto was published. It announced the arrival of a theory of economic and political development that struck at the heart of the international capitalist system of government. It was a challenge to the Grand Coalition of Big Nations who dominated the politics of the second half of the 19th Century.
The USSR was the first experiment and it failed when – economically squeezed by the “Guns and Butter” challenge of the U.S, – the Soviet Leaders, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, announced the bankruptcy of the USSR and its replacement by the West-inclined Russian Federation. The Communist Party had surrendered to the Oligarchs and a Russian mafia took power.
The U.S. and the other Western Capitalist Governments breathed a sigh of relief. But China was lurking in the shadows with a Communist Party at its helm.
China was rebuilding, and refocusing after the chaos and self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution. Extreme Marxism was jettisoned from the modern playbook of growth and development and the West again celebrated – this time prematurely – in the mistaken belief that the class struggle dynamic of Marx and Lenin had been cast aside in China.
- THE IMPORTANCE OF DENG HSIAOPING
The U.S. has never understood the Deng Hsiaoping-inspired China; the combined talents of the White House, the Harvard/Yale Universities, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon and the West Point Military Academy had no playbook; no comprehensive historical review which could bring together China’s unique blend of Billionaires on the one hand and a state economy working alongside a socialist market economy, with an unyielding centralised Marxist Communist Party at the helm on the other hand. China was building a Socialist country inspired by the principles of Karl Marx but the U.S. could not grasp the experiment that was underway.
The U.S. saw the changes brought into play by Deng in Shenzhen and concluded that China’s forward path embraced Capitalism not Socialism. And with China’s growing number of Billionaires the country – surmised Washington – was committed to the principles of Adam Smith not Karl Marx. U.S. academics and political theorists confidently predicted that the pursuit of prosperity by the Politburo in Beijing would soon witness the emergence of a flourishing middle class which would lead to the emergence of a Western oriented pluralist society and the introduction of democratic voting rights. The Communist Party would wither away.
The U.S got it wrong. And not just the U.S. but the world at large as well. They failed to understand the acute memory that the Chinese leadership retained of the domestic turbulence created by the Cultural Revolution. 1966-1976 were bad years for China – very bad. Even today, despite a flood of disclosures about the violence of the period, political leaders and academic writers in Washington, London, Paris have failed to grasp the extent to which China was in a Civil War between 1966 and 1976. There was a fight between the Egalitarian Ultra-Left of the Gang of Four and the Deng Hasiaoping inspired Centrists who recognised that China’s future depended on giving vent to China’s creative determination to build a better life for its people.
- THE BIG OLIVE
We can argue whether it was Socialism or not. There are different views as China’s economic surge created The shape of a Big Olive conjures up a realistic image of China today with wealth at the top, the relative poor at the bottom and a big waist line embracing the increasingly prosperous masses in the middle. The Marxist debate about the productive forces and the relations of production will continue unabated as China tries to reach agreement about the definition of its society today. That debate will not die because the challenge of the New China will not die. There is no blueprint. No country has trodden the path that China is currently on. The Big Experiment continues.
- THE EXAMPLE OF CHINA’S RAILWAYS
In todays Sunday Times (19 July 2026) Christian Wolmer writes on Page 14 of the World News Section;-
“Nothing can prepare you for the shock of China. I knew the numbers before I arrived, but as I toured the country’s high-speed railways and visited towns and cities with motorway systems that make Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction look like a village crossroads, the sheer scale never ceases to amaze me.
China has 29,800 miles of high-speed trains – about 70% of the global total – with plans for many more. There are up to 10,000 daily services in operation using 4,380 eight coach trains – almost two-thirds of the world’s 155mph-plus rolling stock – and welcoming about ten million people on average every day.
The country’s development of high-speed rail has been rapid even by Chinese standards. The first opened in 2008 which means that more than four miles of track a day have been completed since then.
To put that in perspective – in less than two decades, China has built a system three times the size of Britain’s entire network, which was constructed painstakingly over the course of 70 years in the 19th Century.
It is tempting, if cruel, to remind British readers that work on the 140 mile HS2 line between London and Birmingham started in 2019 and may be completed by 2036 or 2039…
China’s rail network is an integral part of its strategy to develop a technological powerhouse. This being the PRC, the economics are opaque. The rail operating companies, the rolling stock manufacturers and the builders of the lines are all state-owned enterprises. The latest accounts show a small profit but the amount of subsidy hidden through transfer pricing is difficult to establish. Precise sums are hard to come by but the official cost of building the railways is estimated to be between 100 million and 200 million Chinese yuan per kilometre (£11-£22 million) – meaning the overall cost is about 10,000 billion yuan or £1,000 billion.
Still, it is clear that today China leads the world – by some distance – in building high-speed lines cheaply and running them economically. And with 25 countries already using high-speed rail, and others seeking to join them, the companies behind the Chinese system are in a position to dominate other markets as well as their own…
The factories that build the trains are on a scale to match the high-speed network. The first thing that strikes visitors to the huge complex at Changchun in North-Eastern China is the silence. There are no oil stains or oily rags on the pristine concrete floor and in the factory, where the wheelsets are produced, every worker is permanently tagged so that managers know precisely where they are and what they are doing…”
China plans to have 70,000kn (43,000 miles) of high speed rail by 2035 which might be optimistic given that it represents an increase on an already breathtaking pace. But there is little doubt, barring either an economic or technical catastrophe that this will eventually be achieved.”
- THE AUTHORITARIAN CHALLENGE
It is easy to argue that this has only been possible because China is an authoritarian regime. The power of the State, able to marshal resources, grab whatever land it needs and direct funds towards a policy it has prioritised has no parallel in Western Democracies except in wartime.
However, that does not mean that there are no lessons to be learnt. The ability of the Chinese to plan such a project, to manage it across the board, to develop the supply chains, to harness the skills of the workforce and to provide the finance does offer an example to follow.”
The above extract is from a new book – Fast Track – the Extraordinary Story of High-Speed Rail by Christian Wolmer (Penguin Michael Joseph) is out on July 23.
There are those in UK politics who are firmly opposed to all things to do with the PRC. They will always be with us. For this group China is a dictatorship, with no freedom, harsh repression, racist arrogance and imperialist ambitions. Reasoning with this group is not easy especially when they dismiss the prediction of Travelex, the international tourist company, that 200 million Chinese are predicted to leave China for up to two weeks on holiday breaks around the world in 2030. But this cannot be true say the anti-China hardliners – “China is one big prison cell – they will travel with gun-carrying Guards to ensure their return to China” And so on.
There is another group – growing in number and they are puzzled. They are hearing about the High-Speed Rail and the predicted 200 million overseas tourists and they are beginning to ask questions. What is underway in China? How is China in sight of achieving its goal of moving the whole nation from its title of a “moderately prosperous society” to a “prosperous society”? How come China was the only country in the world to force Trump to remove punitive trade tariffs?
The questions will continue – How? Why? When? And Where is it leading? It goes back to Mao and the Revolution from 1927 to 1949. It includes the enormous success in forcing the Japanese out of China in 1945 after their invasion in 1937. It embraces the three Big Setbacks – the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmin Deaths. It leads to an analysis of the dramatic return to power of Deng Hsiaoping and the stable and ever-developing regime of Xi Jinping.
China also challenges the meaning of democracy. Is it an academic intellectual exercise to reconcile the Greek Philosophers and the Enlightenment and the French Revolution or is it a feet-on-the-ground campaign to build a prosperous society for all its citizens – albeit some will benefit more than others. China is a challenge and as it increasingly appears before us in informative TV series (Ben Fogel) and factual books (Christian Wolmer) the searchlight will be on the internal dynamics of an authoritarian system of government that has given the Chinese people a future they dared not to even think about as recently as 1976.
GRAHAM PERRY
CHINA POST #632 WILL RETURN TO THE THEME OF CHINA TODAY AND COMMENT UPON ISSUES ARISING OUT OF WESTERN MEDIA COVERAGE OF CHINA.
CHINA IS NOT GOING AWAY. IT IS INCREASING IN IMPORTANCE AND BOTH ITS SETBACKS AND ITS SUCCESSES ATTRACT ATTENTION. CHINA IS “WARTS AND ALL”. MANY INITIATIVES ARE PROVING SUCCESSFUL AND SOME ARE UNSUCCESSFUL – SOMETIMES BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT WAS WRONG AND SOMETIMES BECAUSE THE IMPLEMENTATION NEEDED TWEAKING AND ADJUSTING.
ONE THING FOR SURE; DE-COUPLING FROM CHINA IS NOT ON THE AGENDA BECAUSE CHINA’S MACRO GEO-POLTICIAL REACH IS HERE FOR THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS – AT LEAST.
REGARDS
GRAHAM P
20 JULY 2026
