MATTHEW SYED – THE UK’S LEADING OPINION-MAKER
THE SUNDAY TIMES
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Matthew Syed writes the opinion-forming lead Column in the UK’s Sunday Times. He appears regularly on television and has become the “Go-To” journalist for the final word on topical political issues. In line with other writers who, taken together, express the orthodox political attitudes of the “thinking class”, Syed is firmly in the anti-China camp as evidenced by his article In The Sunday Times dated 19 January 2025 entitled
“The TikTok saga neatly embodies 40 years of being duped by China”
Syed does not like China. He says – “Call me cynical but I think we were played like a violin. And the whole thing that worries me most? That policymakers are about to make the same mistake”. In a phrase he asserts that the West has been corrupted by China and he points the finger at a number of leading Western politicians and business people including Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Carla Hills, Brent Scowcroft, David Cameron and Peter Mandelsohn. He singles out for particular censure Henry Kissinger whom he lists as one of “the leading foreign policy figures [who] made fortunes in the wake of their political careers in part through links with China”. Money made Kissinger pro-China.
Syed does pause to describe ”the greatest achievement of Trump’s first term was to take a scalpel to much of this corruption; kicking Huawei out of US infrastructure, putting an embargo on advanced semiconductors and initiating the US shutdown of TikTok which has reams of data on 170 million American users, manipulates its news feed to favour the CCP and is providing a vital asset as the world moves towards hot war”.
Syed concludes, somewhat ironically, with an invitation to Trump – the most corrupt democratic politician of the modern era – “to maintain our vigilance in this the greatest struggle of our age (which) is to recognise the truth that so many key figures have avoided for almost 40 years , much to their financial benefit. Corruption, in foreign policy, as in so many other areas, is not a symptom of our problems. Corruption is the problem”.
So is the rise of China explained away by the ability of Chinese political and economic leaders to line the pockets of leading Western diplomats and politicians? Does anyone really believe it?
There is another explanation for the rise of China that Syed cannot bring himself to accept – that China has the answers to the challenges of the modern era; that China has combined political clarity with individual effort and collective motivation. But don’t lets get too carried away with China’s progress. It is not a nation free of crime, drugs, prostitution or corruption. It still wrestles with unemployment, errors in decision making at central and local level, planning mistakes and ongoing public criticism and dissent. China is far from being free of problems, challenges and difficulties. But a society cannot lift one billion people out of poverty by instruction and command. Progress of such enormous dimension cannot be achieved without the support, creativity and participation of its people.
And then there is that question of the 137 million Chinese tourists who, in the 12 months before Covid, left China to visit foreign parts without even one of their number being mentioned in the anti-China Western media as having taking the opportunity to apply for asylum in any one of the 80+ countries that they visited.
The Chinese experiment has to be discredited, dismissed and disregarded lest it finds appeal with people in other countries looking for solutions to their own miserable condition of existence. Focus by its opponents therefore concentrates on China’s negatives and China does have negative issues – not the Uighurs in Xinjiang, as this Column has made clear in China Post #546 – but there were the deaths in the Tiananmin Incident of 4 June 1989 and in the ten year Cultural Revolution ending in 1976 with the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four.
China is for the Chinese. It is their story that relates specifically to their own history. The Chinese people worked out their own solutions to their own poverty, misery and disillusionment. Other countries – especially in the Global South – may see parallels with their own history and that is for them and not for us. The Chinese experience has led to an enormous turnaround in the well-being of their people. Led by a Communist Government, they have succeeded in creating a level of prosperity that was un-imaginable back in 1949 – the year the new state was created.
Syed is frightened. He knows that China is growing in popularity and that Global South countries – the mainstay of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – are studying the Chinese model of development. China’s Belt and Road Initiative – so dismissed by Syed – now has produced economic links with approximately 150 countries funding infrastructure development in the recipient countries. The idea that China is where it is today because it “has played Western leaders like a violin” and filled their pockets with goodies underlines the constant failings of the Western world to understand China. Some will be very surprised that Syed has allowed himself to fall for such tosh.
GRAHAM PERRY
