How China stole the West (and we happily gave it away)

Earlier this month, I was one of dozens of journalists invited to Germany for the launch of a robotic lawn mower by a Chinese company. It’s a nice lawnmower with some fine features, much better value than its rivals. But in many ways not worth going into, the launch was a bit of a shambles. 

The company employees over from Beijing were clearly having a fine old time but the venue was a depressing conference centre in the middle of nowhere.

The Chinese team clearly hadn’t given much thought to organisational details, which led to a lot of rather irritated European reporters being left out in the rain for hours with nothing to do.

At one point, however, I got to speak with the very young CEO and discovered something interesting. I asked if the mower would be sold in China because, in 20 years of regularly visiting his country, I had never met anyone who had a lawn. 

“Oh no,” said the young man, a robotics genius, “We all live in apartments. A private home with its own lawn is not something common in China.”

This comment and the rather botched launch event tell us a lot about China’s soaring success in dominating every product category you can name. 

A price-busting robot lawn mower is an outlier, perhaps, but if you take a bigger commodity, China’s energy to excel becomes quite frightening.

One example: the country now has over 300 electric car makers, with at least 50 planning to export to Europe. Every car of which, as has been recently claimed, will be open to hacking, even stopping dead in the middle of the road, by China’s spooks.

Two other elements of the lawnmower event stood out for me, as someone who has been writing about China for years and in the recent past has spoken at elite Chinese universities, tutored companies and helped set up a British business in China.

One was that the lawnmower maker, Segway, was an American startup that had not gone well and had been sold as a basket case to a Beijing robotics business. We see the same kind of thing happening regularly.

The other was that the shambolic nature of the German event was no surprise to anyone who knows China a bit. Jobs half-done or not done at all are the bane of a Westerner’s work life there.

There’s even a phrase in Mandarin that translates as: “I have done something similar to what you asked.” It can often feel, to foreign entrepreneurs and Western-born Chinese who have set up a business there, like managing a company full of teenagers.

And yet, the extent to which China’s drive to effectively “own” the West can’t be exaggerated.

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Even though the Chinese Communist Party regards dominating the world as a work in progress, in reality, it’s largely a done deal. The chances are, the majority of products you use every day either come from China or are made by a Chinese-owned company, the electricity powering it is sold to you by Chinese interests and the technology enabling you to read these words is Chinese. 

Hundreds of major British businesses, from utility companies and other national infrastructure to tech firms often in sensitive areas such as facial recognition and AI, to airports, property, football clubs, pub chains, private schools, are owned not only by rich Chinese individuals but by the Chinese state – the very one which, we now learn is working tirelessly by cyber espionage to undermine our democratic institutions.

The situation is reportedly the same in the US and other Western countries. 

Given that the country was unbelievably poor just 50 years ago, and 60 years ago was losing tens of millions of people to famine, and given that the same political masters – a bunch of ideological nerds, really – are still running the place, the rise of China is one of the most extraordinary developments of the past 100 years.

As one academic China expert, Professor Juscelino Colares, said on Monday: “The Chinese people are the biggest victims of the Chinese Communist Party.”

And yet they have still pulled off this incredible ongoing coup. What fascinates me, though, is not just how they have bought the world, but what their motivation is.

For me, it could be one of three things.

The first is that China is, for the Chinese state, “The Middle Kingdom”, the country name’s literal translation – the centre of the world.

From the same borders as today and with the same people – there’s been no significant influx of talented immigrants – they led the world for the 1,800 years since modern China’s emergence in AD221 – and were the world’s largest economy for all 1,800 of those.

For Chinese people, the dip in the country’s fortunes from the early 19th century until the 1990s was a mere blip. Even so, in 1820, when China was already declining, it was still responsible for 30 per cent of the world’s GDP.

The USA then accounted for 1.8 per cent. China’s historic power, additionally, was based not on aggression but on its intellectual, cultural and trading prowess. China has, some say, been more a civilisation than a state.

The second possible mainspring of China’s success is simple commercial opportunism. The Britain they see, even though we’re still (amazingly) the ninth-largest industrial producer, is increasingly drunk, drugged, work-shy, indecisive, falling apart and distracted by silly trivia – culture wars over gender, Brexit, royals, pronouns, woke-ism and the rest of our arguably self-inflicted wounds.

The China of Xi Jinping – who has successfully transformed himself into Mao.2 – may often be sloppy and undisciplined when it comes to the efficiency of its workforce.

But people are still smart and well educated, work hard and are patriotic, decisive and extremely good at business. 

Chinese people are so business-minded that it’s almost impossible to believe they live in a state that is still officially communist.

So when they see an ailing but interesting American business like Segway, they are nimble enough to snap it up and start making, if there’s a market for it, lawnmowers, whatever the hell a lawnmower even is.

Speaking of Xi Jinping, it’s important to remember that nice, clever if slightly shambolic young people having fun on a company jolly to flog us smart lawnmowers are one side of the Chinese economic miracle.

But they are really the footsoldiers of the hard-nosed party idealogues who decided years ago in a campaign with the flowery and baffling name “The Belt and Road Initiative” to do exactly what they are doing – take over the world. In the interests of this belief, cyberhacking and undermining of the West is not something wrong but an essential part of the game.

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It’s quite likely that as a result of constant and pervasive hacking over more than a decade, the party functionaries working from the secretive Chinese Academy of Governance Central Party School in Beijing currently have the name and address of every Western intelligence agent and every Chinese dissident in the West.

According to Edward Lucas, author of Spycraft Rebooted: How Technology Is Changing Espionage, China probably also owns data on their facial characteristics, voices, fingerprints and gait – the specific way they walk.

Our chronic lethargy in reacting to this decisively is just another element of our fatal weakness. Quoting Sun Tzu’s famous The Art Of War can be overdone but one point among many the general and philosopher wrote over 2,000 years ago still applies: “The opportunity to defeat the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”

I asked Prof Colares at Case Western University for his explanation as to why China is, in some sense, “waging war” with us.

For him, above all it’s because they are determined to establish themselves as a first-rank economy before they suffer too much from the demographic problems – basically, a shortage of women – that arose from the disastrous one-child policy of Mao’s China.

“China wants to escape the middle-income trap, a situation in which countries like Brazil, Turkey and Mexico developed somewhat but don’t manage to leave that stage because they’re always catching up. And one way to do that is through state-managed trade expansion.”

Another element, he said, is a sense of racial superiority, in which minorities’ rights are crushed, alongside a state that allows zero dissent. Another yet is the still-communist mindset.

“There is an idea of extending power out of China so they can extend revolution. This continues to guide the party’s thinking.”

Lastly, Colares said, comes the remnants of China’s history of colonial exploitation. “There’s enormous resentment among the Chinese against the West. This resentment animates to a great extent the drive to dominate the West, and to show them that this is our time.”

One of my favourite observations from 27 trips to China is, believe it or not, the manhole covers on The Bund in Shanghai. I doubt that many tourists even notice them. But embossed into the cast iron are the western letters SMCPWD.

It stands for Shanghai Metropolitan Council Public Works Department, and is, of course, a relic of the days when the British were a colonial power in the city.

Mustn’t it be a matter of pride, I wonder, if you are a Chinese investor – and there are plenty of them – whose grandparents trod on those colonial-era drain covers and who now owns a chunky slice of a privatised British water company?