HowTheLightGetsIn is the world’s largest ideas and music festival, taking place from 24-27 May in Hay-on-Wye. As a long-standing festival partner, we’ve curated a series of interviews and articles with some of the fascinating expert speakers. This year's festival theme, "Dangers, Desires and Destiny", explores what we desire to change, and where our destiny might lie, as we continue to live in an increasingly dangerous world. To read more, check out our interviews with foreign correspondent Christina Lamb and political philosopher John Ralston Saul.
We’re also offering an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to all of our readers, with the code NEWHUM24. Don't miss out on discounted tickets here.
Isabel Hilton is a journalist and China specialist. She is the founder of China Dialogue, a visiting professor at the Lau Institute at King's College London and a contributing editor at Prospect magazine.
What do you make of the idea that we’re moving into a new era of great power competition?
Well, the United States defines China as its biggest challenge, and China defines itself against the United States. So if you look at what each side says about the other, you're pretty much in a great power competition between the world's biggest economy and the world's second biggest economy – both with very large military establishments.
But like most confrontations, it is nuanced by the fact that there's also a great deal of collaborative activity in the way of trade, for example, which has built up over the last two decades, and which you can't just switch off.
Are we looking at a declining power and a rising power?
The United States is in relative decline, of course, because Asia has gone from 5 per cent of the world economy to 40 per cent of the world economy … but that doesn't necessarily mean that western liberal democracies are in terminal decline, as some would argue, and certainly some in China argue. So yes, it's relative, there is a rebalancing going on. That doesn't mean it's the end game at all.
What role does soft power play for China?
China hasn't been a big popular culture power the way for example, South Korea has. The complications of censorship, of the one-party state, really work against it. But where their influence is quite palpable, it's in a much more state-directed project. It's about what China would call “telling China's story well”, and what others would call discourse power.
So how is that expressed? You find it all over social media, you will find it on TikTok, actually. So if you look at TikTok content, you will look in vain for the kinds of criticisms of China's actions in Xinjiang [the persecution of the Uyghur population] or in Hong Kong … China's argument is that China is an entirely peaceful power, that it's never invaded anyone.
How effective is this discourse power?
All these tropes that you hear in Chinese propaganda, you hear them repeated by western businessmen, often you hear them repeated by politicians. And you certainly see them coming up on Facebook, Twitter, all that kind of thing. China has invested enormously in global broadcasting, for example, in CGTN [the English-language state-run television network], in China Radio International, in China Daily. For a while, China Daily was attached to western newspapers. The Telegraph, for example, used to carry a China Daily supplement, as did the Washington Post. So China has invested – since the Beijing Olympics, really – it's invested enormously in getting its story out.
Now, it may have had limited success in Europe or in the United States. But it's had a lot of influence in the global south, in countries that look at western liberal democracies, that look at post-colonial powers and say, “you know, they've been telling us what to do for years. But they're not looking so great. Maybe China has a point.”
The Belt and Road Initiative passes through more than 150 countries. Has that come with increased popularity for China in those regions?
The Belt and Road was 10 years old last year. It was launched in 2013, with great fanfare, and a lot of money. So Chinese enterprises fanned out and built dams, roads, railways, all sorts of things, which were financed by Chinese banks but which weren't exactly paid for by China. China would deliver them and it would finance them, and the host country would then repay those loans.
But a number of things happened. One, not all the investments were wise, there was very little due diligence …. the global recession happened, and then Covid happened. So the repayments got very difficult, then interest rates went up. We have a lot of countries that have infrastructure, which may or may not be particularly useful … and they have debt. And managing that debt is a new thing for China.
What do people think of the initiative now?
That big, dramatic, “here we come, we're going to connect up the world, we're building ports, we're building means of communication, and all of them go back to China”, that phase is pretty much over … There's a thing you often hear which is that someone in an African country says, “when the European Union comes, we get a lecture,, when China comes we get an airport,” and that was the perception at the beginning but that has gotten a little tired, because you had to pay for the airport and you know, maybe nobody comes to the airport. Maybe they do, but not necessarily.
So [there's been] mixed success for China. And the experience of the host countries has also been quite mixed. But what it did do is establish China as a global player, economically and in terms of outreach and capacity.
Why is China using Confucianism to export its ideology to the west?
I was amused when China decided to call its academic outreach, its cultural outreach, after Confucius, because when I was at university in China, there was a big political campaign to criticise Confucius … As far as Chinese revolutionaries go, he was the big enemy, back at the beginning of the 20th century, because radical thinkers blamed Confucius for China's backwardness – the kind of stifling effect of Confucian thinking in the bureaucracy and in the empire. That pretty much continued until Xi Jinping, who decided to reinstate Confucius as part of his evidence of China's great thinking in antiquity and all of that, in China's long cultural traditions of statecraft. And there are long cultural traditions of statecraft. What they have to do with Marxism-Leninism is another question.
Why have the Confucius Institutes been so controversial?
In terms of the outreach, the setting up of Confucius Institutes happened in that period in which the western view of China was very welcoming. You know, China joined the WTO [World Trade Organisation], the Maoist period was over, it was integrating into the global economy … And if you think about it, what are Confucius Institutes? They're essentially the Chinese version of the British Council or the Goethe Institute or the Alliance Francaise. None of those are on campus. They're all in the high street, they're competing.
And what China did was, it went to universities and said, “We'll give you free instruction in Chinese, we'll be on campus … it will be fine.” And cash-strapped universities thought, “maybe if I take a Confucius Institute, I'll get to open a campus in China and just think of the number of students that will come”. British universities were highly dependent on overseas students to make the money work. So they [the Confucius Institutes] got a welcome. And it isn’t that they are teaching Confucianism. They are teaching language, and they are also a presence of the Chinese state on campus. And frankly, that's problematic.
How has this played out in practice?
I remember in Aberdeen University, there was a corridor with photographs of all the Nobel Peace Prize winners. Well, among the Nobel Peace Prize winners is the Dalai Lama. And Chinese students complained about [the photo] and the corridor got redecorated … There have been lots of stories, and certainly lots of concern amongst Chinese students about being watched and reported on by fellow students.
So [the Confucius Institutes] act politically, and there is concern that values such as academic freedom are potentially compromised by their presence on campus. As relations [between China and the UK] have grown tougher, several universities have decided that this isn't worth it. Now, in my view, they ought to be welcomed on the high street … but I think that it is a mistake to have them on campus.
Will political and ideological tensions prevent the US and China from agreeing on climate?
There was a high point of cooperation on climate under Xi Jinping and Barack Obama … all sorts of connections were set up between Chinese provinces and US states, between government departments and cities, all working towards and talking about carbon emissions reduction, and the energy transition, and it was an immensely productive phase.
And then Donald Trump gets elected. And on day two, he bows out of the Paris Agreement, and he shuts down an awful lot of that cross-Pacific traffic on climate change. When Biden comes in, he has a very different approach to climate. But he doesn't have that different of an approach to [the question of] China … So the collaboration with China is now beset by geopolitical tensions. You get the Glasgow COP, for example, [the UN climate summit in 2021] where there was a renewal of climate cooperation between the US and China …. And then within six months, Nancy Pelosi had visited Taiwan, there was outrage on the Chinese side, and it was all cancelled again.
So we've gone through these cycles. We have cooperation, certainly in principle and in some practice, but it's a bit fragile because of the state of the relations between the two powers.
What impact do you think Donald Trump’s re-election might have on US-China relations?
I think that's systemic … On both sides, they are convinced that the other is essentially a hostile party. And that's not going to change. What we can hope for is that they manage this antagonism, rather than allowing it to get out of control. There are any number of ways in which it could get out of control – we could think of [territorial disputes in] the South China Sea, think of [China's contested claim over self-governed] Taiwan, all sorts of things from TikTok, to electric vehicles, there are so many areas of tension.
How important is it for China to win “hearts and minds”?
It is increasingly important. For quite a long time, China didn't seek to export the “China model”, if you like. That’s something that has come with this more expansive and assertive phase that we've seen under Xi Jinping. Now it is a full-blown campaign.
So China is challenging the [existing] global order, which it says is [biased] towards countries that emerged after the Second World War as dominant powers, so Europe and the United States. It is challenging the quite fundamental assumptions in the United Nations systems, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example. Now China will say that it respects human rights, but it does not respect the ability of any other nation to interfere in the politics of another nation state. National sovereignty is one of its fundamental principles and it's been promoting that quite vigorously. And of course that has enormous appeal to other authoritarian states. In that sense, Russia and China certainly do see the world in very, very similar veins.
So it's providing an alternative set of principles?
We need to watch these rather vague propositions, because over time, they do acquire flesh and blood. And countries begin to sign up to them. I'll give you an example. Hungary, which is a member of Nato, and a member of the European Union, has also signed up to a security arrangement with China. And that's a very curious situation. So China is exporting or actively seeking to export a view of the world, a view of the global system, that is closely tied to its domestic ideology. It's not the same as “making revolution” the way I guess China used to in the ‘50s, trying to make revolution in other countries. It's not doing that. But it is trying to redefine the global order in favour of authoritarian states. That's quite a big change, and one that we should be very much concerned about.
Don’t miss Isabel Hilton at HowTheLightGetsIn. Her session on women in war is on 27 May at 3pm. Get your special offer of 20% off full tickets using the discount code NEWHUM24 when prompted.
In the meantime, check out previous festival debates and talks on IAI.TV to get excited for the big event.
