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Home Office’s Prevent programme should be ‘improved’ not scrapped says former Security Minister Tom Tugendhat

Chopper’s political podcast

Home Office's Prevent programme should be "improved" not scrapped, says former Security minister Tom Tugendhat as Axel Rudakubana was jailed for 13 life terms for attacking and killing children in Southport last year.

The Government has started a review of the Prevent programme after it emerged Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021, yet went on to commit his bloody murders in July last year.

24 January 2025

Ex-MI6 Chief & Tory Leader on Trump’s Relationship with the UK, Chagos Islands Deal

One decision podcast

In today’s episode of One Decision, host Christina Ruffini and resident spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6, are joined by former United Kingdom security minister and Conservative Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat to discuss what President Donald Trump’s second administration could mean for the future of US-UK relations. They also discuss how Trump’s foreign policy could shape the future of the war in Ukraine and what lies ahead for the Chagos Islands, a British archipelago in the Indian Ocean. As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to hand over the islands to Mauritius—what potential role could the Trump administration play in the final negotiations? Later, Sir Richard and Christina unpack the events of the Presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. Plus, it’s Sir Richard’s birthday, and he shares his thoughts on what he believes is the biggest, most impactful foreign policy shift he has witnessed.

23 January 2025

Dependent on China or sharing risk across generations: we need to reform pensions

The Telegraph

The UK is terrible at sourcing homegrown investment. Reforming retirement funds could transform business

18 January 2025

Shortly before Reeves’s trip, Gao Shanwen, a prominent Chinese economist who dared question the sustainability of China’s growth model, simply disappeared, sending a chilling message about the state of the world’s second largest economy.

Gao’s apparent detention followed his suggestion that China’s era of rapid growth – which underpins the Communist Party’s legitimacy – was coming to an end. President Xi Jinping’s increasing paranoia about criticism may reveal a deeper truth about the country’s fundamental challenges.

A property crisis, a related and serious debt crisis with steadily rising debt to GDP, declining foreign investment and demographic headwinds that threaten to make it old before it ever gets rich – an amplified version of the classic “middle-income trap” – were a long way off when others reached out more than a decade ago.

Advocating the same strategy under Xi that looked reasonable under Hu Jintao misses the shift to Marxist nationalism that former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has warned about. It fails to recognise the national security implications that have seen a rare moment of unanimity on the US Supreme Court as it upholds the ban on TikTok. That’s what made Reeves’s visit to China last week so unlikely to succeed. The £90 billion trade we have with China is important, but securing just £600 million for the UK economy over five years has told us something else: we need to do better at sourcing investment at home.

Since 2001, we have been badly behind our peers. Britain’s stock market value relative to GDP has dropped by 30 per cent, while others in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the US have, on average, increased by more than 50 per cent. This decline reflects a broader pattern of selling off strategic assets and failing to capture the value of homegrown innovations.

If we had just kept pace with these nations, the stock market would be worth £5.5 trillion today, rather than £2.5 trillion. That’s not just a loss of capital, it’s a loss of control.

Just look at the cases of ARM Holdings and DeepMind, two British technology champions that are now foreign-owned. Let’s be clear: both have outstanding leaders who didn’t make bad decisions – they made the only decisions they could. But that’s all the more telling. Despite their positions as market leaders, the UK capital wasn’t there. Facing losing ideas and people to rivals, they elected to keep the firms together by raising money abroad.

That even such extraordinary leaders couldn’t find a better solution shows the depth of the problem. Fast-growing tech innovators are being held back not by regulation in their own field, but by rules governing pensions – leaving them unable to serve the wider economy.

To understand how we got here, we need to look back to the early 2000s. Policy changes prompted UK pension funds to move money away from holdings in listed UK companies and instead into bonds, triggering an unprecedented sale of great British companies. This switch from live money – the money that supports ideas, hires teams and changes the future – to dead money – the loans made to the state – are a soft nationalisation that has drained our pools of finance and seen us sell the golden geese.

The contrast with Australia is instructive. The Australian “super” system, mandating significant pension contributions, has created massive domestic investment pools. But even Australia’s experience shows that having capital isn’t enough; it needs to be deployed with the right time horizon. Australian super funds, while better capitalised than their British counterparts, sometimes face pressure for short-term performance that can conflict with the longer-term needs of developing technology companies.

Consider the story of CSL, the Australian biotech giant. In its early days, patient capital from Australian institutions gave it time to develop its technologies. Today, CSL is a global leader in blood plasma products, worth more than 100 billion Australian dollars. This success story shows what’s possible when domestic institutional investors take a long view.

For us, there is an alternative. Proposals such as those set out in a report last year for the Tony Blair Institute have illustrated the benefits of enlarging the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) to global scale by extending its role as the natural consolidation vehicle for the UK’s thousands of small, fragmented defined benefit pension schemes. These funds are at present mostly invested in gilts and therefore are simply “dead money” when it comes to funding growth and innovation. The PPF also has a long and proven track record of superior returns generated by a best-in-class investment team.

The beauty of pension fund capital lies in its natural alignment with national economic development. It is the wealth of the old fuelling the ideas of the young and the energy of the young supporting the retirement of the old. Unlike foreign strategic investors who might prioritise technology transfer or market access, pension funds succeed when the broader economy succeeds. Their multi-decade investment horizons match perfectly with the development cycles of advanced technology companies.

This isn’t about protectionism or closing Britain to foreign investment – we must stay open, but with open eyes. Instead of betting again on the policies of the past or looking at asset sales as the solution, we need answers closer to home so that British savers participate in British success stories.

The question isn’t whether we need reform or whether to bet on China’s debated future, it’s whether we’ll act before more DeepMinds and ARMs slip through our fingers.

Taiwan: The Technology of Freedom

SPEECH

Speech to the Taiwan Institute for National Defence and Security Research

13 January 2025

Thank you for welcoming me to Taipei today. Standing here, in a city striving at the forefront of innovation, even as it upholds Chinese traditions and Taiwanese culture, I'm reminded of what Hu Shih once wrote to commemorate the birthday of Confucius: “Confidence is simply the courage to affirm an unknown future.”

Once, that confidence was created by revolutionary moments like May Fourth, 1919. Movements that pointed to a new beginning. Today, what's going on across the Straits is not affirming confidence but spreading doubt.

Young people in the People's Republic of China are increasingly rejecting the CCP's hollow bargain of prosperity for compliance.

Not here. You are building a different future. Building on the past you show how a society can embrace tradition and innovation; how it can preserve its heritage and adapt its culture -- all while driving technological advances that are touching every corner of the globe. Not just in chips, and not just today.

The Republic of China's representative on the international panel codifying the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, showed that a lifetime ago.

While the diplomat and playwright PC Chang brings joy to my daughter through the story of Mulan, it's his words in the UN treaty that will protect her future.

He was key to including the rights of life, liberty, and security; the right not to be held in slavery or subjected to torture; the right to freedom of religion; and the right to freedom of thought. These are, of course, an expression of long-held Chinese, and now Taiwanese values. He made them universal.

Chang’s history is also a reminder of the cost of failure. He helped rebuild a world that had been torn apart by great power competition, greed, and nationalism. His memory is a warning of what we must avoid.

There is no need to follow that path, we can walk a different one, one that you, here already tread. Of cooperation and innovation improving the lives of billions, but only if we keep vigilant, peaceful preparation to avoid misunderstandings.

That's why I am so pleased to be here with you today. The work you are doing at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research is essential to keeping us all free by convincing others not to make the mistakes of the past.

Let me start by saying: thank you.

Those two words are too rarely used when addressing Taiwan.

As the United Kingdom's Security Minister, I saw clearly what Chairman Xi's interference in our domestic affairs means for us, many thousands of miles away. The intimidation of our citizens and our universities, the undermining of our businesses and the theft of their intellectual property, are all serious attempts to undermine our future.

When I was the first serving UK cabinet minister to meet a Taiwanese minister, I was struck by how much more persistent and determined these same assaults were on you and it would be easy to get disheartened by the imbalance between the attacker and the attacked.

But balance doesn't work like that.

As a soldier, I was always struck that military economics are not the same as maths.

The latest military equipment, the size of a fleet, the range of a missile, can make an outcome look inevitable, but what can look one-sided rarely is -- just ask President Zelenskyy of Ukraine who doesn't have the luxury of a 100-mile moat around his country.

Scale does not dwarf courage.

Reach, power, and range are not the same as endurance, will, and determination. And the reality is that technology, properly understood, is a democratising force. It equalises and empowers.

Rudyard Kipling gave us this warning a century ago -- and it echoed in my mind on patrols in Helmand -- when he wrote in his poem Arithmetic on the Frontier that: "Two thousand pounds of education, Drops to a ten-rupee jezail".

Today's technology is not the barrel of a rifleman and the skill of an Afghan, but the genius of a chip-maker and the talent of a Ukrainian drone pilot. That is the latest iteration of democratising force in war.

Russian armour -- costing billions and built up over decades -- is being turned into scrap by technology costing pennies and created last week.

Not for the first time, Taiwan's technological innovation is proving a democratising, empowering force that can't be constrained or held back.

A century ago, Hu Shih recognised that you can’t freedom. "The only way to have democracy is to have democracy," he argued.

Hu Shih didn't have time for the elitism of those who wouldn't allow others access to reading. While others tried to control the essential technology of the day, he transformed language and turned his people from subjects into citizens.

That was the foundation for the intellectual explosion we have seen here on this island. And it caused revolutions.

Today we're seeing two more.

The first is happening not far from here. As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd shows in his latest book, Xi Jinping's "Marxist nationalism" is a shift away from his predecessors' increasing openness and instead combines authoritarian control with a nationalist rhetoric.

The second is right here on the island. On the 101st anniversary of China's historic May Fourth Movement, Matthew Pottinger noted, we're witnessing not a political uprising, but a revolution in expectations and a Chinese enlightenment here in Taipei. That's the technological revolution that Taiwan leads through its semiconductor industry and its open, ideas-led culture.

These forces are pulling in opposite directions.

Xi's vision is to concentrate power so the Red Princes keep control.

Morris Chang's, and now CC Wei's, vision is to distribute power and share it with billions around the world.

This inward, controlling shift is against everyone's interests, even China's. We know that because we've seen this happen in the past. Just at the moment when China could have dominated global trade after Admiral Zheng He had shown the way, Emperor Zhengtong ordered the ships to be burned. That allowed others to advance and develop technologies that saw China slip back.

Today, Taiwan is emulating the admiral while Xi's plan for a Dual Circulation Economy has echoes of the isolated emperor.

The Republic of China is the real people's republic now. It is where people can build their own future and where freedom is forged.

The CCP doesn't understand this. Its top-down approach fundamentally misses how innovation works. You can't innovate by decree. And their own citizens see it.

I've watched how the Chinese Communist Party has tried to direct ideas by sheer force of will and massive investment. But as Lao Tzu wrote, "When the best leader's work is done, the people say: we did it ourselves."

Instead of feeling proud, people can see the sluggish economy and, despite the complicity of silence -- including the recent disappearance of the economist Gao Shanwen -- they are asking why Jack Ma's success was envied and punished, rather than celebrated. After seeing change around the world, many are asking why entrepreneurship must bow to party control.

The CCP is not alone in struggling to deliver prosperity these days. But those who will succeed are the leaders who understand that only a technological revolution can generate productive growth.

That demands the freedom to innovate and succeed.

A society that silences its entrepreneurs, that sees rivals to a party as enemies of the state, that punishes success, can never lead in a technology that requires constant questioning and iteration, that relies on honest, reliable data, and that rewards imagination, openness, and risk, not silence and obedience.

Like a selfish forester, the censor cuts down trees today, and refuses to allow new ones to be planted for tomorrow.

It is clear -- freedom is the essential building block of innovation and the future.

This brings me to why I'm here today. Taiwan's importance to global security isn't primarily about its strategic location. It's about its strategic capability.

TSMC and the semiconductor ecosystem you've built here is enabling a new global revolution not written in a red book but on a silicon wafer.

When we talk about TSMC's advanced semiconductor production, we're talking about a revolution that is enabling future security and prosperity.

Of course, you haven't done it alone. No one succeeds without friends.

In your semiconductor industry, I see echoes of what helped Britain prosper centuries ago -- the openness to ideas and the skills and networks to exploit them.

Our prosperity was born out of centres of excellence that transformed our cities like Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham into ideas factories and engines of growth. That's not just companies, its knowledge networks, where expertise is cultivated, shared, and refined over generations.

Our people travelled the world but it was what happened at home that mattered. A constitutional monarch, not a directing tyrant meant new techniques were tried -- some failed -- and ideas were given shape. The power of these networks lay not in their individual members, but in the ecosystem of the whole.

Today, Taiwan is part of an even more global network with an industry fundamental to all of our futures.

Your semiconductor industry represents an ecosystem of unprecedented sophistication. This island doesn't just manufacture chips -- you make the spider's silk that binds the world.

That deep expertise can't be replicated quickly or easily. You can't easily copy Empress Lei Tzu and relocate the new silk factories.

Building the nervous system of artificial intelligence has put Taiwan at the heart of the new global revolution and made you a key partner for the success of every country and company. You are irreplaceable. We now share the responsibility to work with you to guard your successes and ensure they are shared so that we all prosper.

In Britain we must do more. Everything from treating your envoys as we would treat others, to building on the work I started with your former Minister for Digital Affairs, Audrey Tang, on understanding the cyber threats to each other's country.

The United Kingdom's commitment to Taiwan shouldn't just be a deal with a friend -- but ensuring that the future of technology is shaped by values we share: transparency, fairness, respect for individual rights, and commitment to the rule of law.

Taiwan is the guardian of China's outward facing tradition. Your importance extends beyond your own shores and your network connecting Britain, the US, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, and increasingly, partners like the Philippines brings unique strengths to the innovation frontier.

This isn't about military technology -- it's about how technological capability has become the foundation of national power -- economic and military.

When we stand with Taiwanese society, we're supporting that vision and the ability to share innovation which saw us taking ideas from each other and enjoying the benefits. That's open China. The China that would not lock up Jack Ma, Jimmy Lai, or so many others -- it's the China of Yang Zhenning and Tu Youyou, of innovation and discovery. The heirs to the Fourth of May Movement.

That's why for me, we should not be talking about containing China, but about supporting a model of development built on freedom that benefits everyone, including China.

Punishing success and arresting those who challenge the way things are can only delay and intensify the coming change. Like an earthquake, the smaller, more frequent disturbances can lead to gradual change, holding them back sees pressure simply grow until it is uncontainable.

If you will not allow evolution, you leave only revolution.

In Taiwan, I see Chinese civilization hasn't been diminished by freedom -- it's been enhanced and transformed by it. It has enabled your industry to innovate and proves that Chinese and Taiwanese culture is essential to our whole world.

Our task, together, is to ensure these technologies develop in ways that promote prosperity, freedom, and peace. That's the true meaning of security in our age, and it's why the cooperation between the United Kingdom and Taiwan remains so vital to our common future.

The path forward isn't always clear, but Lu Xun's observation that "as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears" is true.

By standing together, by supporting the model of freedom that Taiwan represents, we can help ensure that the future belongs not to autocrats who demand silence, but to innovators who dare to speak.

Thank you.

Xi has changed China, Reeves is trying to go back in time

The times

President Xi’s aggressive Marxist nationalism should deter Britain from deep economic engagement with Beijing. There is a brighter future to be had nearby

11 January 2025

Over dinner at Claridge’s in 2023, Henry Kissinger posed an unexpected question: “Should I go to China?” The occasion was to mark his 100th birthday, half a lifetime after he engineered America’s opening to communist China.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) always respected the veteran diplomat and the invitation to go east again was from Xi Jinping himself, so Kissinger’s question was largely rhetorical. Of course he should go. But what about others?

Rachel Reeves is in Beijing this weekend. Officially she is restarting the UK-China economic and financial dialogue to bring renminbi trading to London. But the world has changed since Tony Blair initiated the talks. Neither is this the “golden era” that David Cameron and George Osborne hoped would see China become increasingly open.

This is Xi’s China, a Marxist nationalist state that represses minorities at home, covered up the coronavirus until it was too late, supports Russia’s violence in Ukraine and targets British nationals and interests here in the UK. A visit by Britain’s chancellor will be seen by many in Beijing as proof that it can act with impunity, particularly when the demand from the visiting delegation is so nakedly defensive; trying again to bring China’s currency trading to London at a time when the UK debt rates are so high and growth looks so distant.

It’s hard to imagine Kissinger playing such a high card for such a poor strategic goal. Kissinger showed it was right to take risks and speak to enemies so long as such realpolitik delivered his country’s interests. To split the communist bloc — Chairman Mao Zedong’s China from Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union — Kissinger was prepared to risk approbation for engaging with those who had supported America’s enemies in North Vietnam. The result was ping-pong diplomacy.

The story takes in the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan. Glenn Cowan, an American competitor, overslept and missed his team bus. So he jumped on the next one: China’s. He got talking to a fellow player, Zhuang Zedong, and when they left the bus they were pictured exchanging gifts. It was a token of a more hopeful future. Zhuang went on to win gold in the team event and silver in the men’s doubles. Days later, the Americans received an official invitation to play in China. This paved the way for President Nixon’s historic visit in 1972.

Well, that’s how the story goes. Kissinger had done the groundwork, opening communications two years earlier with his opposite number, Zhou Enlai. Among the first questions they discussed was that of Taiwan. At the time, the island was a major US base for the Vietnam War. The Kuomintang forces who had lost the Chinese civil war and fled to the island were happy to host the Americans to dissuade communists on the mainland from attacking.

Kissinger was keen that US troops should not become an obstacle to his plan and assured Zhou that numbers would fall considerably once peace in Vietnam was signed. But despite rapprochement, Kissinger couldn’t repeat Zhou’s formulation that Taiwan was “a part of China”. Instead, he adopted the line that “we are not advocating a ‘two Chinas’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution”.

He may not have advocated it, but it has happened. There now are two Chinas. One is open, centred on Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and used to include Hong Kong and even Shenzhen; the other is closed and centred on Beijing. Rachel Reeves is heading to the wrong one — and for the wrong reasons.

Diplomatic trips to Beijing are especially freighted with symbolism. Sending a senior minister usually signals not continuity but change, an initiative to forge a new future. Yet Reeves appears intent on reinventing a long-gone past. She should instead be engaging with the open China, seeing the future in one of the technological and entrepreneurial capitals of the world beyond the reach of the CCP.

Xi’s nationalist state has turned away from his predecessors’ vision of the People’s Republic. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao put the country on a path to global engagement, taking it into the World Trade Organisation and setting out plans for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. That’s now reversed. Xi has increased state control and put the interests of the CCP over the wider economy.

As technology has evolved, he has made the bet that scale, surveillance and command can deliver growth, not the chaotic creativity that turned tech barons such as Jack Ma into rivals to red princes like him. In London, the Chinese ambassador gave me a chilling demonstration of how much things had changed. In 2017, as the new chair of the foreign affairs select committee, I was invited to his north London suburban villa.

Over a fabulous spread, Liu Xiaoming showed he wasn’t interested in taking forward the openness of the “golden era” but in giving a warning. Sichuan spices and Canton textures couldn’t soften the impact of his words as he recounted snippets of intelligence files China’s ministry of state security held on my family. He told us who my mother-in-law had known as a French diplomat in 1960s Beijing and what she had achieved when she returned for six years in the late 1990s, giving colour that went beyond the professional. But he went further, giving details about her education as a pupil of John Fairbank, Harvard’s great sinologist. Liu was making it clear that while they knew her to be a great diplomat, they had been watching her, and us, for many years.

After the committee visited China, where we were hassled and intimidated, we reported that we would not now call this a golden era of relations between our two countries. In response, we got a seven-page rant telling us to obey our government and that I, personally, had disappointed my elder relatives.

This glimpse of so-called wolf warrior diplomacy, named after action movies portraying the People’s Liberation Army as Hollywood heroes, was unimaginable under Zemin or Hu. They followed the Deng Xiaoping policy of “hide and bide” — hide your strength and bide your time. But under Xi Jinping, Beijing’s state agents have grown in ambition.

In the UK, they have attacked protesters, set up illegal police offices in Glasgow and Croydon, intimidated British nationals from Hong Kong and used their own students to silence debate in our universities. Our Electoral Commission and a Ministry of Defence payroll contractor have been hacked. In the Baltic, China’s ships have cut fibre optic cables and severed powerlines. It has become clear what the CCP’s interests are, and they’re not ours.

So should anyone go to Beijing? As one of the world’s largest economies, that is an important question. We have huge commercial interests and an interdependency that demands co-operation, but that doesn’t mean everyone should go. When Cameron went in 2013, he was making a reasonable bet on promoting a more open future at a time of British strength. Reeves betrays a lack of understanding of how the world has changed since then. She could have made a different choice.

Back at Claridge’s, Kissinger asked me a different question: “Have you been to Taiwan?” It’s where this second China is prospering — a democratic, open and innovative society that points to a different path. I will land there tomorrow. The island province was colonised centuries earlier and has been governed by Japan and the mainland at different points. Its now-minority indigenous population of Austronesians went from there to settle Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, even as far as Madagascar and Polynesia.

Modern Taiwan really emerged in 1949 when the communists gained complete control of mainland China and two million refugees — predominantly from the nationalist government, military and business community — fled, along with the imperial palaces’ treasures that now make up Taipei’s National Palace Museum’s astonishing collections. Despite the animosity, the Republic of China, as Taiwan is more properly known, hasn’t declared independence. But its ambiguous status is causing growing tension. Xi has pledged to reunite the country and is building a navy and air force that threatens blockade or even invasion.

Small islands forced to compete with larger neighbours have a history of showing what a difference openness and freedom can make. In the 15th century, Admiral Zheng led China’s greatest fleet across the Indian Ocean with ships that dwarfed anything Europe could build. But after his death, the Ming emperor Zhengtong banned ocean-going vessels entirely. China chose to look inward; its rulers wanted control more than innovation. Centuries of stagnation followed.

China’s moment of humiliation

Into the gap European merchants expanded until they threatened China itself. At its lowest point, in October 1860, British and French troops looted, then destroyed, the Old Summer Palace while forcing China to accept the toxic opium trade. It was a shameful episode in Britain’s history, remembered now in China as a moment of humiliation. Britain’s power wasn’t only based on gunboats but an ecosystem of innovation. Emerging from the medieval guilds, a complex web of relationships between master craftsmen, apprentices and merchants created small workshops that experimented with new techniques, engineers who shared ideas in coffee houses and mechanical institutes.

The state provides a framework of laws and protection but the expertise itself grows from the bottom up. Britain’s industrial revolution let inventors, entrepreneurs and skilled workers — not government directives — transform our world. The semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) in Taiwan are modern examples of those communities. They now produce more than 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors and more than half of the rest. It is an environment where excellence builds upon excellence, centred on companies such as the world-leading Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), valued at almost $900 billion. But the industry isn’t only the vast fabs — it is the entire ecosystem of innovation.

Universities work closely with industry. Engineers move freely between companies, cross-pollinating ideas. And small companies experiment with new designs and techniques, pushing boundaries, confident they can access the world’s best manufacturing capabilities. TSMC pushes this overseas, working closely with tool manufacturers in Japan and the Netherlands, design companies in Britain and America and research institutes worldwide. The result isn’t only technological leadership but also a resilience that no amount of state planning could mirror.

Taiwan has embraced what the author Nassim Taleb calls “antifragility” — the ability to grow stronger under stress. It succeeds not despite its precarious position but partly because of it. The constant need to innovate, to stay ahead and to build partnerships, has created an ecosystem that turns challenge into opportunity. Beijing is trying to build its own semiconductor industry through huge state investment.

It is repeating the mistake of the French knights at Agincourt, believing that scale and resources alone can overcome systematic excellence. But the CCP sees no alternative. To maintain stability across a vast territory and manage demographic decline, environmental challenges and rising expectations from its population, it feels the need for control, stifling the very innovation that only freedom can foster.

When Beijing launched its Made in China 2025 initiative, it followed the classic pattern of state planning — huge investment, rigid targets and centralised control. The result has been a peculiar mix of impressive achievement and fundamental weakness. It can build the world’s largest network of high-speed rail but it struggles to design the most advanced chips. This was not inevitable. In 1999, a lecturer, Jack Ma, tried his hand at entrepreneurship.

His company, Alibaba hit a record-breaking $150 billion IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014. When he stepped down as chairman in 2019, he was a tech titan and not ready to retire. While planning to sell shares in Ant Group — his new venture, valued at $37 billion — he publicly criticised Beijing’s regulatory system, calling it outdated and stifling to innovation. The IPO was stopped and Ma disappeared for months. Reports suggested that he was placed under “supervision”, a term often linked to house arrest or detention.

He wasn’t alone. The CCP has been asserting control over influential tech companies and their leaders, hitting Alibaba’s stock value and Ma’s personal fortune, demonstrating a shift in Beijing’s approach to managing its private sector. No wonder manufacturing is already shifting to India, the Philippines and Mexico. Xi’s insistence that business serves the state, supports the CCP and knows its place has made innovators keep their heads down or leave the country.

Reeves misremembers golden era

As AI reshapes our world, the ability to innovate is even more crucial than the ability to manufacture. Beijing’s approach to AI development mirrors its broader technological strategy: data collection, state direction and centralised control. But the biggest breakthroughs in AI need trust — that is what fosters open collaboration and free inquiry.

That’s why Reeves should have travelled a little bit further. She is not only misremembering the golden era, she is misreading the entire landscape of tech development in Asia. The vision she is chasing — of state-directed manufacturing and centralised economic planning — already shows signs of strain. The real engine of Asian technological development lies not in Beijing’s five-year plans but in the complex networks of innovation that span Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and beyond.

Could Reeves have gone to Taiwan? It would be hard without being accused of encouraging separatism. But British trade ministers have been, most recently in 2022, and when Taiwan’s digital affairs minister Audrey Tang visited me in London to discuss cyberattacks and defending democracy, I became the first cabinet minister to formally meet a Taiwanese minister.

I was planning to reciprocate and learn more about Taipei’s approach to self-defence, online and off, but the election came early. This isn’t about choosing sides between Beijing and Taiwan — indeed, neither of them seek such a choice. It’s about choosing which model of development we want to engage with, and engaging Chinese entrepreneurs where they’re allowed to succeed.

Britain should look to where technology is going, not where it is punished. That means deepening co-operation with Taipei, while of course maintaining appropriate diplomatic relations with Beijing without summit-level engagement. Reeves isn’t wrong to see the future in China. She’s just looking in the wrong place. It’s not holding court in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People but Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs — a short flight from where our chancellor chose to land.

The New Imperial Age

OUTpost podcast

James Glancy speaks to Tom Tugendhat MP, former soldier and security minister in the previous British Government, about the new paradigm of global power.

10 January 2025

Conflicted Community: Tom Tugendhat - The Dangers of Islamism and the Future of the Middle East

COnflicted podcast

To bring in the new year, we have a special Conflicted Community episode this week– an interview with none other than Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative British MP and ex Minister of State for Security.

Tom is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a veteran of both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s Conservative cabinets. He remains a big figure in the party, having run unsuccessfully for party leader in 2024, and is one of the most outspoken of all British MPs when it comes to the UK's security policy. But most importantly, Tom is a long time dearest listener, friend of Aimen’s and fan of the show, so we invited him on to discuss himself, his time in government and his thoughts on the current crises engulfing the Middle East.

In this episode Thomas, Aimen and Tom discuss Tom’s background, including some of his formative years spent in the Middle East, as well as his thoughts on the scourge of Islamism in the region and the West, before looking at how effective security policy can be enacted by the West as a new world order takes shape.

1 January 2025