The transformations spanned every dimension. Virtually every visitor in the early 2000s with even the slightest artistic curiosity would make a trip to the vast 798 Dashanzi factory complex that had been turned into a set of workshops and exhibition spaces for avant-garde sculpture and painting, while the likes of Ai Weiwei were already becoming familiar international figures. The so-called sixth generation of Chinese film directors, such as Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye, were making biting neo-realist-style masterpieces about contemporary urban existence. From foreign policy to philosophy, the Chinese intellectual scene seemed to have an anticipatory fizz around it, as thinkers who had once toiled in international obscurity started to realize just how much their ideas now mattered to the world. Despite the political system, it was a China where spaces for self-reflection and critique seemed to be growing again. The mix was a heady one. The old China that people like me had first fallen in love with. A sense of burgeoning possibility for the country and for the rest of the world. The economic boom that never seemed to end. And the intellectual challenge of making sense of what it all meant.

  * * *

  —

  In the background, ubiquitous, was the Chinese Communist Party. When I walked to the Starbucks in Oriental Plaza from the little house in which I lived near the Forbidden City’s East Gate, I would often take the long route that allowed me to peer furtively down the entrance of one particular hutong—narrow alleys lined with Beijing’s traditional courtyard residences—where Chinese security personnel were always discreetly positioned. A little way down the tiny street was Zhao Ziyang’s home, where he still lived under house arrest. Zhao had been the CPC general secretary in the lead-up to Tiananmen in 1989, the hope of the students who saw a kinder, more liberal face who might lead the country down a different path. His unwillingness to launch the brutal crackdown demanded by Deng Xiaoping and the Party elders saw him removed from office and consigned to the house in Fuqiang Hutong where he would live until his death in 2005. At Zhao’s side, in the famous photo where he stands amid the students with a megaphone trying to persuade them to leave the square ahead of what he knew would be bloodshed, was his aide, China’s future prime minister, Wen Jiabao.

  Wen too would end up as the more humane face of the Party, the man who would visibly shed tears after mining accidents and natural disasters, “Grandpa Wen,” “the People’s Premier.” Unlike his immediate predecessor, Zhu Rongji, Wen was not going to tear into any economic reforms with free-market zeal. Unlike the men he once worked for, Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, he was not going to be a standard-bearer for even the limited version of political opening that once had support in the Party. But, for a time, Wen reinforced the sense among many of his political counterparts in the West that there was a version of this China and the party-state that the world could live with. Not a progressive China, not a democratic China, but not an aggressive or totalitarian China either. With his very demeanor, he conveyed the impression that there were some leaders there with decency. That the mission of maintaining the leadership of the Party was not so distinct from the task of working out how to build a prosperous life for the people of a still-developing country that faced unimaginably large problems.

  Wen was also the Chinese government’s beneficent face to Europe. Where US presidents and other heads of state dealt primarily with the Chinese Communist Party’s general secretary and president, the achingly stilted Hu Jintao, the Europe portfolio belonged to the prime minister. This made sense for an agenda that was so heavily economic in nature. But in the shadow of the Iraq war, minds in Europe and China were increasingly trained on political and strategic dynamics too. Optimism about the European project was at its peak. The EU was tentatively starting to assume a foreign policy role of its own. A European constitution was in the offing. There were mutterings from European political figures about the desirability of “multipolarity” during a period when US “hyper-puissance” under George W. Bush made everyone uncomfortable.[4] When Europe and China looked at each other, they saw emerging poles in that new order. The cluster of advisors around Wen certainly believed that more Europe was a good thing. They all viewed Europe as the more benign edge of Western power. They saw the growing appetite there for a European profile distinct from the continuum with Washington and thought that China should encourage it.

  Europe wanted more from China too. It envisaged Beijing gradually assuming greater global responsibilities: supporting a common development agenda in Africa, taking on the burden of peacekeeping in the world’s trouble spots, and a host of other tasks to ensure that the system on which China’s economic interests depended continued to function smoothly. The push was for China to step up, to assume leadership, to end its free-riding, to stop “hiding its brightness,” as Deng Xiaoping’s strategy had once urged. US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s call for China to become a “responsible stakeholder” mirrored European thinking to a tee. China wasn’t one.[5] But perhaps there was a chance that Beijing could come to see its interests that way, and perhaps Europe could help get it there.

  Wen was the man fielding these earnest entreaties from political leaders in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and London. And one staff member, the only official then attached to either Hu’s or Wen’s offices who came from a diplomatic background, converted them into options for China’s leaders to consider. This was Desmond’s friend, the scrupulously careful Song Zhe, who later ended up as China’s ambassador to the EU and its chief representative in Hong Kong. We would feed him “non-papers,” with ideas that had also been quietly bounced off British, French and German officials, to sound out the limits of the possible. This didn’t go on for long. Desmond was firmly discouraged from this kind of stove-piping after Song received a warning from the Chinese security services. Other parts of the Chinese bureaucracy were less friendly to foreign policy freelancing.

  It was illustrative of a system that seemed simultaneously rigid and permeable, at a moment where China’s global role was characterized by a vast spectrum of potential. For all that Chinese politics is supposedly a black box, many of us in Beijing at the time at least had glimpses inside. What we saw looked nothing like the world of unimaginably far-sighted Chinese leaders who supposedly thought in centuries, nor a mythologized Confucian meritocracy, nor the inflexible bureaucracy that many other foreigners were stuck dealing with. It looked like raw politics. The horse-trading for positions. The bureaucrats who wanted to do enough to ensure their own promotion while leaving any mess for their successors to clean up. The endless factional games. The shadowy figures behind the scenes who wielded greater influence than their formal positions implied. The ingeniously concealed and choreographed rules of corruption.

  But most striking were the stories of the leaders who were figuring out their own relationship to China’s newfound power. Chinese mayors shocked by the level of open graft they found when they met counterparts in places like Moscow that “we’d never get away with here.” Politburo members receiving visiting Taiwanese dignitaries and being amazed that “Chinese” leaders could carry themselves like real politicians rather than the stiff bureaucrats they still knew themselves to be. Then there were the stories that felt like darker portents of the country’s potential future. One that stuck with me was the account of a visit by Vladimir Putin in 2006, during which he and the Chinese leadership had spent most of their meeting time together exchanging advice on how best to refine their domestic repression techniques in the aftermath of the revolutions that were blowing up in Central Asia.

  As it turned out, this was precisely the form of raw politics that would ultimately prevail.

  * * *

  —

  When Desmond sent me the COVID warning message, he was in exile. His wife Whitney had been detained, seemingly indefinitely, held incommunicado for three years in an unknown location, likely never to be tried but simply held as a standing warning to Wen Jiabao not to step out of line against the new leadership. The Party was now decisively under Xi Jinping’s grip, and much of the country’s commercial life was under the grip of the Party. Oncepotent private sector actors were cut down to size, as Xi moved to neutralize any independent sources of power, and economic goals were subordinated to political and military objectives. A million Uyghurs in Xinjiang were in detention camps. Hong Kong was no longer under the “one country, two systems” model that China had committed to in its handover treaty, instead subjected to Beijing’s unadulterated authority. And the rest of the world faced a Chinese government that had moved from free-riding to assertiveness to a level of diplomatic, economic and military aggression that seemed to be intensifying by the month.

  Like many other Western think-tankers working on China, I had not visited the country since December 2018, when one of our number, International Crisis Group’s Michael Kovrig, was also thrown into a Chinese prison. He was grabbed as a de facto hostage after the daughter of Huawei’s CEO, the Chinese telecoms company that will occupy a prominent role in this narrative, was arrested in Canada at the US’s behest for her role in sanctions-busting with Iran. Michael’s work embodied the efforts of those researchers who were trying to understand China better and find ingenious ways in which cooperation might still be possible despite all the obstacles. It made no difference. Journalist contacts from the early 2000s, like the guru-like Chris Buckley of the New York Times, with whom I used to trade speculation about inner-Party workings at Sichuanese restaurants, had been forced out of the country after devoting their professional lives to making sense of its complexities for the world at large. Longstanding friends in the Chinese intellectual community, whom I now only met outside China, had either become excruciatingly cautious or complained darkly about the trajectory the country was on.

  Their experience has been replicated in myriad other ways for almost everyone working in this environment: the diplomats, businesspeople, journalists and intellectuals who had spent so many years trying to ensure that things would end up in a very different place. When most of us meet now, it has little to do with the optimistic initiatives that we attempted a decade-and-a-half before. It is typically spent trying to figure out how the rest of the world can deal with the sharp edges of Chinese state and Party power that were once only felt within China’s own borders. Many of those who were once so excited about China’s arrival on the global stage now debate how the other major powers might best work together to stop the most damaging elements of the Party’s agenda from prevailing. This book tells the story of how that happened.

  Munich, February 2020

  The art deco ballroom of Munich’s Bayerischer Hof was packed. German military personnel maintained a perimeter around the assembled heads of government, ministers, senators and parliamentarians as the US Speaker of the House began her remarks. It was the last major gathering of political leaders before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, was snapped meeting the cheerful-looking head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, where he denounced “misinformation and stigma” about the origins of the virus and claimed that its spread outside China had been curbed.[6] Nonetheless, the Europeans and Americans in attendance were genuinely confident they would be spared. The only casual nod to the outbreak was a proliferation of little sanitizer bottles with “so that things don’t get out of hand” emblazoned on their front. Another China-related matter was on everyone’s minds.

  Nancy Pelosi was on a repair job for an alliance under severe strain. The hope among many of the Europeans there was that this was a foretaste of the end of the Trump presidency, the soothing prospect of a Democratic administration and the restoration of transatlantic amity after a bruising few years. Yet she had another message to deliver too: that some things were not going to change as much as they might have hoped.

  Speaking on the same stage twelve months earlier, US Vice-President Mike Pence had delivered a bracing warning on China. This was far from the norm. The Munich Security Conference was usually the place to talk NATO, European security, Russia, nuclear arms or the Middle East. This was where Donald Rumsfeld tangled with the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, ahead of the Iraq war; where Vladimir Putin laid out his baleful warning in 2007 that Russia now stood in opposition to the entire post-Cold War security order in Europe. Stern lectures about the Chinese security threat, on the other hand, were for gatherings of Asian defense ministers in Singapore, not old world Atlanticist confabs in Bavaria.

  Two years earlier, China hadn’t even merited a mention in Pence’s speech. Now the vice-president was identifying it as a core risk to the transatlantic alliance. The United States was in the middle of the biggest shift in its own approach to China in decades, and the most comprehensive overhaul of its approach to national security since the 9/11 attacks. Technology competition was at the heart of this revolution, a cluster of issues that would determine the future economic, political and military landscape and the distribution of global power. While these ranged from artificial intelligence to quantum computing, there was an immediate set of decisions that would have a conditioning effect on virtually all of them, the question of whether Chinese equipment would form the spine of the next generation of the world’s telecoms networks. “We cannot ensure the defense of the West if our allies grow dependent on the East,” Pence declaimed.[7] 5G infrastructure, a seemingly technical matter, had taken on vast geopolitical significance.

  There was a problem with Pence’s argument though. Few of the assembled European politicians were listening. For many US partners and allies who weren’t looking closely enough at how deep and broad the new consensus on China in Washington was, this was just another episode of Trumpian lunacy that they had to find a way of sitting out until sanity was restored. This ignored the fact that de facto US bans on Chinese equipment had been in place since the Obama administration, while the British intelligence services had moved to ban Huawei’s state-run counterpart, ZTE, in 2018. Yet the hope was that it would still be possible to placate both the Americans and the Chinese in the short term and that the situation might look very different when the 2020 US presidential election was over. As a result, the two most critical European capitals on the 5G issue, London and Berlin, were still trying to come up with tortured compromises.

  This was where Pelosi came in. No messenger could have been more apt. At the very inception of her long career in Congress, the Tiananmen Square massacre had been her breakout political moment, when she became the leading voice fighting to protect Chinese students in the United States whose open sympathy for their compatriots now put them at risk if they returned. She would remain a thorn in the flesh of the Chinese government for the duration of her time in Congress, from her efforts to condition trade relations on human rights to her support for an Olympic boycott. Her critical views on China had once been seen as excessively hawkish for mainstream tastes. More supposedly sophisticated policymakers claimed that economic growth and closer Chinese integration with the liberal international order would be a more effective way of addressing her concerns. Now Pelosi’s position was the mainstream. For European audiences though, it was not the China credentials that gave resonance to her remarks. It was Pelosi’s position as Donald Trump’s arch opponent. Uniquely able to get under his skin, her disdain for his entire agenda was embodied by the images of her tearing up his State of the Union speech at the conclusion of his address, just a couple of weeks before the conference.

  Yet the subject animating the woman who was then the most powerful Democrat on her visit to Europe was precisely the same as Trump’s faithful VP a year earlier. What was at stake with the 5G decisions, Pelosi told those helping her to prepare for the trip, was no less than the choice of dictatorship or democracy. “I’m going to say something that may not be agreeable to many of you here, because you invited candor, and that is the subject of 5G and cybersecurity,” she started, after pleasantries about the transatlantic alliance were out of the way.[8] “China is seeking to export its digital autocracy through its telecommunication giant, Huawei. Nations cannot cede our telecommunication infrastructure to China for financial expediency.” Her unambiguous answer to one of the questions from the floor had even greater piquancy: “Does this mean that you agree in substance with the China policy of President Trump?” Without a pause, she jumped in to respond: “We have agreement in that regard…Yes, yes, I do believe that it’s a real danger to put all that power in the Sinification of 5G.” Any European leader in attendance who had hoped that the China question might recede again after the upcoming elections could be under no illusions.

  In the months that followed, China was ground zero for an even more immediately deadly threat. Whatever uncertainty there was about whether the inner workings of the Chinese system had ramifications for the world at large was blown away by the manner of the cover-up of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan during the crucial early stages of the pandemic. Supply chain panics exposed dangerous levels of dependence on Chinese production facilities, from pharmaceuticals to basic medical goods. And unlike a decade earlier, where Beijing’s judicious, pragmatic approach during the financial crisis won plaudits even from critics, its prickly belligerence instead saw China’s standing in international public opinion plummet.[9] Whether it was sanctioning Australia for demanding an inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, dismantling the vestiges of Hong Kong’s distinct political system or inducing the biggest crisis on its border with India in decades, China’s behavior on a bewilderingly expansive number of fronts intensified the sense that there was an urgent problem to address. By the time of President Biden’s own speech at Munich in 2021, the language was even sharper. The liberal democracies had to mobilize if they wanted to win the “race for the future,” he argued.[10] Open democratic societies were at an inflection point and needed to pull together to defend a global system facing competition from a powerful authoritarian rival.