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Posted on 28th September, 2025 in Blog posts

BRITAIN HAS AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM CHINA’S RECOVERY?

My answer to a request to talk about the 2024 book

WHO ARE WE, AND HOW WILL WE SURVIVE IN THE AGE OF ASIA?

to the Society for Anglo Chinese Understanding, London 2025

 

 

contents

WHAT I’M NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT AND WHY

CHINA IN THE 1970s

 

UK IN THE 70s

 

1979 YEAR OF THE TITANS

1979 China: pussy philosophy

1979 UK: iron ladyship

1990 IN BOTH COUNTRIES

UK: From 1990 to today

CHINA: From 1990 to today

HOW DID CHINA GET TO THIS PLACE, AND SO QUICKLY?

Social infrastructure: DEMOCRACY

Cognitive infrastructure: FIDELITY

Material infrastructure: DEVELOPMENT

 

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ALL THIS?

CONCLUSION

 

 

 

 

WHAT I’M NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT AND WHY

When I was first asked if I’d give this talk, I imagined that I might like to speak about my admiration for Chinese poetry, painting and calligraphy or perhaps about Chinese social philosophy or even about the culture of dining. Then there are all the beautiful places in China, the mountains and temples, the river towns of the east and the kasbahs of the west. I’ve come across several Chinese individuals whom I have greatly admired and I would like to tell you about them, but I’ve decided that, because of the fraught situation of our country at present, this opportunity has to have a more immediate purpose. And, after all, I wrote WHO ARE WE? because I want British people, facing challenges which China has faced over much of the last century, to see themselves in Chinese perspective.

 

In order to make my points, I have to talk a bit about the politics of the late 20^th century in both countries and contrast their economic trajectories. So, if you’re not interested in this kind of stuff, better leave now.

 

CHINA IN THE 1970s

 

Almost exactly 53 years ago I was in the Great Hall of the People in Peking, a shy lad and one of about 25 foreigners at a banquet of several hundred officials waiting to greet the British foreign secretary. When the band of the Peoples’ Liberation Army, in green fatigues with the only badge a red star on their worker caps, struck up the Eton Boating Song, Premier Zhou Enlai and Lord Home entered the Great Hall.

 

I had been pulled in by the British Ambassador to make up numbers, though I was not a diplomat but just a gofer in the office of the forthcoming British Industrial Technology Exhibition. This meant that I was pretty free to bike around Peking – there was no danger from cars since only a few of Mrs Mao’s friends had cars – and I could see for myself that, although I thought my country in dire straits, they were nothing as dire as those of China.

 

Even a youngster such as I could see that I had come to an unhappy, cruelly oppressed country where most people were unhealthy and hungry, badly clothed and housed. I could smell the dank smell of poverty while queuing in the rundown markets and compare it with the Chanel No5 on the wives of the Cultural Revolution’s elite when they dallied in the gaudy Friendship Stores, from which ordinary Chinese were kept out by armed guards.

 

Even as blinkered and gullible a young socialist as I was could not fail but to see the awfulness of the slave state created by Mao Zedong out of one of the greatest of human civilisations.  I had gone to China a Labour Party activist but a secret Maoist. I returned home to Scotland in 1974 and joined the Tory party.

 

Both China and Britain had, borrowing Dean Acheson’s words, lost empires and not found roles. In the subsequent 15 years, remarkable leaders of both China and the UK arose to tackle what they saw as the disintegration of their societies. Although both countries changed immensely, thanks to those leaders, it has become apparent that China has been much more successful in escaping from those dire straits. Our two countries are very different, in size as in history, but is there anything the British could learn from China’s experience, that might help us rejuvenate?

 

UK IN THE 70s

In the 1970s the UK was in a mess; impoverished, de-industrializing, deeply in debt, with massive unemployment and governments incapable of tackling our problems.

 

There were several reasons for this.

From 1939-1941 Britain had fought single handedly against the Nazi/Soviet alliance; when Russia changed sides and became our ally our industries subsidised the Russian war effort with war supplies to help them resist the Nazi invasion. Once the USA was on side and the Russians had smashed the Germans in the East, we occupied a big slice of Germany, we fed the starving German population with food that was badly needed at home. To do all these things, we incurred gargantuan debts which were only finally paid off in 2006, nearly 60 years later.

 

But the second reason was because our politicians had prioritized health and welfare above investment in industry, while continuing to pour money into the empire and its defence in a way that the UK could no longer afford. Attlee’s government was right of course to invest in health and welfare – they were carrying out a populist programme which, by and large, was agreed by all the parties – but then, and over subsequent years, too little attention was paid to strengthening our economy, the foundation of everything.

 

The result was a society which was profoundly depressed. The small East Anglian town in which my Scots mother lived, 30 years later an expensive bolthole for wealthy Londoners, was full of second-hand shops and jumble sales. My mother taught at a Secondary Modern whose graduates thought themselves immensely successful if they got jobs as labourers and farm hands[1] and at a borstal where some of the boys had been banged up for stealing food. There was a sharp gulf between the secure on the one hand, mainly those with inherited wealth or safe jobs in the public sector, and the rest of us. And society was deeply divided.

 

At that age I did not understand economics and thought that Britain was torn apart because what was lacking in our country was that sense of community, of common purpose, that had animated my parents’ generation when they had put aside all personal ambitions to serve their country against the Nazis in the Second World War. So, I became a community development worker.

 

I was soon put right by the workers. The last thing they wanted was community or social workers flapping about. It was Dalkeith miners and a carpenter from Pilton (then a poor and desolate area of Edinburgh) who taught me that the most important things for communities are good jobs, i.e. successful industries and enterprise. Not only for what they mean for families and individuals, but because without them, governments can’t raise taxes to pay for health and education. I was being educated by the people at the bottom of society who are necessarily most realistic and pragmatic because they have to be, in order to survive.

 

At the same moment many other do-gooders like me were being educated in much the same way, in both China and the UK, because everything started to change in 1979.

 

1979 YEAR OF THE TITANS

 

In 1979 both China and the UK found that they had leaders who had a very clear idea of what needed to be done. In China, DENG XIAOPING seized power from the Maoists and in the UK a sleeping princess called MARGARET THATCHER was kissed awake by a reforming philosopher called Keith Joseph.

 

DENG XIAOPING agreed that the people knew best; MARGARET THATCHER promised to do what all the four previous British prime ministers had known was needed, but failed to do.

 

1979 China: pussy philosophy

 

DENG XIAOPING turned his back on the debilitating ideology of the first 30 years of communist rule, declaring that  China had to forget modern superstition, by which he meant communism, seek truth from facts and deploy any means possible to raise the standards of living of the starving and repressed population. It was his pussy philosophy: it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. A nostrum that we would do well to remember in the UK today. He put governance before politics. Food before ideology.

 

1979 UK: iron ladyship

Margaret Thatcher privatised nationalised industries, weakened trade unions, helped tenants of the state to become property owners, encouraged enterprise and implemented management reforms in the NHS. Her government oversaw the deregulation of financial markets. In foreign policy, she successfully resisted the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, worked to oppose Soviet communism and, in later years, supported Mikhail Gorbachev in ending the Cold War.

Some of her actions had unintended consequences; many things that needed to be done were not done; she can be criticised for that, but it is certain that, for a few years and in many – if not all – parts of the UK, the economy improved immensely, bringing investment and employment.

My mother was living in that impoverished East Anglia and every time I returned I saw the smartening up of her rural town, the business parks, the increased wealth everywhere evident. By the end of the Thatcher period, we no longer bought second hand clothes from VERA THE WARDROBE DEALER, our coal fires were replaced by central heating, outside lavatories were torn down and replaced by bathrooms with showers. Showers!

 

How did the Titans get their acts together?

 

Change in Britain started to come about when ordinary people, who had previously trusted the Labour Party, voted for MARGARET THATCHER. In China, the people revolted by taking back their land, which had been stolen from them in the 1950s and by re-establishing markets and independent businesses as the only way to feed themselves and their families.

DENG XIAOPING prohibited the officials, who had previously punished anybody who showed any initiative, from suppressing enterprise through regulation. He did more: He demanded they became the facilitators and initiators of enterprise. He responded to the demands of the people by declaring that China was in a period of reform and opening up. In January 1979, Deng went to the United States, both to ensure that Chinese people saw TV pictures of a more advanced economy, but also to demonstrate that China needed to learn from the free economies and abjure China’s collectivist ideology. Let’s move on to 1990.

 

1990 IN BOTH COUNTRIES

 

Neither MARGARET THATCHER nor DENG XIAOPING had been without opposition from vested interests or reactionaries.

In 1990 both leaders were challenged before they had got to the end of their shopping lists. Their political rivals tore into their Achilles heels. In Thatcher’s case it was a controversial tax reform. In Deng‘s it was his permissiveness in allowing debates to turn into anti-communist demonstrations and thus threats to CCP power.

In China, after a period of uncertainty in which it seemed that his opponents might reverse his reforms, DENG XIAOPING was able to reclaim power. He went on a tour round the country, evading the other top leaders in Beijing and encouraging the provincial leaders to double down on his development strategy. This was called the SOUTHERN PROGRESS after the tours that emperors had made in earlier centuries to encourage their provincial governors. The only equivalent in British history has been William Gladstone’s MIDLOTHIAN CAMPAIGN of 1879.

The results of Deng’s inspiring campaign have shaken the world. And even more, Chinese civilisation is being rejuvenated from below. We’ll come back to that shortly.

 

UK: From 1990 to today

Thanks to the Thatcher era reforms, between 1980 and 2008 Britain returned to its position as one of Europe’s most successful large economies.  Unfortunately, though, from the sacking of MARGARET THATCHER onwards, our political leaders were, by and large, indifferent to the fundamentals. They forgot that a country’s influence, that a peoples’ welfare and security, all depend upon a flourishing economy.

Tony Blair, who came to power in 1997, knew that there were other reforms and investments that were needed if the benefits of the Thatcher revolution were to exceed the disadvantages.

But he and his successors in all the political parties preferred to strut the international stage or distract themselves with virtue signalling over issues of marginal relevance to regular people, the ‘normies’. They spent everything the Thatcher reforms had provided on aggressive interventions in Muslim countries and on expanding the state, building bureaucracies not businesses.

Today, following 35 years of Labour, Conservative/Liberal and Conservative governments, we are poorer (and not merely relatively), more divided and less well-governed. Notwithstanding our many talented people in scientific, technology, creative and financial industries – to say nothing of social and public services – there is widespread agreement among dispassionate observers, that:

• Our debt is overwhelming; politicians have spent the security of future generations in buying votes[2] or wicked interventions abroad.
• We are de-developing, in that we have de-skilled much of our economy by losing the great industries that made us the workshop of the world, and selling off the new enterprises that might have grown to replace them.
• Politicians have deliberately increased the costs of energy for ideological reasons, rendering exports uncompetitive and the normies impoverishing. We are dependent on potentially hostile powers[3] for too much of our energy.
• In many respects, we still have an underperforming education system, which is not capable of recharging a modern economy.

Thus we find ourselves today in a situation in which every informed person – perhaps everybody – knows that we are going down the tubes, but that, although they chant the mantra of ‘growth, growth, growth’ the political parties have no idea how to deliver that or else are unwilling to take measures that are essential but may mean they get defeated at the next election. What happened in China after 1990?

 

CHINA: From 1990 to today

Today the China I first saw as a wreck is the world’s largest producer of industrial goods and global leader in a vast range of industries, including

 

• solar energy manufacturing,
• motor and electric vehicles,
• robotics,
• telecommunications,
• computers and
• chemicals.

 

In sum, China has a lead in new high-tech industries like renewable energy and consumer electronics, clean technology, power generation and drones.

 

Today, “Chinese firms are on track to master the most sophisticated, technological goods produced by the United States, Europe, and other parts of Asia.”[4]

 

Living standards have improved immensely. When my Chinese students come back to the UK on holiday, they are affluent and confident, married with homes and cars of their own, with enough funds to support their parents and live well. Few young Brits feel so secure.

 

HOW DID CHINA GET TO THIS PLACE, AND SO QUICKLY?

 

One answer must be that the years of Mao had so reduced almost everybody that desperation drove everybody on to superhuman efforts.

 

That desperation had to be channelled. And so it was: after Deng’s SOUTHERN PROGRESS, the government did channel the peoples’ energies with a few early decisions – let’s call them infrastructure decisions:

 

1. Social infrastructure
2. Cognitive infrastructure
3. Material infrastructure

 

Social infrastructure: DEMOCRACY

You could call it democracy, not in the sense of electoral democracy but in the sense that government doesn’t take control, it provides the conditions in which people can do things themselves.

First, the normies were set free to make of life whatever their skills and energy could help them make. Regulation and control was minimal.

Second, the lanyard class – officials and civil servants – were transformed from naysayers and bed blockers into innovators and stimulators.

[STORY : A few years ago, I visited a former student of mine when she was hoping to set up a new company on a little industrial estate based in historic buildings in central Beijing. The local planning and development officer arrived when I was there and asked her what help she needed, whether she needed a government grant to move in and whether he could assist her in applying for the licence. I had recently had a bruising time with planning officers when I was trying to open a school in one of two historic buildings in two London local authorities. The officials couldn’t care a toss about enterprise or job creation and took many months and colossal fees to be utterly negative about our applications].

I learnt from that comparison that civil servants in China were mandated to facilitate enterprise, not sit on committees and ponder until everybody’s forgotten the question or the applicant has gone bankrupt.

Third, there were high quality, well-educated decision-makers – government ministers and industrial leaders – with a very clear idea of the priorities of normies. They were to have practical experience, be selected meritocratically and not because they belonged to an ethnic group or ideological sect.  Their ministers were usually engineers by trade and thought long-term.

Fourth, vast resources have been poured into education such that China now has the largest skilled workforce in the world, able to transform itself again and again according to the exigencies of the market and the strategies of the government.

The government is not above curbing the greed and selfishness of the business classes. Fortunately, it has, among the business leaders, socially aware men like Ren Zhengfei of Huawei who converted the company he made into a cooperative like John Lewis.

 No, China does not have electoral democracy as we understand it, but it has nevertheless been very beneficial for the normies. At least until recently, but I won’t talk yet about some of the bad decisions of the last few years because I want Britain to learn from the good ones.

 

Cognitive infrastructure: FIDELITY

 

Chinese planners have not forgotten the human factor: that systems work or don’t work according to the input of people. So the quality and confidence of the people are fundamental. Education matters. Not just skills education, but values too.

 

Some of my university colleagues used to say that Chinese students only memorize things by rote and can never participate in a discussion. They don’t say that anymore.  In science and business China has shown its people are among the most productive and innovative in the world. The Chinese students of the creative industries, drama, and so forth have become much more expressive as debating, drama and experimental arts have been encouraged in Chinese schools and undergraduate courses, so that it’s fair to say that they can be the most creative of all the students on those arts and media courses, of the London universities I know well, and doubtless elsewhere also.

 

The other thing that impresses me about many of the Chinese students is their knowledge of their own culture and respect for their own civilization. If you probe Chinese students of science or maths, you are very likely to find that he or she has a good repertoire of classical poetry, of philosophical references and may be able to write good calligraphy and paint as well. This will be combined with quite a thorough knowledge, not only of the principal facts of China’s very long history, but also acquaintanceship with the great novels, poems, and folk tales of their culture.

 

Let me remind you that this is only 50 years since Mao tried to utterly eradicate China’s civilisation and civility and replace it by fantasies dreamed up in London’s Soho in the 19^th century. Marxist ideology has been rejected and the values of Chinese civilisation are re-emerging. In one of the best TV drama series China has ever produced, the 2018 Like A Flowing River 大江大河 the whole story  is told of how mere villagers overcame communist officials to rebuild China.

 

Making money is very important, as you would expect in a society where most people have been struggling to survive rather than indulging themselves. But greed is tempered by responsibility to family members. This often extends to the other communities to which they belong, whether schools, colleges, villages, temples or provinces.

 

The relentless pragmatism, determination to survive, is illustrated in another very great 2012 TV drama series A Wenzhou Family. 温州一家人. This tale of a destitute family and its vicissitudes probably shows us how Chinese like to see themselves as heroes in a mighty struggle to survive. And not only Chinese but people from  Singapore, S. Korea, Taiwan and many other parts of East and South Asia.

 

Amin Maalouf has written[5] movingly of the humiliation of feeling your culture and identity worthless.  The CCP rubbished Chinese identity, tore down its monuments, declared that China’s past had been all vile. This incurred them the hatred of millions, who have gradually reinstated their culture and expressed pride in it. As demonstrations around the UK have shown very recently, many Britons too are angry that their leaders appear not to respect or care for their own country’s identity and the civilisation our forebears created over the last 1000 years. Scotland is probably not in nearly such a bad way as England because we are famously patriotic and even nationalistic. Yet there has been a tendency in recent years to denigrate the Scottish achievement and find flaws in the Scottish Enlightenment whose thinkers did so much to liberate the world from superstition and suffering. Instead of celebrating the diffusion of concepts of human rights and empirical reasoning by the pioneers of the Scottish empire, they have slighted it. And yet, being happy in your community’s identity is an important foundation for life, inspiration and motivator. China’s civilisation began to return, despite the CCP ‘progressives’ when the people had had enough of its cultural denigration.

 

Let’s leave the abstractions for the more concrete: the simplicity of the Chinese tax system and relatively simple regulation mean that, rather than resenting the impositions of government, people can feel that they are being treated fairly and are even willing to pay their taxes rather than pay accountants to avoid them[6].

 

Getting people to think long-term, in other words not for purely personal selfish reasons to satisfy their immediate ambitions and greed is not difficult in China, where the multi-generational family has long been in the main purpose of life. The communist revolution may have weakened family bonds, and that was certainly its intention. However,  in some ways, because of the widespread persecution of individuals, family bonds have become even more important than before and the majority of businesses are family business. This is yet another indication of social cohesion.

 

Finally, to help people feel invested in the revolution, the government has curbed negative influences – violence and pornography – from social media, prohibited certain unhealthy video games, strictly controlled drugs and encouraged family interdependence by making the generations responsible for each other.

 

Material infrastructure: DEVELOPMENT

 

Privatization and contraction of state-owned enterprises was part of the  material infrastructure, creating space for enterprise. De-regulation also helped foster the private sector and bring in foreign investment, reassuring them that they were to work in a market economy.

 

As we entered the 2000s, the national emphases were on

 

• self-sufficiency, or security in all essentials
• never abandoning the real economy, never de-industrialising
• transforming China into a technological leader and turning China’s national champion firms into global ones.

 

The Chinese government

1. picked the right sectors
2. backed this vision with enormous financial support, spending 1 to 2% of GDP each year on direct and indirect subsidies, cheap credit, and tax breaks.
3. invested in the deep infrastructure (underlying physical systems and human expertise) that enables innovation and efficient production. It created an innovation ecosystem centred on powerful electricity and digital networks
4. established a massive workforce with advanced manufacturing knowledge. This may be Beijing‘s greatest economic asset.
5. built a domestic Internet that rapidly connected virtually the entire population while blocking undesirable content.
6. got its firms to pioneer the mobile Internet. Top platforms, such as Bytedance, Alibaba and TenCent became world class innovators. Huawei became the world’s leading producer of 5G equipment. It is also one of China’s leading semiconductor innovators, after investing billions in replacing American chips.

 

 

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ALL THIS?[7]

 

The UK needs to set up its innovation ecosystem for the years ahead.

 

We must start thinking in ecosystem terms, as China does; for the UK, that means above all raising standards in education and linking it to the economy.

 

We have long-standing strengths in entrepreneurship and finance, so state led investments in modern deep infrastructure are likely to have big payoffs, just as investments in railroads and highways in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 

Large scale infrastructure projects can stimulate demand for different technologies and create the process knowledge needed to build them, which are crucial first steps in rebuilding the manufacturing base. A top priority should be building a bigger and better electricity system that makes use of nuclear power, natural gas, and renewable energy sources.

 

Because we have high labour costs, environmental standards, we will never be able to compete with China or India in labour costs, and should not try. Anyway, Asian industries are increasingly robotic, making humans superfluous. We need to make our markets attractive for capital intensive sectors.

 

We have to rebuild our process knowledge because much of that knowledge has gone abroad, and we must be willing to import it.

It is not just economic planners who should be involved. We need a whole-society approach to the rejuvenation of our economy:

• There needs to be agreement on long term vs short term goals; all plans must consider the forthcoming generations
• We need loose 5 year plans – not to impose inflexible targets but to help us evaluate
• Decentralisation, giving towns and cities the responsibility for development
• Standards in education need to be raised, focussing on knowledge-based education, respecting the best that has been thought and written in both European and Chinese civilisations. STEM subjects should come first when tax payer funds are allocated.
• We need an ideological change: Right now the chattering classes redeploy their imperialist and missionary mindset in telling Asians and Africans how to be virtuous. Just as they ruined Afghanistan, Syria and Libya so that they could claim to be virtuous heroes, so they today sacrifice our normies and future generations as they play lady bountiful to millions. Our political class needs, at last, to put the interests of the normies front and centre: their defence, their health, their sustenance, their futures. We need leaders with a development mindset.

 

CONCLUSION

 

If what I said today sounds like a condemnation of our own country and eulogy of China, then please note that I have no desire to copy a very different society. What I’m saying is that, just as Chinese have come over here since the early 19^th century to see what they could learn in developing their own country, so we now must do the same in Asia – and not just look at China, but Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and, increasingly, India.

 

Since 1949 Chinese politicians have made some terrible errors, usually because of the failure of its political system to be transparent and to hold dictatorial leaders to account. Our country has different failings: we elect inadequates and then paralyse them with sneers.

 

Collectivisation cost the lives of tens of millions; even before that appalling error, nationalisation of independent companies, industries and civil society had wrecked China’s economy; the Three Gorges dam project arguably will be paid for in the lives of future generations; the one-child policy, introduced from 1979, has had disastrous consequences from which we need to learn, particularly since the proportion of one child families in the UK  is rising  rapidly; the crushing of investigative journalism in China allows scandals and cruelties to go unchecked.

 

We smugly compare our level of corruption with that of Asian countries but forget that financial corruption is only one form of corruption. There is also political corruption, making decisions because they benefit your party or your voters even if they are detrimental to regular people. Our politicians are very guilty.

 

English language civilization has, despite its many flaws, produced the societies which most people in the world want to emulate or immigrate to because of their relative openness and tolerance and inclusiveness. It did so because, as early as the 14th century, England was economically successful. Scotland began to share, then enhance, that success after the Act of Union.

 

Britain was able to build on the ideas of the enlightenment to create the industrial and scientific revolutions, and then to spread rationality and empiricism around the globe[8].

 

In many ways, it is China that has become the rational and pragmatic society, while the United Kingdom is mired in ideological squabbles with a purblind political class, seemingly unable to respond to the changes in the world around us.

 

In human affairs, since modernity and accelerating with globalisation, social media and AI, change is unceasing and exponential. Fortunately, it is easier than ever before to learn from other peoples, not merely those that speak English.

 

And if there is one country from whose successes and failures we can glean most, surely it is China.

 

[1] I should also say that my mother also taught at other schools, Including a private school. Also that many of the youngsters from Kesgrave Secondary Modern fell on their feet thanks to the excellent inculcation of basic skills of English, arithmetic and self-discipline. When I returned to see my mother in Woodbridge, I used often to be approached by her former pupils – a gas fitter, a school cleaner, an ex-Marine and a carpet salesman.

[2] The most lucid and empirical report of the negligence of our political class is contained in Johnson, Paul (2023) Follow the Money New York: Little, Brown. The dangerous state of debt can be understood from the 2023 OBR report https://obr.uk/frs/fiscal-risks-and-sustainability-july-2023/#Section-1, accessed 051023.

[3] ‘The combination of having to buy more expensive natural gas from Qatar and the United States losing access to China’s lucrative market for European cars, machinery, and luxury goods could cause Europe to deindustrialize.’ Sikorsky, Radek: Europe’s real test is yet to come. Foreign Affairs, July-August 2023.

[4] Wang D and Kroeber A (2025) The real China model in Foreign Affairs September/October 2025 Vol 104, Number 5

[5] Maalouf, Amin (1998) On Identity, London: The Harvell Press, p62 and passim

 

[6] I am myself simplifying and I have not adjusted in the light of the changes of the past 10 years, because I want to learn from the early decisions and not the later ones.

[7] I have drawn, for specific examples, heavily upon a particularly fecund volume of articles in Foreign Affairs September/October 2025 Vol 104, Number 5

 

[8] That is virtually a quote from Kishore Mahbubani