7Æ
ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELLchanges that came with Nixon’s visit in
1972, though more extensive informal
links did commence with Japan.
Instead, China became part of the new
socialist economy centred on the USSR;
however, that also became more fraught
after the political split between Mao and
Khrushchev in the early 1960s.
The reopening of diplomatic relations
between the US and China in 1979
heralded a more mutually beneficial
trading relationship. President Ronald
Reagan’s US was happy to create debt
as it issued dollar bills, and paramount
leader Deng Xiaoping’s China was even
happier to abandon much of the
Soviet-style command economy to
produce goods that Americans could
buy with those dollars. The mutual
dependency that historian Niall
Ferguson called “Chimerica” had begun.knowledge. But the conventional
wisdom that China has to steal
information because it’s not capable of
innovating is no longer true. Today,
corporate powerhouses such as Huawei
(producing mobile phones), Hikvision
(CCTV) and Megvii (artificial
intelligence), strongly connected to the
Communist Party-run state, are
producing world-leading virtual reality,
AI and 5G technology. This has made
the west profoundly nervous, as recent
controversies over Huawei’s role in the
UK’s telecom network have shown.
China’s status as an innovator
is not new either. Inventions such as
paper, gunpowder and the compass
were developed in China. But China
also played an important role in the
circulation of global goods from the
early modern era onward. In the
17th century, the mass reproduction
of porcelain goods (‘china’) from
factories in places such as Jingdezhen,Yet closer trade relations don’t always
mean closer diplomatic relations. In the
past four decades, China has become
richer and more tied in to the global
economy, but it has become a major
military power, too; it also retains
strong barriers to entry into its domestic
markets, particularly in sensitive areas
such as internet services (Google,
Facebook and Twitter are all banned in
China). This has created new tensions
between the US and China.
In the 20th century, China’s role in
global trade was mainly as a manufac-
turer of goods. Its contemporary
prosperity is based in large part on the
fact that in the 1990s a large proportion
of the world’s furniture, clothing, and
toys were stamped ‘made in China’. But
in this century China has become not
just a producer but also an innovator.
It’s become well-known that China has
been taking intellectual property from
its partners, often without theirChina remembers
well the ‘century of
humiliation’, from
the mid-19th
century to 1930,
when the world
was able to order
China around
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