Offline: China—what is to be done?

Abstract

Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss used the word “threat” nine times during her speech in Taiwan last week. She was talking about China. Truss described the Chinese Government as a “tyranny” that sought “to gain power on the global stage”. She insisted that western nations must end dialogue with China since the “globalist model” had failed. Instead, she argued, we needed to recognise that China and the West were engaged in “the most consequential struggle of our time”, in which western countries must use “hard power” for “meaningful deterrence”. On the day Truss gave her speech, I was in Chongqing to learn about plans for the development of a state-of-the-art cancer centre. Chongqing University has over 50 000 students and 5000 faculty. Professor Bo Xu is President of the Chongqing University Cancer Hospital, which began life as a modest district hospital in 1943. Today, it is an 1800-bed specialist centre providing care to 100 000 inpatients and more than 600 000 outpatients annually. The demand for cancer care in China has exploded. Almost 5 million new cases are diagnosed every year. Early detection and treatment programmes are urgently needed. A new campus, to be ready by 2025, will house a 2500-bed cancer hospital, with facilities for proton therapy and precision oncology research. The goal is to develop a world-class cancer research hospital that fosters, despite Truss's injunctions, international collaboration—academic exchange, scientific conferences, and research cooperation with Europe and North America. The G7 Hiroshima Leaders’ final Communiqué rejected Truss's call for a more aggressive stance towards China. Instead, they sought to build “constructive and stable relations”. Rather than withdraw from dialogue, the G7 concluded that “It is necessary to cooperate with China…on global challenges as well as areas of common interest”. They went further, calling on the Chinese Government “to engage with us”, including on global health. The G7 goal was “de-risking and diversifying”, not decoupling. That said, western political leaders promised to engage “candidly” with China, and the Communiqué cited G7 concerns about Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea. These remarks were met with sharp criticism from Chinese authorities. The China Daily wrote that the G7 was nothing more than a “finger-pointing bloc that advertises its own version of world order”. But behind these predictable statements, the actions of Chinese people and government institutions do not conform to western clichés of the kind advanced by Truss. The Chinese academic medical community, for example, is committed to promoting ever closer research cooperation, with the aim of upgrading the quality of China's science and medicine. I visited the China Association for International Exchange of Personnel in Beijing, part of the Ministry of Science and Technology, which exists for exactly this purpose. It is hard to reconcile these competing visions about China—threat or competitor? Daniel Bell's The Dean of Shandong (Princeton University Press, 2023) gives reason to be optimistic. Bell was Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University from 2017 to 2022. He is not a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but rather a Canadian academic who became an expert on Confucius. His book is playfully subtitled “Confessions of a minor bureaucrat at a Chinese university”. He recounts the often amusing errors he made as a westerner seeking to find his way in Chinese academia. But he has an agenda: “I worry about the demonisation of China and especially of its political system.” He is no apologist for the extremes of Chinese communism. He acknowledges recent “worrisome developments”. But he bristles at the “crude stereotypes” western politicians and media deploy. “The reality” of China, he argues, “is much more complex”. His book, an insider's account, aims to explore this complexity. The vilification of China only reinforces the hands of hardliners. Instead, “a more balanced picture of the CCP is necessary”. He wants to encourage “understanding and sympathy” for a people who have made extraordinary economic and social gains in only a few decades, who are mainly extremely hard working, and who share similar hopes for their families and futures as we do. We must certainly be vigilant. But, as Bell suggests, our vigilance should be tempered by humanity and the desire for engagement, not ostracism. Science and medicine have important parts to play in that endeavour.