How will Xi respond to popular protests against China's Zero-Covid policy? He won't want to show weakness but an over-reaction to understandable frustration with seemingly endless lockdowns could backfire. This is a great test of his leadership.1/7 China's performance on Covid remains extraordinary, especially compared to the West's abject record. But we are now in a new phase of Covid. It is far more transmissible and a lot more widespread. Lockdowns have, as a result, become far more costly.2/7

With regard to Covid deaths, China has hugely outperformed the West. China's total is 5,226 deaths, the US 1.05 million. China prioritised life, the West the economy. It was a huge embarrassment for the West. The West has never had the humility to acknowledge China's success.1/6 The West is still playing the same game, denigrating China's zero tolerance policy, decrying China's lockdowns. The crucial argument now is no longer about the number of deaths but the number of infections. The West believes that infections don't matter.2/6

It will take a long time to digest the longer-term meaning of the Pelosi debacle and China's response. This was a profoundly important event. Never before has China demonstrated such military will and capacity. Nothing can be the same again. 1/7 The US was utterly unprepared for such a response. Pelosi's visit was an inept display of division and miscalculation. America and the Taiwanese regime were the big losers. What will it mean? Let me speculate.2/7

The Pelosi visit must be seen in the context of the dramatic failure of US foreign policy since 9/11: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and increasingly Ukraine. Why? As a superpower in decline, it no longer controls or shapes the world as it used to. It has lost its compass.1/5 We now live in the Age of Instability. The aura of authority the US once had is draining away. Most countries are aware of this and increasingly make policy in full knowledge of it. Ukraine is a classic example. Europe followed the US but most of the developing world has not.2/5

For months the Western propaganda machine told us Russia had miscalculated, faced military humiliation, would suffer a huge economic crisis, and Putin would fall. Then the non-stop triumphalism began to wane, news became scarce. From wall to wall coverage, the BBC fell silent 1/7 In fact, the West has miscalculated on an epic scale with the most profound and far-reaching consequences. How could the West have got it so wrong? Because they think the world is still somehow dominated by the West as it was for so long. That is history not the present. 2/7

1. My son, Ravi, was meant to be studying at Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. Instead, he has been very ill in London for the last 10 months with #LongCovid. 1/4 He spends around 16 hours a day resting in bed with chronic fatigue. Long Covid has deprived him of anything resembling a normal life. He is a pale shadow of what he was a year ago. 2/4

1 The West is in deep trouble over Covid. It was brutally exposed in 2020 as totally ill-prepared and unwilling to take the kind of measures required. Nearly two years on, in the face of Omicron, the West is once more found hugely wanting. 2 It is not just a failure of Western governments. This is a crisis of liberal values and ideology. It is most blatant in the home of Western individualism, the United States and also the UK, with their extraordinarily high death rates.

China is constantly under-estimated in the West. The two latest initiatives - taming tech and common prosperity - are of huge significance, for China and also for the West. They have received little coverage. Yet they are two of the most important reforms of the Xi era. They are a reminder of the sheer dynamism of Chinese governance that lies behind the country's transformation. Take tech regulation. Taming tech is a crucial issue for China and the US. In the US there has been zero action. In China they will now be subject to heavy regulation

The juxtaposition this week of the AUKUS pact and China's decision to apply to join the CPTPP trade agreement is hugely revealing. In the court of global public opinion, China wins hands down.
Thread ↓↓↓↓↓ 1. AUKUS is a military pact. It is a typical cold war mentality. Whatever the problem, the US always thinks first in military terms. The fundamental cause of its waning influence in East Asia is economic. It is a global hegemon that is increasingly out of touch with the world.

The new military pact signed by the US, UK and Australia is aimed at China. Far from improving relations it will worsen them. It is straight from the Cold War playbook. But far from being a sign of strength it is a demonstration of the West's weakness in East Asia. Thread ↓↓ 1 It fails to understand why support for the US in East Asia has been in decline and China's has risen greatly. The reason is economic not military. The US economic presence is shrinking: China the opposite. Look at Belt and Road. Yet this is a military pact. It misses the point

1/5 Suddenly there is frenzied speculation in the West about Covid's origins. Biden has given US intelligence 90 days to report. The right-wing media are blaming a Wuhan lab. In March the WHO investigation team said this was highly unlikely. What's going on? 2/5 We'll probably never know the origin of Covid. It took 14 years to find out about SARS. Ebola remains a mystery. The idea the truth is waiting to be discovered in a Wuhan lab is the stuff of fantasy. Scientific opinion overwhelmingly believes its causes were natural.

1/7 The Great Western Regression on China began around 2016. For more than a decade, there had been a curiosity about China's transformation. Then the doors slammed shut. An open mind was replaced by the Closed Mind. The Great Retreat into the past began. 2/7 Cold War categories replaced serious thinking. China is the USSR. The Chinese CP was synonymous with the CPSU. The CPSU failed: so will the CPC. The USSR is history: China will be the same. The Closed Mind reigns. You don't need to know about China. Just parrot old cliches.

1/6 Isolate China! Build a broad alliance of democracies! So where to start? Five Eyes, of course: US, UK, Australia, Canada and NZ. Anglo-Saxons together. Four former settler colonies. English their mother tongue. This is not a statement of strength but an admission of weakness. 2/6 The axis of the West used to be the US and Europe. What has become of Europe? The new EU-China Investment Treaty suggests Europe is not in the business of ganging up on China. Merkel understands the world (and China) better than the Anglo-Saxon crusaders who prefer the past.

1/4 100,000 dead in the UK. 400,00 dead in the US. Apart from New Zealand, every Western liberal democracy has failed. This is the worst crisis of Western liberal democracy since the 1930s. But this is not simply a failure to deal with the pandemic. Its roots lie in globalisation 2/4 The pandemic is a product of globalisation. So is the rise of China. Globalisation has enabled modernisation to take off big time in the developing world. The Western economies are declining with remarkable speed. That is the underlying reason why US democracy is in crisis.

1/7 What is the West's response to China's remarkable handling of Covid-19? The answer is simple. Ignore it. In the beginning, the UK govt included the Chinese figures at its media conferences. Then they disappeared. A bit later S. Korea vanished too. It was all too embarrassing. 2/7 The strategy is either to ignore China and pretend it doesn't exist (no figures, no news) or demonise it. As a result it is now virtually impossible to read anything serious about China (or East Asia) in the Western media. There is the odd sensible piece but only rarely.

1/6 The West faces a perfect storm. 1. It has failed on the pandemic; a systemic failure of liberal democracy; 2. Its economies are mired in deep recession, while China's races ahead; 3. And now, as we can see, the US is facing its worst political crisis since the Civil War. 2/6 I have argued that 2020 will be seen as the year of the Great Transition, when the majority of the world's population come to view China as the new global leader. The breakdown of the US political system will greatly accelerate that process.

1/8 Britain is in almost complete lockdown. Nine months since the first. Europe is closing its borders to the British. Across Europe the pandemic is worsening. The US has over 300,000 dead. Far from getting better, the situation in the West is getting worse. The West has failed. 2/8 At what point will the West wake up to the fact this is an historic crisis of Western government, society and culture? Without a vaccine, the West has shown that it cannot deal with the virus. It has been forced to admit defeat and live with it. And it is losing the battle.

1/8 The year started with a major Western assault on China over its handling of Covid-19. China was on the defensive. 2020 is ending with China riding high and the West in a huge mess. The most obvious reason is that China handled Covid brilliantly and the West failed miserably. 2/8 But it is much more than that. The West finds itself in a profound existential crisis which is multi-dimensional. The decline of its global hegemony is the most important factor. It can't come to terms with or accept China's rise. Three countries illustrate the West's crisis.

The last nine impoverished counties, all in southwest China's Guizhou Province, have just eliminated absolute poverty. China's target was to eliminate all absolute poverty by the end of 2020. It has succeeded. A marvellous achievement. China has now taken over 800m out of poverty China's record on human rights meets with a chorus of Western criticism. But it is silent on China's achievements on the abolition of poverty. Yet the right to eat and survive is the second most important human right of all.

1/6 There have been three ways of tackling Covid-19. Only one has been successful, that of China and East Asia. One has been a disaster, that of the United States. That of Europe, the third has, in varying degrees, been an abject failure. 2/6 Remember the scurrilous attacks on China's handling of coronavirus in Jan-March, accused of cover-up, secrecy, not caring for human life, prioritising the survival of the regime. They have fallen almost silent. The reason: China has done brilliantly, the West disastrously

1/7 We will remember 2020 as the moment of the Great Transition. The year when China replaced the US as the world's leading power. 2008 accelerated US decline and China's rise. Ever since the gap has remorselessly closed. But 2020 will prove far more significant. 2/7 2020 is the year when the depth of America's crisis became clear to all: an incompetent president, a political system not fit for purpose, a society unable to come to terms with a pandemic. A pandemic is like war. It tests governments, systems and cultures to destruction.