Why the British Ruling Class Needs a Chinese Enemy

A new Cold War is being declared—without debate and without any of the apparently existential stakes that made the first one seem remotely sane. Instead of at Bolshevism, our ruling class now points at China. The declared cause is human rights and the “rules-based order.” The real motive, as always, is the preservation of a decaying oligarchy whose power depends on perpetual crisis. The absurdity of this new confrontation is that where Britain and America once feared revolutionary communism, we are now asked to fear shipbuilding contracts and container ports.

China is not our enemy. But the British regime needs it to be.

Let us begin with the fantasy. In the mainstream imagination, fed daily by think-tanks with Atlanticist donors and intelligence agencies moonlighting as journalists, China is a totalitarian juggernaut. It censors, it spies, it steals. It bullies neighbours. It arms for conquest. It is poised to invade Taiwan, crush dissent, and rewrite the global order in its own despotic image. That is the cartoon—painted in lurid colours by men who profit from fear.

Now compare the data. China built 250 merchant ships last year, against America’s five. It owns 50% of global shipbuilding capacity and supplies 97% of the world’s rare earths. Its Belt and Road Initiative has funded infrastructure in 140 countries. It has lifted over 800 million people out of poverty, mostly through trade and industry rather than handouts. Its territorial claims, however disputable, are focused on waters that carry $5.6 trillion of annual trade—much of it Chinese. It invests. It builds. It imports. It exports.

This is not how empires behave. This is how civilisations behave. But the sight of China succeeding without liberal democracy—without feminism and without Pride parades—scandalises the priesthood of modern “liberalism.” For them, a non-Western country that outperforms the West is not just inconvenient. It is blasphemy. Worse still, it threatens the foundational myth of post-war global order: that Western values equal universal prosperity.

That this is nonsense hardly matters. The regime that governs us does not need truth. It needs narrative. And when its own record—deindustrialisation, atomisation, stagnation—becomes indefensible, it must invent monsters to justify itself. The China threat is not geopolitical. It is theological. China’s very existence disproves the sacred link between “democracy” and success.

And so the British elite, which has turned its own country into a fiscal theme park and its people into beggars, reaches for confrontation. Sanctions, naval deployments, press briefings from the Pentagon reprinted by the BBC—these are not strategies of security. They are symptoms of decline. The enemy is not Chinese power, but Chinese example.

Our regime fears not Chinese aggression, but Chinese restraint. China has no plans to invade Cornwall or Scotland. It has no ideological missionaries. It does not fund NGOs to reform British policing into woke militias, or promote transgenderism in our schools. It does not fund terrorist proxies or drop bombs on children from invisible drones. It merely exists—and prospers.

This is intolerable to a ruling class whose entire legitimacy rests on the notion that there is no alternative. For the system to survive, China must be made into something it is not. Its railways become Trojan horses. Its students become spies. Its Confucian sobriety becomes Orwellian surveillance. Its port leases become imperial bases. The endgame is not truth. It is escalation. The goal is not to win a war, but to create one.

What we are watching, then, is not a diplomatic quarrel. It is a psychological projection. The British ruling class, whose only product is financial abstraction, cannot look at China’s vast industrial rebirth without a shiver of self-hatred. And so it must be transformed into hatred of the Other. China becomes a mirror that must be shattered.

The beneficiaries of this new sinophobia are always the same: arms contractors, party donors, war-gaming academics, and the City of London parasites who sponsor them. They see a new Cold War not as disaster but as opportunity. War justifies spending. It justifies censorship. It justifies the continued dominance of a class that has produced nothing but decline.

The losers are equally familiar. They are the British poor, whose cost of living will rocket when China retaliates against sanctions. They are the workers, whose jobs depend on imported Chinese components. They are the students, who benefit from Chinese research partnerships. They are the teachers, who bring the glories of Greek and Latin grammar to a vast and most appreciative market. They are the consumers, who rely on affordable Chinese goods to offset the economic vandalism of their own rulers.

If war comes, it will not be fought for freedom. It will be fought for reputation. The regime would rather ruin the economy than admit that its model has failed. It would rather risk annihilation than give up its grip on the narrative.

There is no British interest in a quarrel with China. We do not share a border. We do not compete for colonies. We are not threatened with invasion. To disentangle ourselves, then, from Donald Trump’s crusade is not weakness. It is sanity. Let America bankrupt itself on destroyers and hypersonic missiles it cannot build. Let Australia chain itself to AUKUS and nuclear submarines it will never finish. Let the EU dream of carbon tariffs on Chinese goods it cannot replace. We should quietly walk away. Cut our defence budget. Exit entangling alliances. Let China trade and build. Let us buy from it, sell to it, learn from it, and avoid provoking it. This is not appeasement. This is realism.

It is often said that we cannot support China because it is not liberal. But what has “liberalism” done for us? It has given us surveillance laws, speech controls, mass immigration without consultation, and an unpayable debt burden. It has turned our cities into slums and our children into dependents. Whatever its faults, China does not pretend to be free while jailing citizens for speech. It does not pretend to be democratic while ignoring every vote. Its authoritarianism is honest and rather limited. Ours is hypocritical and growing.

So China is not our enemy. Our enemy is the clique that wishes us to believe it is. They need China not as a threat, but as a scapegoat. They need a war not to win it, but to survive amid its noise. We do not need a war with China: we need a war with the people who are trying to give us one.