Cold War Two is real, and Xi’s spies can track you down anywhere

The man sat down opposite me as our train glided through the snow in Switzerland. Early forties, Caucasian, winter gear, backpack. He saw that I was reading a novel about the Kremlin. Then he got out his phone and stuck it under my nose so that I could see an article about the author on his screen.
“Good book?” he asked in French. I said a curt yes. The Swiss, generally, do not strike up conversations with perfect strangers on trains. Most of them would rather ski backwards down the Matterhorn in the buff than do so. But this fellow was talkative.
What did I think of Ukraine? Bad business. Russia? The same. The Middle East? I shrugged. China? Ah, now that was something else. I was finishing a biography of the enigmatic “Red Emperor”, Xi Jinping, and I was on my way to catch a flight to Taiwan to watch an election there. But I decided I wasn’t going to tell this curious passenger about that.
What did I do? Retired, I said. Where was I going? On holiday. He switched to English. He said he was a Swiss-American doctor keen on international affairs. Oh, and he’d been all over — Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Hong Kong, the Far East — but most of the time he worked in a hospital in the Bernese Highlands.
Yeah, right, I thought, retreating into a glacial Anglo-Swiss silence. He got off, and I caught my flight from Zurich. During the overnight journey to Taipei it dawned on me. I’d heard a replay of my career profile and places I’d worked as a foreign correspondent. And I’d spent a month writing a book in those Bernese mountains.
It was my phone. I had used a supposedly super-encrypted app to talk to Chinese and American sources. Someone had cracked the app, got the number, traced my recent movements, found my travel booking and decided to check me out. This wasn’t a random hacker. Welcome to le Carré-land in Cold War Two.
It was always a hard ask to write the life story of a dictator who leads a secretive, nuclear-armed superpower and the world’s second economy. But even after 20 years of reporting on China for The Sunday Times, I was surprised by what I found out.
I used to think Xi was different from his supposed friend Vladimir Putin. OK, we all knew the Kremlin was a criminal enterprise run by gangsters and KGB spooks. But China wasn’t so bad — it was a government, a party and an army organised on strong institutional lines with Xi as manager-in-chief, much admired by some in the West.
Except that it isn’t like that at all. Behind the façade of the Communist Party, family mafias struggle for power amid murder, corruption and sex scandals. Ministers and generals vanish in purges, technocrats abase themselves, bankers disappear into the vaults of state security and tycoons fall into line or go into exile. Suicides and deaths in custody are routine; foreign firms face raids and arbitrary arrests. No one is safe from an all-seeing surveillance apparatus, perfected during Covid-19. Everyone has to parrot “Xi Jinping thought”, a set of third-rate banalities written to celebrate the emperor’s genius.
Above it all, Xi is an absolute ruler. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China moved towards economic reform and collective leadership. Now it has gone backwards. The state is supreme. Xi has restored the power of a few — a red aristocracy of princelings headed by his own clan, which is worth at least $400 million.
You could say we knew all that. But I didn’t realise how brutal and terrifying it is to be one of the Chinese elite. Even the rich live on a precipice. “In China, power is power,” one of them told me. “The reality is money doesn’t matter. These people at the top have things that no sum of money can buy.”I found out that Xi’s first wife, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to London in the late 1970s, had fled to Britain after they divorced. For decades she was able to travel back and forth to China. She entertained exile dinner parties with her anecdotes and was seen with a new man in arty circles in the city of Chengdu. But in 2019 she returned to Beijing for her father’s funeral and since then has not been seen in public again.
Xi’s path to power is littered with victims. A billionaire who helped his relatives hide their wealth — but unwisely bragged about it — was kidnapped from Hong Kong and vanished for five years before a show trial and prison. Another died of a “heart attack” aged 44 just before his release from jail. A notorious smuggler who may have entertained a younger Xi to the karaoke-and-massage delights of his “Red Mansion” is also behind bars.
Then there was the British businessman Neil Heywood. He was found dead in a hotel room in 2011. The wife of Xi’s chief rival, a populist named Bo Xilai, was convicted of his murder, paving the way for Bo’s downfall and dispatch to a maximum-security prison. But I found a wealth of unpublished details that strongly suggest she could not have committed the crime. In private she maintained her innocence. The most credible killer — if Heywood was indeed killed — is one of Xi’s minions in state security.
Foreign governments including our own have long tried to ignore all this stuff on the basis that what happens in China is for the Chinese, while we get on with doing business. But when Covid-19 broke out in the city of Wuhan, the world could not ignore it. My investigation of the politics of the pandemic turned up highly sensitive information. Top US officials in both the Trump and Biden administrations were convinced that it was a “lab leak”.
The origins of Covid are still unproven. But that is because Xi’s regime has systematically obstructed scientific inquiries. I discovered the shocking extent of Chinese influence over the World Health Organisation (WHO) and its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In my book I describe how his German chief of staff, who was a self-professed admirer of Xi, played a key role in negotiating access to China for the WHO’s teams. It was no surprise that one mission came back full of praise for Xi’s pitiless “zero Covid” crackdown, and a second mission stated that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely”.
The WHO rejected three experts nominated by the US government to go to China, preferring to send a controversial British-born scientist, Peter Daszak, who had himself worked on lethal bat coronaviruses with the chief of the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
In the ensuing row, the democracies forced Tedros to backtrack and reshuffle his leadership team. The chief of staff, Bernhard Schwartländer, was moved to another senior role. A few months later he left the WHO — and moved to Beijing. There he is serving as the German government’s global health envoy and has appeared on Chinese propaganda platforms to praise life under Xi.
The “Red Emperor” aims to dominate world trade, to defeat western democracy and to make China the supreme power in the East. Britain has not woken up to the reality that we are already in Cold War Two. That is why the Labour government’s delay in cracking down on suspected hostile agents is dismaying. The game is well afoot when rival intelligence agencies (I hope ours are better than theirs) scour the digital world and can even plant a stranger on a train. Nice tech work, guys — whoever you were — but the human factor could do with an upgrade.
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China is published by Headline Press on Thursday at £25