In Brief…
This blog is about geopolitics, culture, and strategy and how they interact. Its focus is on what the trends of our age mean for Britain, it's society, and its interests.
At Length…
We are living through geopolitical, technological, and social transformations unknown in living memory in the West. Xi Jinping, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, describes these transformations as ‘great changes unseen in one hundred years’, likening the conditions in which China continues to rise and US influence to decline to those which precipitated America’s eclipse of the British Empire.
These geopolitical changes are accompanied by shifts in technology, especially social media and AI, which coupled with economic stagnation, demographic change, and political dislocation are reshaping how we think about self, mind, body, and society. Everything is changing at every level, from individual psychology to the global order.
Xi is correct in pointing to the historic nature of those changes, but he understates them. A century and a half ago, another Chinese statesman, Li Hongzhang, described the total transformation of his country in the face of the industrial European powers as ‘great changes unseen in millennia’. What we find ourselves in today is a process more aking to Li’s diagnosis than to Xi’s. To deal with the present we must look to history beyond the twentieth century, to other times when the world transformed or turned upside down.
The advent of new technologies across information processing (AI, social media, and quantum computing), mass production (AI and robotics), and energy (green technology and nuclear fusion) coincides with the rise of China as a leader in each area and as a superpower with global reach. The last time such a combination of technologies combined with a new rising power was in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when Britain’s growing dominance of international trade and burgeoning ability to project military power combined with the industrial revolution to propel it to global dominance in a way which fundamentally transformed both the international order and the nature of every society it touched.
Previously dominant empires like Qing China were unable to deal with this onslaught, particularly when it combined with growing domestic problems. Today, Western democracies seeking to deal with a resurgent China are beset by analogous internal challenges from eroding social cohesion to government dysfunction to collapsing productivity. For the Qing, clinging to old ideas and failing to understand the cultural as well as political and economic changes brought about by new technologies wielded by another civilisation proved to be their downfall. Chinese society underwent a century of colonial depredation, dependence on hostile states, civil war, interethnic conflict, and bloody revolution.
Today in Britain, as we stand in the face of similarly profound changes, we should heed the lessons of that history. Successive governments have proven unable to begin to deal with the coincidence of the domestic failure of late-20th century liberalism, the advent of technologies which will have knock-on effects on the order of the Reformation and Industrial Revolution, and the need to navigate a world increasingly influenced by the strategic priorities of a non-Western, non-democratic superpower which is shaping the direction of new technology across the world. We are not thinking enough about how to adapt.
Why subscribe?
There are plenty of blogs documenting the latest geopolitical and technological developments from week to week. This is not one of them. Instead it is about the bigger questions those developments raise for nations and the people who inhabit them. There are good sources out there on geopolitics and technology and the relationship between technology and culture - but few that look at the mutual influence of all three.
Writing as a British citizen, I believe that if my country is to navigate the great changes in a way which best secures the interests of its people, then culture is central. Economic gain, technological progress, and geopolitical posturing mean little if people lack a sense of rootedness, meaning, and solidarity.
I approach this as someone who works on the geopolitics of China and UK China strategy, with a professional background in think tanks, defence AI, and academic anthropology. I think this combination brings an unusual perspective; if it sounds like an interesting one, please click ‘Subscribe’.
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About William Matthews
I am interested in human behaviour and history, and my work has always had something to do with China. I did a PhD in anthropology on the relationship between reasoning and worldviews and perceptions of mind and body in Chinese fortune-telling, taught the comparative social science of China at LSE, worked in private sector geopolitical risk and defence AI, and was a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House. I like military history, wargaming, and folk horror.
I have written widely on China’s geopolitical influence, including a report setting out how I think Britain should approach its relationship with China, published by Chatham House. My work has appeared in the Critic, the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, Nikkei, UnHerd, and elsewhere.
I am the author of a book on culture, cognition, and worldviews based on my PhD research. It’s called Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology through Chinese Divination, published by Berghahn Books.
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