"It's amazing how China continues these lockdowns for so long - they are incredibly wrenching," says Professor Dali Yang at Chicago University who has been studying the zero-Covid policy Xi has personally endorsed. "In the past, we could always count on China's leaders to be pragmatic about economic policy, and prudent in their foreign policy. We don't see that now," Ms Shirk says. Over the next six months I pedalled across the mountains of Yunnan, wandered the imperial palace in Beijing, and rode a train hauled by two soot-blackened steam engines far west into the deserts of Xinjiang. The landscapes were sublime but the poverty grinding. Everywhere I went people told me how "backward" China was compared to the West. But there were hints of change. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru In 2005 I was handed a DVD smuggled out of a village called Dingzhou in Hebei province. It showed a pitched battle between local farmers and dozens of armed thugs, hired by a state-owned power company, to force them off their land. The farmers had dug deep trenches in their fields. The thugs attacked at dawn opening fire with shotguns and beating the farmers with steel bars. Six were killed. Many of them mention Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer who has been banned from several platforms for his misogynist views. In Arab countries, however, this Manichean narrative is largely rejected. Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) basically view the conflict in Ukraine as a complicated European conflict, which does not require Arab states to stand against Vladimir Putin’s government. Economic growth has shrunk to 2%, the lowest in more than three decades. China's property market is in free fall. Youth unemployment is running at around 20%. A trade war with the US is not helping. And anger has been brewing. These South China Sea islands are only the most daring and visible of Xi's moves to take control of the near abroad. Taiwan could be next.   Despite having been forced out, you also learn a lot about the occupiers just by looking around. Speaking personally, Francois said he was not convinced the British public wanted a fourth election in seven years.