Get your Strait facts: China’s quiet Taiwan push

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Lucy Letby is notorious. The former British nurse was found guilty of murdering seven babies in hospital and trying to kill six more. But there are increasing questions about the case against her and about Britain's criminal justice system.

And football is just awash with money. Players are brands, clubs are merchandising powerhouses. Salaries are, well, salaries are largely secretary. But what seems clear is that top footballers aren't getting as big a slice of the pie as they once did.

First up, though.

In the burn it all down push going on inside America's government right now stuff is constantly getting removed from government websites. But on the State Department's fact sheet about American relations with Taiwan, there was a change that really, really irked China. This suddenly gone was the wording that said we do not support Taiwan independence. Just like what we heard yesterday about American positions advertised at the Munich Security Conference. This, too, goes against decades of precedent. America, like lots of countries, walks a fine line on this point. Officially, there's a policy to speak of one China that includes Taiwan. But since the 1950s, America has pledged to help the island defend itself, something presidents, including Richard Nixon, have been at pains to point out the United States.

Will and should continue to provide defensive weapons for Taiwan.

Taking a few words off the State Department website messes with this delicate diplomacy. China yesterday called it another example of the US Stubbornly Persisting with its wrong policy and called for correcting the mistake. The Economist has been looking elsewhere, though, how lots of other countries deal with this little geopolitical dance. And our investigation finds that more and more of the world is coming down firmly on the side of the mainland.

We found that dozens of countries have recently changed their position on Taiwan to give broad backing to China's campaign of coercion against the island.

Jeremy Page is our Asia diplomatic editor.

Seventy countries have now officially endorsed both China's sovereignty claim over Taiwan and, more strikingly, all its efforts to achieve unification without specifying that they should be peaceful. And the vast majority of those countries have adopted that new wording in the past 18 months.

So, again, this is diplomacy wrapped up in the language. But when you say the new wording, what do you mean there?

So the wording that I'm talking about can be found particularly in joint statements and communiques between China and other countries, the formal documents that are typically released after their leaders meet or senior officials meet. And often China tries to get other countries to endorse its position on Taiwan. In particular, they try to get it to accept what it calls the One China principle, which is its formula for defining its sovereignty claim to Taiwan.

And your read of this is that China has been really nudging other countries in this direction?

Yes, that's right. There seems to have been a concerted effort by Chinese diplomats in the last couple of years, in particular, to build international support for China's broadening campaign of coercion against Taiwan. We've seen over the same time frame, Chinese authorities have really stepped up their efforts to isolate Taiwan diplomatically and to intimidate it into agreeing to unify with the mainland. One way it's been doing that is by escalating military exercises around the island. I've been speaking to American officials, and they say it doesn't seem like a Chinese military assault on Taiwan is imminent, but their intelligence has suggested for a while that President Xi Jinping has ordered his armed forces to have the capability to invade Taiwan by 2027. So there is a lot of concern about how things play out over the next few years.

And it's sort of interesting that changing the official wording on documents and communiques and readouts and what have you is a way to accomplish something in this diplomacy. I mean, why do you think that's the way China wants to go about it?

I think there's a couple of main reasons. One is that China really wants any actions it takes against Taiwan, be they military or economic, to be seen as legitimate within the international community. So that's why it's been getting other countries to adopt this very specific sort of legalese. Our findings were similar to those from a study by the Lowy Institute, which is an Australian think tank, and that found that 119 countries had endorsed the One China principle. And of those 89 had also backed its unification efforts without specifying if they should be peaceful. And then I think China's other motivation is to try to protect itself from the kind of blanket sanctions that Western officials have recently discussed imposing on China in a Taiwan crisis.

So from what you found here, what are the trends? Which countries, which kinds of countries, in what regions is this push from China succeeding?

They're mostly in the Global south, about 97%, based on our calculations. But they do include some important players like South Africa, Egypt, Pakistan, and span several continents. One noteworthy thing is that many of them are countries where China has secured access to critical natural resources and also where it's helped to build ports and other infrastructure in recent years as part of its Belt and Road scheme. China also achieved a real breakthrough in September when it got 53 countries in Africa to adopt that new wording endorsing all unification efforts. Malaysia is another interesting case. It issued a statement last year which stopped short of adopting that carte blanche language. But it did use some firmer new wording on Taiwan, and it dropped a call for peaceful efforts towards unification. So I think what all this shows is that China's influence in the Global south continues to grow despite the recent decline in its overseas lending as it has scaled back Belt and Road. And I think another thing this shows is that America and its allies have really fail to incentivize developing countries to resist Chinese pressure on Taiwan.

But it's still unclear to me whether these kinds of delicate changes of language would make a real difference if China were to try to take Taiwan. Do you think it would?

That's quite hard to tell. I think some of the governments that have adopted this new language might not have appreciated the implications of it. China sometimes plays a bit fast and loose in the way it translates these statements as well, and it's hard to predict how exactly they would respond to an actual Chinese attack on Taiwan. But as that Lowy Institute study I mentioned concluded, it is very likely that China would portray those endorsing the firmness language as having given a green light to the use of force. And then a lot will depend on what happens at the United nations, where countries from the Global south, because of their sheer numbers, could play a really decisive role in judging the legitimacy of China's actions and indeed of an American response. China would no doubt try to rally all its supporters at the un and the US and its allies would do the same. So it's interesting to look back at the UN General assembly vote soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Naturally, a large majority of member states, 141 out of 193, backed a resolution calling for an immediate Russian withdrawal. That was in March of 2022, and those in favor included most of the global south. But judging by the kind of progress that China has been making in the last couple of years, I think the world would divide very differently in any vote over a Taiwan conflict. And it looks like the west could really struggle to get the UN to condemn any Chinese aggression against Taiwan, let alone support sanctions.

I guess that's where the rubber really starts to hit the road. It would be a big deal if the UN couldn't cobble together a condemnation of Chinese aggression at that stage.

Yes, it would be a huge deal, but at the moment, it looks like China might have the numbers. There would be significant opposition that would come principally from America and its closest allies. And it is fair to say that they have been stepping up their own efforts to firm up their public positions on Taiwan and to prepare for a conflict. So China still has some work to do. It claims it has universal support for its position on Taiwan. That's a big exaggeration. And then I think there's a new worry for China on this front since Donald Trump returned to the White House, and that is that he could press some countries to downgrade their relations with China, as we just saw with Panama.

Jeremy, thanks very much for taking the time.

Thank you.

As high profile court cases go, Lucy Letby's is one of the most disturbing.

Some of your victims were only a day or a few days old. All were extremely vulnerable.

In August 2023, the former nurse was found guilty of murdering seven babies and trying to kill six others while working at a hospital in Northwest England. She's maintained her innocence throughout, and two appeals against the convictions have been rejected.

As I observed last August, you acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies.

In July 2024, she was found guilty of another count of attempted murder.

You have no remorse. There are no mitigating factors.

Questions about whether Letby's trial was fair initially sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it looks increasingly likely that something did go wrong during the judicial process.

There'd been questions about the conviction of Lucy Letby from the outset, but initially that was mainly from a few sceptics on the Internet.

Georgia Banjo is a Britain correspondent.

What's happened since is we've had eminent statisticians question some of the evidence, and most recently, we've had some leading neonatal experts express their worries, too. And fundamentally, the concern is that the conviction might be unsafe.

Okay, so let's talk about the case. What was wrong with the case made against Letby?

The interesting thing about the case is that it was entirely circumstantial. So there were no eyewitnesses, no forensic evidence, or no motive, really, to speak of. What there was was this incredibly sharp increase in deaths in the babies at the neonatal unit where Letby worked. They were dying or they were suddenly collapsing in unexplained ways. And the doctors on the enet initially suspected Letby because she'd been present during most of the incidents. And then the police heard about it, and they initially built their case on flawed statistical evidence. Then we get to the trial, and there the bulk of the case rested on medical evidence, which was interpreted for the jury by expert witnesses. So this is incredibly technical evidence. And the prosecution's star witness was a doctor called Dr. Dewey Evans. And he argued that the only possible explanations for these deaths were foul play. Essentially, he claimed the methods included poisoning babies with insulin or injecting them with air. So some really unusual and varied methods. The problem is that there were some doubts about his judgment during the trial. That became apparent. And now more recently, there have been some quite serious questions about the value of his medical evidence as well. There's one particular Canadian neonatologist called Dr. Shu Liquid. He's been vocally critical of the testimony, and he says that Dr. Evans has misinterpreted a key paper that he wrote and that Dr. Evans relied on.

And why has his critique been given so much weight?

So Dr. Lee led a team of international neonatal experts. They formed a panel which looked into the causes of the deaths and the sudden collapses. And they found that lots of the babies were premature, they were low weight, they had chronic problems, and that a lot of them were also cared for poorly. That there were lots of individual errors in the unit, and more broadly, that the unit seems to have been fundamentally unsafe. Now, this fits with a report in 2016 which found that there was inadequate staffing on the unit. It found there was poor leadership. It fits with some of the testimony heard during the trial that there were sewage problems, sewage leaks on the unit, and that they could have been linked in particular to one death where a baby died with a bacterial infection. And then there have been other kind of details that have come out. So in one particular case, it was alleged that Lucy Letby had inflicted trauma on a baby's liver. And the panel concluded that instead the injury seemed to have been sustained during a traumatic birth.

In our opinion, the medical opinion, the medical evidence doesn't support murder in any.

Of these babies, just natural causes and bad medical care.

Finally, we hope the authorities will consider our findings seriously and act accordingly, because you will not.

Now, on February 4th, Shili presented these findings at the panel and the findings have also been sent to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. That's the CCRC and that's an independent body which has the power to refer cases back to the court.

So does that mean that Lucy Letby could be innocent?

None of the experts go as far as to say that they're understandably quite cautious people. It's also important to note that the prosecution argued that there was lots of other circumstantial evidence. So, for example, Letby took home confidential medical records about the baby she cared for. There was an infamous note she wrote which said, I am evil. I did this. Which the prosecution said amounted to a confession. During the trial, there was a bit of suspicious behavior that was scrutinized in detail. But I think the important thing to note is that the question really, legally speaking, should be, was her conviction based on unreliable evidence? And if it was, then it's deemed unsafe in legal terms. And so now I think we're looking at the distinct possibility that Letby could have been the victim of an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.

Does that mean it would then go back to trial?

So to successfully appeal a conviction, you need fresh evidence, and that means evidence that couldn't have been presented during the trial. And there's a problem here because Letby's defence team, for whatever reason, didn't do this. So on top of that issue, you also have the fact that successful applications to the CCRC are incredibly rare. I think a lot of people now think that because this case is so incredibly high profile and because the CCRC has, you know, had a lot of scrutiny recently for other bad decisions, that this case could well be referred back. But it's going to take a lot of time.

And if this goes to appeal, how might that go?

So it's just so hard to say. We don't really know what the Court of Appeal would do. I think whatever happens, it's clear that this case has exposed enormous problems, both in the National Health Service in terms of the care that's been given to very sick babies. But it's also exposed deep flaws as well in the criminal justice system. I think there's a real risk now that this case further undermines faith in the law. I think if it does go back to appeal. The process will bring renewed heartache for the victims families. But I think ultimately the safety of future victims depends on it.

Georgia, thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Raisie.

Even non football fans know who the really big stars of the moment are. Kylian Mbappe, say, or Erling Holland. This is supposed to be the stratosphere of salaries, the sign of growing financial excess in the sport. Truth is, it's hard to know just how much these players take home. But take a look at the finances of the clubs they play for. Paying the top talent starts to look like a bit of a deal.

While there is a great industry trying to discover what footballers earn, it's actually kept private between clubs and footballers.

Amelia Wood writes for the Economist.

But from what we know, even as football clubs across Europe are raking it in, star footballers are not doing quite as well as they could be.

Well, let's go through that. What's the sort of relative situation of star footballers pay now as compared to earlier generations?

So take someone like Kylian Mbappe, who is a French football star for Real.

Madrid's free and scores.

The real.

Real Madrid have got their equalizer.

He is said to earn about 45 million euros a season. Now, that's nothing to sneeze at, but when you look at what Cristiano Ronaldo once earned for the club, he was reported to earn about the same for Real Madrid a decade ago. Another example is someone like Erland Haaland, who's Manchester City star striker.

Haaland gives City the lead. The Blues are back in front.

Last season he broke the record for the most goals scored in the English Premier League. But his salary is rumoured at about 26 million pounds, which is less than what a comparable player like Gareth Bale reportedly earned at rival Tottenham about four years ago.

And so the point here is, as you say, that the clubs are raking it in more and more, but the star players less and less, I guess.

Well, not quite less and less, but what you can see is that the very top football clubs are raking it in. Real Madrid became the first club to rake in over a billion euros in a single season. And according to Deloitte, the top 20 highest earning football clubs brought in between them a record 11 billion euros over the 2023-24 season. Part of that is because the clubs are also looking at alternative revenue streams. Club stadiums now host other activities, from Taylor Swift concerts to American football matches. And the most famous teams are beginning to endure as brands and therefore in revenue even as they're performing badly on the pitch. As a long suffering Man United fan, I can definitely attest to that. Deloitte counts them as one of the top earning clubs year on year, but unfortunately their on pitch performance does not always reflect that level of revenue.

No, fair enough. But what you're saying suggests that the star players maybe are not getting a fair cut of what those clubs are pulling in.

Well, it's difficult to shed a tear for those so well paid. I think what it suggests more is there's plenty of earning potential left for star players like Mbappe and Haaland later in their career. They're still young and when we look at elder statesmen of the game like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, they're well past their top playing days, but currently they're earning piles. Ronaldo is reported to earn 75 million pounds for his Saudi club. And so I think footballers can see an opportunity there of the potential profits of building their brands. And also pay ultimately is still a far cry from days gone by. English football great Gary Lineker recounted that his first professional contract in the 1970s was far less generous. The going rate was about £100 a week.

Amelia, thanks very much for joining us.

No problem. Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.