Following Mike Pence’s 2018 Hudson Institute speech, the wider narrative around China began to change — just as it started to become clear how much of China’s wealth had been ploughed back into infrastructure and the military. India hosted the world’s biggest ever elections (and its computer programmers came in for some criticism). The US withdrew its troops from Syrian Kurdistan (and set its sights on space). And in Wuhan, China, rumours emerged of a potential new SARS outbreak. This was 2019…
