So before we get on to Alistair and his World Cup, so for just to give you a sense of what we're going to be talking about in this program, so we're going to do something on China, something on Malaysia, we're going to deal with a very interesting speech from David Miliband, who's a friend of both of us, but who's talking about Britain's place in the world.

And we'll also have a look at strikes and some of the Labour debates around Brexit, but to begin with, let's start with China.

And Alistair, you've been reading about Xi Jinping, think about Xi Jinping, and you've been looking at some of these demonstrations in China.

I mean, they're pretty amazing, aren't they? I think that there's been lots of comparisons made with China and Square, which is understandable, because that's the big one that people remember.

I was a journalist then, I was on the mirror, and I can, you know, I think there was a sense at the start that this might lead somewhere other than crackdown, but it didn't.

And I feel exactly the same about this one, I'm afraid. I think the crackdown on this is going to be really severe, because he's gone from being there.

And there've been protests, there've been quite a lot of protests going on, fairly small, fairly localised, mainly in relation to the zero COVID strategy, where people are being locked up for months and months and months.

There was this terrible fire, where people were locked up, and I think 11 people were killed.

There's been the development of what they call the blank, the white paper protests, where people just hold up white paper as a way of saying that they don't have freedom of speech.

I think what's been interesting in the last couple of days started in quite a big one in Shanghai, is that this is now developing into people complaining about the government and in particular about President Xi Jinping.

And that, I think, will lead to pretty ferocious crackdown.

And people may be wondering why aren't the police just piling, and they piling on that guy from the BBC and a few others.

But in a way they don't need to piling, because you've got to understand it's such a surveillance state, that there you can get everybody afterwards quite easily.

So just to loop back for a second, just to set a little bit more context around this, and then maybe get you on their response.

So China has gone for this very, very aggressive zero COVID, and has been running it obviously since the very beginning of the breakout in Wuhan.

So this has been going on now for a very long time. It's been going on for almost two years uninterrupted.

And it's a question, I guess, I almost three, I suppose, I guess it's a question of firstly, why is China doing this?

Why are they so determined there's going to be no COVID at all?

They were, of course, in line with the way that the rest of the world was behaving when they began doing this January, February, 2020.

In fact, they were ahead of the rest of the world, and in some ways, the rest of the world followed their example and went from thinking that zero COVID lockdowns was something that could only be done in an authoritarian state like China.

To beginning to think it was something could be done in countries all around the world, and rather surprisingly, it did happen in countries all around the world.

But as other countries have come out of lockdown and have begun to, as it were, in a verticalmer's accept COVID as part of the general disease within their population, China has continued to want to entirely eliminate it.

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