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Hello and welcome to the edition podcast with me, Cindy You.

It's a podcast from The Spectator where we pick out

some of the most important and intriguing issues within our pages with the writers behind them.

This week, I'll be taking a look at how China has fared so well out of the pandemic.

I'll also be hearing about whether or not test and trace was doomed from the start.

And at the very end, all the excuses that coronavirus has given people.

First up, China's Q3 growth figures came out this week and they were pretty good.

The economy grew by 4.9% while much of the rest of the world is still mired in coronavirus misery.

Rana Mitter, a history professor specialising in China, takes a look at how COVID has accelerated China's rise in this week's cover piece.

He joins me on the podcast now, together with Nigel Inkster, formerly at MI6, and now the senior

advisor for cybersecurity and China at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

So, Rana, you write that in the beginning of the year China was a defiant retreat, and now it's in a declaration of victory. Can you tell us about it?

I think that's right, Cindy, that if you had had to predict what was going to happen at the beginning of the year when the pandemic broke out, a lot of people, including it, seen people in China itself, and it's often quite shrill social media, thought that this was going to be a

period of real damage to the government and to Xi Jinping, the president and general secretary of the

party in particular. And it hasn't worked out that way at all. When I talk, as I know, you know, all of

us, I think, do to friends in China on video calls in over the last few weeks and months, it's all

been very much about life being

quite normal, commiserations for what's happening in Britain, but we're off to a restaurant

or off on holiday. So something has clearly happened in between. I think there are two or three

...