Today, there are still many sources of tension. But has that sense of acute crisis ebbed? I'm David Rennie, the Economist Beijing Bureau Chief. My co-host Alice is away this week, so I'll be speaking to our editor-in Zanni, who's just back from China. We'll hear her sense of the mood in Beijing and of China's place in the world. This is Drumtime from The Economist. Zannie, welcome back to Drumtire. It's great to be here. Since you spoke to us last year, Zannie, you've been podcasting and talking to a lot of people. You interviewed a Hamas leader, you went back to Ukraine, and now you've just been with us in Beijing for a week for the China Development Forum, where senior Chinese politicians meet with foreign business bosses and officials. I

have, David, and I have to say that my March week in China is right up there now amongst my highlights of the year. And it's not just that the China Development Forum, which is a remarkable and absolutely kind of anthropologically fascinating gathering where you have a bunch of Western CEOs on their best behavior, sitting in rows listening to long speeches by Chinese officials. So that's a really fascinating thing to watch. But perhaps even better for me is that my March visit is my kind of ready tour of Beijing week, which has two components. Firstly, it's a complete stamina test. I think, David, I added it up and we had about 30 meetings. You'd scheduled breakfast, lunches, coffees, dinners. I left Beijing, my waistline thicker and my mind filled with an amazing sense of what's going on in China. And it was wonderful for me to get a sense of just what an extraordinary job you do there.

Well, you're too kind. And your office told me to keep you busy. So that was all I was trying to do. And I like to thank the CDF, that forum that you went to, for keeping me in my place. Because as a local grubby reporter, I got, I think it was a purple badge, which there was a series of endless humiliations of doors I couldn't go through that you could. And then I had lunch in the staff canteen in this sort of basement with a plastic tray, which actually I have to say, pretty good. But you were off eating, I think it was abalone with the swells, I believe. You

know what, all of these gatherings, whether it's the World Economic Forum or indeed the China Development Forum, they all have various sets of badges. It's a bit like middle school, you know, you always feel that there's something more interesting going on where you are not. But I can assure you that the food was no better because I happened to go to the ordinary lunchroom and then I went to the VIP lunchroom and I found out that the food was exactly the same in both. But it is actually a pretty extraordinary gathering. First of all, the setting is amazing. This government guest house, a beautiful park-like setting in northern Beijing, which has an extraordinary history. It's where Henry Kissinger met Zhou Enlai. It's where more recently Kim Jong-un stayed when he came on his train from a couple of years ago. The blossom is just coming out. There are a number of ornamental lakes you walk around and it feels very, very tranquil and rather beautiful. And at the same time, that's the backdrop to this. And it's off the record, so we can't discuss the details of what we're in there. Chinese policymaking is presented. You have a sense of how it works, which I know you have all the time, but for me is very powerful, where you have all of the officials. There are the ubiquitous references to Xi Jinping. There's the deliberate use of the same phrases. This year, everyone was saying new quality productive forces, high quality innovation. These are all phrases that we're going to be talking about in this show. But there was a sort of an interesting part of the discussion there is the sort of criminology amongst the Western attendees. Has anybody said even half a phrase differently? And what can one read into this? And then there's an equally interesting theatre from watching the Western CEOs who are there, who are extremely high level, they're giving statements that you can just tell their PR departments have been sweating over for days, just how much flattery to give, just how to phrase things. And so for me, just anthropologically, it's an amazing window into what it is like to do business in China and how Chinese policymaking is presented to the world and indeed to a Chinese audience.