This 2022 Financial Times article laid bare the decline of VW's China success story. VW had led the way in localization, with a 1984 joint venture and the launch in 1999 of a long-wheelbase model targeting the needs of the Chinese market. Now, with China's automotive market both the largest and most innovative in the world, the Localizer needed to localize more. As Herbert Diess, CEO, announced in Beijing following the first fall in car sales for 20 years, “The future of the Volkswagen Group will be decided in the Chinese market.” A taste of things to come in China's Dual Circulation economy?

Dual Circulation changes what foreign companies need to do. It both describes the context for business strategies that involve China and reshapes these strategies. First, the clear dividing line marked out between internal and external circulation highlights the divergent and distinct business environments between China and other markets. The much-discussed need to localize and adapt to the China context is stronger than ever. Second, the ambitions of Dual Circulation to create a technologically more capable and self-reliant China with a much larger consuming middle class change the nature of the China opportunity. In the near term, these ambitions sharpen China's policy focus on how foreign companies can help China succeed, especially in key technologies. This presents business opportunities, yet often runs counter to the China policy of governments back at headquarters. Moreover, the very aim of Dual Circulation is often to strengthen the future competitors of multinationals. In the longer term, Chinese policy success would create a much larger market, albeit one with much more capable Chinese competitors. Such success is far from a foregone conclu-sion, however. State intervention in technology initiatives and repeated government failure to address China's sectoral imbalances could instead lead to wasted investment, stagnant growth and a withering of entrepreneurial dynamism.

Doing business in China is often associated with informal, “under- the-table” transactions, the vast majority of which constitute corruption by contemporary international standards. A reductive explanation for this phenomenon concentrates on the Chinese cultural concept of guanxi, translated as “relationships” or “connections”, that allegedly creates an inclination towards informality and exchange of favours and gifts. However, the reasons behind China's struggle with corruption are not cultural but institutional and relate to its economic model, weak commitment to the rule of law and opaque governing system. Instead of a traditional culture that breeds corruption, China has a political, economic and legal system that has for a long time encouraged and sustained a culture of corruption. This reality raises many concerns about business and ethical practices as well as the competition standards that the BRI promotes at a global scale.

These fears seem well- founded as China has been criticized for using bribes to advance the BRI on a few occasions. In 2018, Macau- based Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng, a businessman affiliated with the CCP, was found guilty of bribing UN officials to support Macau's bid to house the UN Office for South– South Cooperation. In 2019, Patrick Ho, the head of an NGO backed by the CEFC China Energy Company Limited, a Global Fortune 500 energy and finance conglomerate, was involved in multiple corruption scandals in Africa while promoting the BRI agenda. The CEFC founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, who developed important business and political links in the Czech Republic, has also been detained in China since 2018 on bribery charges. In many Chinese- financed projects, from Malaysia to North Macedonia, Sri Lanka to Uganda and Kenya, there have been accusations and evidence of corruption. These cases play into a widespread perception of the BRI as lacking transparency, consisting of shady deals that are poorly regulated and involve illicit transactions.

Although China's own struggles with corruption are well known, corruption in the BRI is ultimately a matter of regulatory and monitoring efficiency of the institutions involved in its development, Chinese and local. Host government capacity in this regard is an important variable in the success or failure of a project, shaping the local experience of the BRI (Song 2015: 33).

When Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader in February 1975, she had not yet fully embraced the principles and policies which were subsequently developed into Thatcherism. However, she instinctively perceived that the path chosen by the postwar Conservative Party had been a mistake, and her experiences as a minister in Edward Heath’s 1970–74 cabinet reinforced her growing conviction – fully shared by Keith Joseph – that the Conservatives needed a change of ideological direction. At this stage, however, her instinctive ideas and philosophy were not fully formed, so that at the time of the Conservative leadership contest, Thatcher had only recently embarked upon her process of political reappraisal and search for a new mode of Conservatism.

It has been widely believed that in the 1975 Conservative leadership contest, many Conservative MPs voted for Thatcher primarily because they were determined to replace Heath, and most of the other leadership contenders were his allies or associates: “Electing Margaret had simply been the most effective way of getting rid of Ted” (Critchley & Halcrow 1998: 60; see also Riddell 1985: 10). However, although she undoubtedly attracted support from many Conservative MPs by virtue of not being Heath, this has been exaggerated as the main motive for voting for her, and therefore underestimated the extent to which Thatcher genuinely appealed to some Conservative MPs in her own right, either due to her apparent personal qualities or/and her nascent right-wing views. After all, if Conservative MPs had merely wanted a new leader whose most important characteristic was that they were “not Heath”, there were others in the second ballot, such as William Whitelaw and James Prior, who were associated with him ideologically, but were potentially more politically attractive. It therefore behoves us to examine more carefully, and with more nuance, how and why Thatcher was elected Conservative leader in early 1975. Three discrete factors need to be considered: the unavailability of other candidates representing the Conservative right; the manner in which Thatcher was already beginning to develop a distinct ideological stance and policy agenda, even though it did not yet warrant the soubriquet Thatcherism; the extent to which she had impressed some Conservative MPs with her parliamentary performance as a shadow Treasury minister since the previous year's election defeats.

Many analysts have noted that the BRI is missing a map (Narins & Agnew 2020). This is puzzling because mapping is commonly used by the CCP to reshape geopolitical realities according to its nationalistic and stra-tegic priorities: depicting Taiwan as a province, laying claim to the entire South China Sea with the infamous “9 dash- line”, delineating China's Exclusive Economic Zone and claiming sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands are just the most recent examples of mapping as a way to define where China begins and ends. In addition, maps have been employed to graphically correct historical “mistakes” in China's borders with Vietnam, India and Russia, while today nationalistic circles refer to (ironically western) maps of the Qing dynasty as part of their nostalgia for a time when China ruled all under heaven. Given the systematic use of maps to imagine China in the world and vis- à- vis its neighbours, why is there not an official, definitive map of the BRI? The answer lies in the BRI's gradual evolution from a development initiative on China's periphery to its main global platform for economic relations and diplomacy.

The official narrative states that the BRI was initiated in September 2013, when Xi Jinping publicly promoted the creation of a “Silk Road Economic Belt” with central Asian nations while on an official visit in Astana, Kazakhstan. The following month, he made a similar announcement from Jakarta, calling for a twenty- first- century “Maritime Silk Road” of investment and trade. The Belt and Road appeared for the first time in an official party policy document in November 2013, where setting up new financial institutions and improving infrastructural connectivity with neighbouring countries are stated as aims of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road (Communist Party of China 2013). Its debut in the realm of policy documents was a modest one, given the BRI's subsequent development. The reference to what would evolve into the BRI was hidden at the end of point 26 of China's plans for deepening reform in a paragraph titled “Further opening up inland and border areas”.

As Thatcher discovered in the autumn of 1990, a hitherto dominant party leader and prime minister can suffer a catastrophic loss of support from former party loyalists due to serious policy disagreements entailing high-profile clashes with senior ministers, plummeting opinion poll ratings, by-election defeats, and/or a growing conviction among their party's MPs that the leader's glory days are well and truly behind them. Many of these scenarios can occur when a party leader and prime minister erroneously becomes convinced of their own political invincibility and immortality, and insistence that they are still revered by the people. In Thatcher's case, however, her hubris developed against a deteriorating economic situation characterized by rising inflation and higher interest rates following the 1986 “Big Bang” deregulation of financial services, her personal association with the widely reviled Community Charge or “Poll Tax”, and her increasingly undiplomatic anti-European comments and speeches.

Yet expectations or hopes that Thatcher's resignation would herald a revival of One Nation Toryism were not realized. Instead, despite subsequent Conservative leaders initially advocating a more conciliatory, constructive and inclusive mode of Conservatism which embraced the social and cultural changes Britain had recently experienced, the party has become steadily more Thatcherite, not only in terms of its economic policies and priorities, but in terms of the ideological stance of an increasing number of Conservative MPs. From the early 1990s onwards, the One Nation Tories were not replenished by a new cohort, but were instead steadily replaced by economic liberals who shared the ideological commitment to the free market, and therefore a continuation, or even intensification, of privatization, public sector reform, restrictions on trade unions, tax cuts and welfare retrenchment.

When there has been an occasional departure from these policies, such as the part-privatized probation service being renationalized in May 2019, it was because the private sector companies operating it either suffered severe financial problems, or failed to provide a satisfactory level of service as stipulated in their contracts. Meanwhile, the higher government borrowing and pay subsidies (furlough schemes) implemented during the 2020‒21 Covid pandemic was an ad hoc crisis-management response to an unforeseen and unprecedented scenario that threatened economic catastrophe, not a reversion back to pre-Thatcherite Conservatism. In neither instance did the more active or interventionist role of the state herald a formal abandonment of Thatcherite neoliberalism overall.

Most commentators on modern conservatism agree in identifying the Irish-born author and politician Edmund Burke (1726–97) as its first major figure. In 1930 a former MP, Arthur Baumann, published Burke: The Founder of Conservatism. For the American historian Peter Viereck, conservative thought “begins with Burke”, and the publication of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 was an ideological landmark to match the appearance of The Communist Manifesto in 1848 (Viereck 1956: 10). Lord Hugh Cecil even gave conservatism a birthday – 6 May 1791, when Burke's opposition to the French Revolution produced a public breach with the leadership of the Whig Party (Cecil 1912: 43; where the nativity is misdated to 1790). More recently, the MP Jesse Norman argued that “in many ways [Burke] was the first conservative, the founder: the first person who can properly lay claim to having forged conservatism as a distinctive body of thought” (Norman 2013: 282).

There are alternative and earlier candidates for the parentage of modern conservatism – Benjamin Disraeli, for example, was a passionate admirer of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), author of The Idea of a Patriot King, and the sceptical Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) anticipated Burke in important respects. However, although Burke's Reflections was written in response to a single, momentous historical development, it incorporated numerous passages whose implications reached beyond revolutionary France, and could be said to constitute an appeal to “first principles”. Burke had two immediate aims – to attack the ideas which, he felt, had inspired the revolutionary movement in France, and to quash symptoms of a similar insurgency in Britain itself. The danger of such ideas, Burke argued, lay chiefly in their propensity to encourage radical change. No system of government could be perfect, and it was the duty of responsible politicians to propose reforms once defects became too glaring to ignore. But even such imperative changes should be introduced gradually. Root-and-branch reform could lead to a breakdown of political and social order. This was particularly the case if the radical proposals were inspired by abstract ideas which showed insufficient respect for established practices.

Ten years after Margaret Thatcher's death, and with her free-market or neoliberal philosophy seemingly beset by increasing conflicts and contradictions, and therefore subject to growing criticism, this is a timely opportunity to revisit her eponymous ideology. In this short book, the key concepts, objectives and policies of Thatcherism are examined, in tandem with the intellectual sources, arguments and discourse which shaped and underpinned it. The book also considers how Thatcher and her ideological adherents exercised a dominance in the Conservative Party far greater than their actual numerical strength in the 1980s, and the extent to which Thatcherism subsequently became hegemonic in the Conservative Party, particularly in terms of the continued, indeed, intensified, commitment to free-market economics, low direct taxation, privatization, deregulation, “marketization” of public services, reduced workers’ rights and employment protection to promote labour market flexibility and restore managerial authority in the workplace, and relentless attempts to reduce welfare expenditure and entitlement. So entrenched has economic neoliberalism become in the Conservative Party, that almost any problems in the British economy and society are interpreted as evidence that the Thatcherite revolution is still incomplete.

In an additional chapter, we examine some of the contradictions or unintended consequences of Thatcherism that have become increasingly evident since the 1980s. These include the manner in which the 1986 deregulation of financial services ushered in an era of unprecedented consumer borrowing and spending, which was totally at odds with Thatcher's own moral strictures about personal frugality, self-restraint and thrift; the new modes and layers of regulatory bureaucracy yielded by privatization and “marketization” of public services like education and healthcare, in spite of Thatcherite denigration of red tape and state interference; the manner in which the transformation of universities into businesses, and students into fee-paying customers, has led to a proliferation of degrees in subjects which the Conservative right view with deep disdain and disapproval, but which universities find profitable because many students (as sovereign consumers) wish to study them; the general weakening of values and virtues which Conservatives have traditionally revered and defended – community, continuity, deference, family life, organic society, reciprocal duties and responsibilities, social harmony and stability –

The manifesto on which the first Thatcher government was elected in 1979 was a relatively modest document compared to the radicalism which followed as the 1980s progressed, but nonetheless, it was clear that a significant change of ideological direction was envisaged, as delineated in the previous chapter, which entailed new political priorities and policies. Although there were clear pledges on cutting direct taxation and selling council houses to their tenants, on many other flagship Thatcherite policies, such as privatization, and trade union reform, the 1979 manifesto was rather restrained in what it promised. There were four reasons for this modesty, the first being that election manifestos aim to present voters with a political party's overall objectives and priorities, albeit including a few attractive policy pledges, rather than a detailed itinerary of every proposed measure and legislation.

Second, the inclusion of too many specific or detailed policy pledges might alienate some potential voters, either because they might dislike some of the pledged policies, or because the more detail provided, the more political ammunition this will provide to the party's rivals, who will then seek to frighten voters about the implications of a particular policy, and how it will detrimentally affect them.

The third reason for the relative opacity of the Conservatives 1979 manifesto was that the party was itself ideologically divided between Thatcherites and One Nation Conservatives, or “dries and wets” in common parlance, and hence the manifesto reflected the need for compromise by only offering pledges and policies that both philosophical wings of the party could endorse; more contentious or controversial policy proposals needed to be omitted or toned down.

Fourth, Thatcher herself was not yet sufficiently confident about how radical she and a Conservative government could be. As we noted in the previous chapter, she had many ideas and instincts about what shewanted to change and achieve, but was unsure about how far, or how fast, she would be able to implement the policies and reforms which she favoured. Consequently, some Thatcherite policies were pursued incrementally, while others were not enacted until the latter years of her premiership, by which time her confidence (along with that of her closest ministerial colleagues) had increased, and sources of opposition – both inside the Conservative Party and far beyond – had been weakened.