23 January 2026: China | Photography

‘Life without a hegemon in a post-American world’ // Lee Miller: fashion in times of shortage [J2T #657]

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1: ‘Life without a hegemon in a post-American world’

The European Council on Foreign Relations has a new report out based on research into changing global attitudes to China. The tone is summarised by the headline: “How Trump is making China great again”, and the report is written by Timothy Garton Ash, Mark Leonard, and Ivan Krastev, which is a pretty credible crew. Here’s one of the headline charts about attitudes to China.

(Source: ecfr.eu)

In short, outside of Ukraine and South Korea more people see China as an ally or a necessary partner than a rival or an adversary, although in some places, the UK included, this is inside the margin of error.

There’s a similar chart for the United States, but the most revealing aspect of this data is the year-on-year change between November 2024 and November 2025.

(Source: ecfr.eu)

Outside of India, these numbers are travelling in one direction. The research samples are large enough to be credible: 25,949 respondents across 21 countries conducted in November 2025, although there are some restrictions on the research in Russia, China, and India.

Not only do more people think China is on the rise geopolitically and leading in important industries, but few seem to fear this course of events... In fact, China’s rise is seen as something that suits people living in most non-Western countries. Life without a hegemon is how most people appear to imagine the post-American world.

The other half of this is that America is increasingly seen as “acting as just one great power in a post-Western world.”

This is quite a long way in to a longer piece by Richard Hamescalled ‘Haunted By Its Own Reflection’ reflecting, quite crossly, on the way in which the Trump Administration’s unlawful attack on Venezuela has in been routinely conflated by Western pundits and media with China’s interest in Taiwan:

What happened in Venezuela was an extra‑territorial intervention by a distant power that has long treated the Western hemisphere as its backyard. What may happen around Taiwan, by contrast, is entangled with a century of civil war, foreign occupation, broken promises, and a contested but continuous claim of statehood that Beijing has never relinquished.

It’s a long piece, and I’m not going to be able to do much more here than parse some highlights, but it is worth staying with it. I should say from the outset that from the tone of the article he’s not a China apologist. What he’s interested in is worldviews:

The modern Western worldview grew up inside what I have called industrial economism: a civilisation organised as a factory‑market, powered by extraction, competition and growth as an end in itself. Under this paradigm, states behave like corporate predators. They compete for markets, resources and labour. They project military force to protect supply chains and suppress defiance. They justify this behaviour through universalist doctrines... each conveniently aligned with their own interests.

This model has deep cultural roots, he suggests, and this means that it is projected onto everyone else:

When you have spent centuries sailing out of your own port to remake other peoples’ worlds, you expect everyone else to do the same once they have enough ships.

The result is that when Western analysts look at China, they look for what is familiar, and if they don’t find it, they frame it in familiar terms. For example,

The Belt and Road Initiative becomes a sinister plot for “debt trap diplomacy” while Western financial institutions—whose conditions have stripped sovereignty from dozens of nations—are framed as “development partners”.

Part of his point here is that China’s worldview is formed very differently to this, both in the long-term, over several thousand years, and in the short-term, over one hundred and fifty.

For most of recorded history, China was less a nation‑state than a civilisational basin—a vast cultural ecosystem bound by language, bureaucracy, cosmology, kinship and ritual, more than by flags and frontiers. Its central strategic nightmare has [been] how to stop the centre from collapsing and the periphery from peeling away.

That’s the long-term history. The short-term history that the Chinese Communist Party emerged from was one of colonisation and humiliation, and this informs its statecraft:

This inheritance nurtures a strategic instinct that is structurally, not ethically, distinct from Western imperial habits. Beijing is more preoccupied with internal cohesion than overseas bases; more attuned to the slow accumulation of advantage than to theatrical shock‑and‑awe; more disposed towards patient positioning than to spectacular victory.

None of this makes China benign. It does make it different.

(Photo by pentium_six/flickr. Public domain.)

Of course, if this account is right, then it opens up the question of why the narrative of China as a “threat” is so prevalent in the West, and so potent. Hames suggests that this is a reflection of the West’s unease about itself:

The long boom of industrial economism is stalling. Economic growth in many Western states is anaemic or skewed to such an extent that it enriches a thin stratum of society while hollowing out the middle classes... Political systems display visible decay: polarisation, institutional capture, performative legislatures unable to solve even basic problems like cost of living and immigration.

And in the face of this, China’s rise is not just a feature of shifting geopolitics, but it whispers to these deep anxieties about the end of the West’s dominance:

China is the villain; we are the guardians; history is once again a morality play, and our travails are caused not by internal decay but by an external ogre... [T]he China threat narrative functions as a displacement mechanism—a way of avoiding the deeper reckoning with an industrial paradigm that has exhausted both the planet and the legitimacy of those who benefit from it.

The thing is, as Hames observes, there’s no shortage of information about China. The problem is one of interpretation:

To grasp China on its own terms demands an unusual humility: that Western concepts—of sovereignty, security, democracy, and power—might not be universal yardsticks but local inventions; that other civilisations own equally coherent but different grammars of order and justice; that history did not begin with the Treaty of Westphalia, the Enlightenment, or Bretton Woods.

Well, the West and its institutions don’t really do humility:

Yet history suggests that empires rarely fall because they lack facts. They fall because they cannot interpret reality in a way that allows them to adapt. When an empire loses the capacity to see the world except as an echo of itself, it is already in decline.

But this isn’t merely a philosophical or an analytical failing. It translates into doctrines and battle plans. And in turn that creates a self-fulfilling cycle of mutual distrust:

None of this implies that we should simply trust Beijing’s intentions, downplay its authoritarian tendencies, or ignore the experiences of those who feel threatened by Chinese power...

The challenge is different. It is to step outside the either/or reflex: China as monstrous adversary or enlightened saviour. Both are caricatures. Both absolve us of the harder work: learning to inhabit a world in which different civilisational projects coexist, collide, and sometimes cooperate without any single one owning the script.

The triumph of the Trump Administration, it seems, has been to break this cycle. I’m reminded of the notion of ‘dilemma resolution’, invented by Charles Hampden-Turner and evolved by Anthony Hodgson. Something is a dilemma because you can’t choose between the two horns of the dilemma: you have to find a way to resolve them. And if you do choose between them? That is a route to catastrophe: when you get what you want in the short-term, you lose what you need in the medium and long term.

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2: Lee Miller: fashion in times of shortage

The Tate Britain retrospective in London on the American-born photographer Lee Miller runs until the middle of February, and there is a lot in it: her surrealist period in Paris with Man Ray before the war, her work in Britain in the first part of the war, and as a photojournalist with US Army accreditation after the invasion of Europe, and post-war, married to the artist and writer Roland Penrose, taking portraits of friends who visited their Sussex home.

Miller could have gone back to the United States when the second world war broke out, but she chose not to. There’s a quote from her in the exhibition:

‘Years ago I fought and struggled to live in Europe - chose my friends in these countries - and their way of living - so I can’t leave now just because there isn’t enough butter to go round’.

In Britain, work opportunities were restricted, but she found herself at British Vogue, regarded by the authorities as an essential vehicle to communicate the exigencies of the war effort to British women as they were drafted into the factories and the fields.

Obviously the notion of an upmarket fashion magazine being used as a vehicle to communicate that people should do more with less is inherently interesting. One of the more intriguing rooms in the exhibition has a series of spreads from wartime Vogue, photographed by Miller.

(Spreads, (c) Condé Nast, photos, (c) Lee Miller Archives. Images: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA-4.0.)

In case the copy is hard to read, the coats story reads, with some language of the time, “The girls opposite, admiring the stuffed fur-bearing animals, are wool-bearers themselves. They all have Utility coats.”

And on the hats:

Your autumn suit will be devoid of trimming, tailored on austerity lines. Your hat will follow suit, relying on line rather than trimming for its effect. This does not mean severity or monotony, as the hats on these pages prove. Rolled brims, dipping brims, berets, back-of-the-head hats... one will surely suit you and your suit. And remember, when you’re hat hunting, that felts are becoming scarcer, so a good felt is more than ever a good investment.

In some of the accompanying prints in the same room, we see the BBC broadcaster Elizabeth Cowell against a bombed background during the Blitz. In the end, the picture wasn’t used,¹ but Vogue editor Audrey Withers wanted the image to show how style could continue in the face of rationing:

“the skirt is straight and narrow, as we feel all skirts will be in future owing to the rationing of materials”.

Photo, (C) Lee Miller Archives. Image: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA-4.0.

Elizabeth Cowell pops up again in a spread on how short hair is now fashionable—partly it seems, driven by a desire to reduce hair-related factory accidents.

We get a sense of how disrupted London was by the war in a quote from Miller:

‘Three months of solid hell at night - and harrowing by day to get to work by some crazy route - to count noses to see if everyone had really lived thru it - it became a matter of pride that work went on - the studio never missed a day - bombed once and fired twice - working with the neighbouring buildings still smouldering - the horrid smell of wet charred wood - the stink of cordite... taking the prints and negs home to do at night if they happened to have the sacred combination of gas, electricity and water, intact’.

One of the visual strategies here was drawn from her surrealist period; rather than create unattainable images of fashion that would emphasise the privations of the war, she would juxtapose them with, well, with anything she could find lying around.

And in other ways as well—as in a shot of two models posing as “spotters” on London’s Primrose Hill, in their goggles and masks.

Left: Wrens’ Naval Airborne Mechanic, 1944. Right: Parachute Packer, 1941, (C) Lee Miller Archives. Image: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA-4.0.

Miller wasn’t thrilled by her work for Vogue, although it did also give her the opportunity to produce two books of photos of women war workers, which I’d have thought would at least have elevated their status. All the same, she wrote to her parents that,

‘It seems pretty silly to go on working on a frivolous paper like Vogue... though it may be good for the country’s morale it’s hell on mine.’

So Miller jumped at the chance to be a war photojournalist (she learned the journalism as she went), travelling across France and Germany with American troops, photographing Dachau (not seen in the Tate exhibition) and staying in Europe until 1946 to document the aftermath of war. There are photos of refugees in Luxembourg and executions in Hungary.

This took its toll. She suffered from severe post-traumatic stress, and found photography increasingly hard, turning instead to cookery. In 1953 her second husband, Roland Penrose, privately asked Vogue to stop commissioning her because of the effect that it had on her mental health.

But the thing I keep coming back to is how the language of fashion changes when it is not about exclusivity and status.

(Spread, (c) Condé Nast, photos (c) Lee Miller Archives. Image: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA-4.0.)

And here’s the copy:

These factory fashions have a tough chic of their own, derived from the fact that they are functional. The prime object of their design is to eliminate anything that might catch in machinery.

Fastenings are down the back, or on the shoulders; pockets on the seat; belts snugly buttoned behind: shoes pulled on. Strings, loops and laces are taboo.

Those in authority, intelligently sympathetic, found that girls hated this hairlessness and were always coaxing out a curl: but that if hair were allowed to show elsewhere they were quite content to keep the front.

We therefore got the coiffure, below, specially styled, and the hat and turban, opposite, specially designed to meet this point. (Manufacturers of factory kit are likely to take up these efficient, good-looking designs.)

(Fashions for factories, Vogue Studio, London, 1941. Photo (c) Lee Miller Archives. Image: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA-4.0.)

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j2t#657

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1. The censor barred pictures that showed more than 50% of bomb damage, so it seems at least possible that it fell foul of this rule.