Roger Garside is a former British diplomat who twice served in the British embassy in Beijing in the 1960s and 1970s. During his career he also worked for the World Bank in Thailand, and later ran his own consultancy advising countries on developing capital markets as they liberalize their economies. He is the author of the acclaimed book, “Coming Alive: China After Mao,” a portrait of the social and political developments in the country in the mid to late 1970s. His new book, China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, is partly a fictionalized account of how a plot to unseat China’s leader Xi Jinping could unfold; and partly an analysis of why such a coup could happen, rooted in Garside’s analysis of the current state of politics in Beijing. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Illustration by Lauren Crow
Q: How did you come to write this provocative book?
A: The book is a call to action for the U.S. and its allies to make regime change in China a strategic goal. It is also a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. In the non-fiction part of the book, I explain why there can be an end to the current totalitarian regime in China, and in the semi-fictional part I narrate how a coup d’etat achieves this. Broadly speaking, the book is designed to awaken people’s imaginations, to question their notions about China and how we deal with China, and where the future of the world therefore is going.
In a recent article in the Toronto Globe and Mail you wrote about this need for “regime change” in China. Isn’t that a very volatile, threatening phrase that a country like the U.S. should be wary about using?
To carry public opinion with them, our governments must be clear about the nature of the threat and open about the objective of a free China. The means to achieving that objective may sometimes need to be protected by secrecy, but there is nothing to be lost, and much to be gained, by openly declaring our objective. Those Chinese who secretly want change will be heartened by our commitment, and the regime in Beijing already denounces “hostile forces” for seeking political change so we have nothing to lose by openness.
Is there a reason to be hesitant about openly declaring this?
Well, for all the reasons you say, and more. Yes, there have been a lot of unsuccessful regime changes, driven by the U.S. and its allies. But there have been some successes too. If we go back to the end of the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to differing degrees of explicitness, pursued a type of regime change. I’m not suggesting, though, that the Biden administration should be Reagan Part 2. It’s a far more complicated situation, given how deeply intertwined economically we are with China.
BIO AT A GLANCE | |
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AGE | 83 |
BIRTHPLACE | London, U.K. |
RECENT POSITIONS | Executive Chairman at GMA Capital Markets Limited Former officer of British Diplomatic Service |
PERSONAL LIFE | Married to Mariota Garside |
What are the things that you believe the U.S. and its allies should be doing with regard to China and the Communist Party?
The strategic situation is this: the U.S. and its allies have great economic superiority over China. The dollar is the world’s global reserve currency by a very long margin. Even with a digital currency being developed in China, the renminbi is a long way from becoming the world’s global major reserve currency; it won’t be so long as it is not freely tradable, and it will not be so long as there is a totalitarian regime running China. They don’t give up that kind of power to the markets.
So the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and the world’s banking system. The settlements are controlled, ultimately by the U.S.. The greatest capital markets in the world are in the U.S., along with the world’s biggest pool of freely tradable and inventive, freely moving investment capital. The U.S. also has the greatest centers of technological and scientific discovery.
The Trump administration began the process of applying this power to China, through steps such as curbing exports of dual-use technologies from the U.S., and by placing companies from China on the U.S. Entity List — and also with the legislation signed into law by President Trump in his last days in office requiring U.S. securities market regulators to suspend from trading firms that do not allow auditors and regulators to have access to all their financial information, something which is forbidden by Chinese law. Already, the New York Stock Exchange has suspended three major Chinese companies on those grounds. And so the U.S. has made a start.
I want to see the European Union cancel its steps towards the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, which has been signed but not ratified by the European Parliament. I want to see the EU stop that process of ratification. And there’s so much more we can do.

Photo by Julie Munroe; Courtesy of Roger Garside
Isn’t China so thoroughly integrated into the global economy that it will be very difficult to apply pressures that won’t ricochet back against the U.S. and its allies?
That’s true, that has to be faced. I’m certainly not advocating across-the-board decoupling, and I believe the various strategic thinkers within our governments have got to elaborate a sophisticated strategy which will stop short of that. We need a strategy which rewards or incentivizes change in China, and punishes wrongdoing.
Then I believe that those forces within China that are deeply unhappy about the overreaching of Xi Jinping’s strategies towards the West will be unleashed. I disagree with Xi’s analysis that China must emphasize state-owned enterprises and that the Communist Party, with its socialism with Chinese characteristics, has been responsible for the spectacular growth in the global economy over the last 40 years. The people who’ve made China economically strong are the Chinese people. It’s their enterprise, their energy.
What happens if the U.S. and its allies don’t act? What’s likely to happen in the next, say, five to 10 years with China?
Well, number one, at the next National Party Congress in 2022, Xi Jinping will be reappointed as leader of the Communist Party. And that will be a great sign of endorsement of his strategy. And he will be emboldened, and the Party he leads will be emboldened to ratchet up the current strategies which they are pursuing. We will move steadily, and perhaps quite fast, towards a world in which the world’s largest economy is controlled by a totalitarian regime. And we [the West] will be seen to be in decline. And the future will be dark, a nightmare.
Given that China is likely to be the world’s largest economy soon, are you arguing that its government is likely to act in a similar way in other parts of the world as it does at home?
Yes. Maybe not in exactly the same way. But they will be emboldened to apply their ever growing economic power to coerce countries, picking them off one by one. I mean, they’re brilliant. They will pursue this strategy of divide and rule until Xi Jinping and the Communist Party he leads achieves its aim, which he set out for them in January 2013, of global dominance.

Isn’t it a bit late for the West to pull back and to talk about regime change, or decoupling, or of even trying to contain China? There is a sense that corporate elites and perhaps many in the U.S. and its allied countries are not up to a fight over this — after all, multinational companies see the China market as their future.
It is late, but not too late. Thankfully, there has been a great sea change in America, and it’s a bipartisan sea change. There’s a similar change of opinion underway in other liberal democracies. The fact that the bill to hold foreign companies accountable was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress is, I think, a spectacular manifestation of that sea change.
And that is just the beginning. It’s going to take extremely strong leadership by the Biden administration and by Congress to get the very powerful forces in our societies, the Wall Streets, the City of London, the financial sector, the industrial sector, to accept that their interests are imperiled by the nightmare vision of the world’s strongest economy being ruled by a totalitarian regime. Political leaders have got to get vested interests to understand that there has to be a cost, an economic cost, to the strategy, but that it will defend the framework which makes prosperity possible.
How do you lead an effort to challenge the Chinese Communist Party without it backfiring and encouraging people in the U.S. and elsewhere to go out and target people of Asian descent?
The fundamental basis for dealing with that question is for our governments and our whole political class, day in and day out, to spell out that our hostility is not directed at the Chinese people. Nor is it indeed directed at the whole of the Communist Party. It is directed at those within the Communist Party who are hell bent on strengthening the totalitarian system that is now in place. The term totalitarian is very important.
[The CCP is] far more sophisticated than Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. But look at its essentials, and look at the essentials of a definition of totalitarian and they match.
Academics and journalists should stop referring to the Chinese Communist Party as an authoritarian regime: It is a totalitarian regime, which meets the definitions of totalitarianism set forth by Robert Conquest and Hannah Arendt. It’s far more sophisticated than Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. But look at its essentials, and look at the essentials of a definition of totalitarian and they match.
Don’t your designs on regime change mean that you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with cross-border trade, technology transfer and three decades of rapid globalization centered around China? How can sanctions deal with that? And what other solutions would you propose?
The so-called Magnitsky law [which allows the use of sanctions against individuals in other countries] was an important step forward. But I think it’s too easy to use the sanctioning of a dozen or 20 regime officials of the second, third or fourth rank as a kind of cheap way of virtue signaling — of saying, “Well, we’re imposing a cost on the Chinese elimination of suppression of freedom in Hong Kong.” The strategy has really got to look beyond the moral gestures. So the heart of the matter is not cutting off all trade, and not cutting off all finance, but costly measures that show our serious intent; the Chinese Communist Party will recognize that.
Garside spoke with the University of California Press about China Coup and what inspired him to write it.
Let’s talk a little about the coup that you outline in the book. I won’t give away the story, but we know that Xi Jinping is the leader and in your fictional telling, he is deposed. How likely is this scenario?
The details are fictional but how likely it is depends upon the resolve of, first of all, the U.S. and then of its allies. This is not yet clear. These are early days in the Biden administration, but I think there are very intelligent and well-informed, experienced people in DC who will be thinking about these issues. I would like this book to bring these issues more into public debate. I believe a coup can happen, but I’m not going to put a probability figure on it.
I used the scenario of engineering a confrontation between the U.S. and China starting in the financial markets. This is something that is under the control of the executive branch and could get strong backing from Congress because U.S. investors are being misled; they are being denied the information they need to make sound judgments about the investing. So I believe that it’s a totally plausible way to generate a confrontation, which will strike at the point of greatest vulnerability in China, which is the opacity and fragility of the financial system.
The economic drama in China today is being played out in the context of a nation that is suffering from deep-seated, long standing problems, a moral crisis, great and growing social inequality, intellectual and cultural stagnation, a lack of trust between rulers and the ruled, and often a lack of trust even horizontally between people and their work colleagues. There is also huge distrust between China and the world — We have seen that with COVID-19, and then the continuing refusal to allow the WHO and everybody else to have access to and to know what went on in Wuhan in the last quarter of 2019.
If you want to preserve the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power, you have got to make the break for democracy in order to get the confidence of the people.
None of these problems can be solved or tackled effectively by a totalitarian regime. They can tinker at the edges often but you can’t get a renewed transition to the free market economy, which is essential for the health of the Chinese economy, without political change.
You have got to make the break for democracy in order to get the confidence of the people, the trust of the people, so that they will accept the transitional costs of reducing the state-owned sector and allowing the private sector to enlarge and start to go into banking or transport or utilities, and so on. You can’t overcome the vested interests at the regional level without mobilizing citizens through the ballot box and through political freedom. You cannot seriously cut back on corruption without a free press and an independent judiciary, and that can only exist with a freely elected democratic government. All these things come together. And don’t tell me that people like [Chinese vice-premier] Li Keqiang don’t understand that.

Courtesy of Roger Garside
The picture you paint of a bleak and demoralized China doesn’t seem to fit reality. Indeed, the country’s economy appears strong; there’s been tremendous development and prosperity; a growing number of Chinese who have traveled overseas feel better about their country. In fact, lately it is the West and America that have looked fragile and ripe for an uprising. How do you respond to that?
There has been spectacular economic growth but look at the emigration from China, one of the most important in world history. It’s not being led by the poor and powerless, as in previous emigrations. The first people looking to get out of China are the rich and powerful, sending their children to be educated in the U.S., seeking to get U.S. citizenship if they can, or Australian, or British or whatever. The numbers are significant, and the fact that the communist regime does not permit free capital movement seems to me powerful evidence that they believe that there would be a great outflow of capital if they did permit it, which would dwarf what we saw in 2015. It would be cataclysmic.
And secondly, look at the surge in religious faith and practice in China. A lot of the people who are turning to Christianity are well educated, middle class people, entrepreneurs. And it’s not just Christianity; it’s all major religions in China. There are various kinds of alienation which — even if they’re not of a kind that is going to get people out on the streets tomorrow morning — do tell us something important about China and the state of society.
Another point: revolutions in the past have seldom come about because there’s been a massive upsurge from the bottom. Look up the October Revolution in Russia: St. Petersburg was a humming, fantastically dynamic industrial city. It was one of the most exciting cities in the world to live in, much more exciting than Beijing or Shanghai today. And yet, a combination of internal and external factors came together to create a situation in which a tiny number of revolutionaries seized an opportunity to carry through a revolution, which changed the world. That’s more the analogy that I’m looking at in China.
MISCELLANEA | |
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BOOK REC | Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari |
FAVORITE MUSIC | Classical. Mitsuko Uchida playing Schubert. |
FAVORITE FILM | The Third Man by Orson Welles |
PERSONAL HERO | Wu Ningkun, author of A Single Tear, the classic account of those Chinese patriots who returned to China in the early 1950s and were later persecuted. Of his two decades of persecution, he wrote “I came, I suffered, I survived.” |
Can the U.S. really hold together an alliance to put pressure on the Chinese government given China’s financial and economic leverage over so many countries?
Well, it’s a big challenge, another facet of the enormous challenges to statesmanship, and to the statesmanship of European and Japanese leaders in particular. But yes, I believe it can and will be done. Australia has been incredibly courageous. And I’m very interested that my article was published in Canada because it has for decades been very moderate in its public discourse about ideological rivals. The action of the Chinese government in detaining the two Michaels [Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor] in retaliation for the detention and arrest of Meng Wanzhou of Huawei is a game changer in Canada.
As for Europe, there is a strong sense that we’ve got to change our strategy towards China. And we’ve got to adjust what has been a very bad balance between defense and promotion of our political values, and our supposed economic interest. I think there are changes going on at the political level in Europe, which mean that our governments will follow the American lead cautiously, not very boldly, but I think it will happen. And as for Japan, you saw with the communique following Prime Minister Suga’s visit to the U.S., that for the first time since 1969, they mentioned Taiwan.
Other liberal democracies are not as ideological as the U.S. is. We don’t get as excited and vehement. We never did, even during the Cold War with Russia — there was a different temperature. We have a different temperament. But I think things are changing here, too.

David Barboza is the co-founder and a staff writer at The Wire. Previously, he was a longtime business reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times. @DavidBarboza2