The villages here are mostly destroyed from both their occupation and recent liberation. Despite the eerie quiet and visible destruction, there is movement. Over the next six months I pedalled across the mountains of Yunnan, wandered the imperial palace in Beijing, and rode a train hauled by two soot-blackened steam engines far west into the deserts of Xinjiang. The landscapes were sublime but the poverty grinding. Everywhere I went people told me how "backward" China was compared to the West. But there were hints of change. Mark Francois says Rishi Sunak did not commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence when he met the group earlier. irannews.ru But it's still a mistake to draw a straight line from Mao to Xi, Prof Karl argues, because it dismisses all that came in between - and the Chinese who dreamed or fought for a different country. “The Saudis have emphasised in recent years that they seek to avoid entanglement in what is referred to in the US as ‘great power competition’,” Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen and the Middle East Institute’s senior vice president, told Al Jazeera. “Their interests, the Saudis have made clear, have focused on maintaining strong relations with their main security partner, the US; their number one economic partner, China; and their key partner in OPEC+, Russia.” Although she considered removing the videos, Ms Hartley says she is content that she decided to share the post. "China today has no socialist characteristics" she says "The subordination of labour to capital is complete. If you're a real socialist, you must have a notion of class democracy, of justice, of hierarchy and anti-hierarchy. None of that is even part of Xi Jinping thought." Certainly some MPs backing Rishi Sunak are hoping, and urging, her to do so as they feel more days of camps thrashing it out - and a members' vote that may not necessarily align with the MPs' vote - will only cause more divisions. "A lot of people far away from the frontline are celebrating," one soldier tells us, who only wants to be known by his call sign "Gadfly". Do relations with Saudi Arabia still serve US interests?