In her new book, Uneasy Streets sociologist, Caroline Knowles, points out the marks made on British society by Chinese money while Britain’s understanding of the superpower remains scant. She shares some of her observations with The Mint.
Caroline Knowles did not set out to write a conventional book about China. Uneasy Streets began, as much of her work does, with a disturbance close to home: a Chinese restaurant in her neighbourhood, a set of local frictions, and the sense that something larger was hiding in plain sight. But the book soon widened into a study of how Chinese money, students, infrastructure and influence are threaded through Britain’s streets, universities and urban skylines.
Knowles is careful not to present herself as a China specialist. “I’ve been prodding around in China for some time while not being a China scholar,” she says. But she adds that, as a sociologist, “you can’t understand the modern world unless you do some reckoning with China.” That reckoning, in her hands, does not begin with grand strategy documents or geopolitical briefings. It begins with walking, noticing, asking awkward questions and following clues.
Her method is deliberately untidy. “I wouldn’t say that it was social science,” she says, describing her approach as “rather ramshackle, rather speculative”. She looks for “an interesting little detail” and asks what it links to. This is the opposite of the top-down view of China as a seamless global power. Knowles is interested in the “bottom-up kinds of ways of prowling the streets”, where another China appears: messier, fragmented, sometimes powerful, sometimes stalled.
One of the book’s central images is the hole: the stalled building site, the fenced-off promise, the pit in the city where a tower was meant to rise. The most striking example is the Spire site near Canary Wharf. Around it, hoardings still promise “a landmark building” and “unrivalled views across the city”. But, as Knowles puts it, “actually it’s just a hole.” For local people, that matters. They have to walk around it, live around it, and endure the dead space left behind when global capital hesitates.
Knowles was surprised to find that both the Greater London Authority and Greater Manchester authorities did not appear to know “how much international money is swishing around in their cities”.
The hole is not only physical. It is also political. It exposes what local authorities do not know, or choose not to ask. Knowles was surprised to find that both the Greater London Authority and Greater Manchester authorities did not appear to know “how much international money is swishing around in their cities”. Nor did they know clearly where it landed. One planner told her that the origin of the money was not part of the planning process: the question was what would be built, not who was financing it.
Knowles thinks that is a mistake. “Perhaps you should care where the money comes from,” she says, “because in this case, a lot of the money had to go back to China and we’re left with the wreckage of building projects.” The problem is not unique to Chinese money. She mentions Kuwaiti and Saudi capital too. But this kind of investment tends to arrive in the form of “iconic buildings”. It does not usually build community centres or genuinely affordable housing. “The hole is in a sense a missed opportunity to build something that might actually be useful.”
Manchester, often presented as the great success story of English urban regeneration, does not escape her critique. There has been a lot of building and activity, she says, but the question is whether it is the building Manchester needs. Much of it is high-rent, build-to-rent housing aimed at a generation unable to buy. “They’re trying to profit off generation rent’s inability to find deposits,” she says. Even when schemes include so-called affordable housing, the definition is often tied to market rates. “That’s the wrong way to look at things anyway,” she argues, because 80% of market value can still be far beyond what people can pay.
The issue, for Knowles, is not simply China. It is the way British city-making has become opaque, privatised and largely undemocratic. Chinese capital “plays right into” a system that already keeps citizens at a distance. Planning notices go up on lampposts. Consultation is thin. Reports speak euphemistically of “Asian money” rather than Chinese capital. “It should be plain to everyone where it’s coming from and what they’re going to do with it,” she says.
Knowles points to the estimated 150,000 Chinese students in the UK, paying high international fees at a time when universities are financially squeezed. They have become, in her words, “cash cows.”
The same hidden dependency runs through British universities. Knowles points to the estimated 150,000 Chinese students in the UK, paying high international fees at a time when universities are financially squeezed. They have become, in her words, “cash cows” — a role many resent. Their presence has helped keep universities afloat as government funding has weakened, but it has also reshaped courses, recruitment and institutional incentives.
Universities rarely discuss this openly. Knowles argues that there are pressures to admit international students “whatever their qualification base, whatever their grasp of the English language”. AI now makes the language question even more complicated. Courses popular with Chinese students expand; those same courses may become vulnerable if the flow of students slows. And that is possible. China now has a highly developed higher education system of its own.
For Chinese students, the British degree still has value. Knowles compares it to “buying a Gucci handbag”: the label matters.
For Chinese students, the British degree still has value. Knowles compares it to “buying a Gucci handbag”: the label matters. A diploma from UCL, LSE, Oxford or Cambridge carries prestige. It can also help students returning to China gain advantages in housing and residence rights in major cities. But Britain itself is not necessarily attractive. Some students see it as a place to get a qualification, not to build a life. They find the country “crumbling and dirty”; wages are poor; public systems do not work well. Dubai, Australia and other destinations may look more appealing.
This cuts both ways. If Britain views China through suspicion and fragments, Chinese students may look back and see a declining country selling prestige from worn-out institutions. Knowles’ book suggests that both empires — Britain’s old one and China’s emerging one — are more unstable than their official images allow.
The “golden era” of UK-China relations, from roughly 2008 to 2016 or 2017, now looks like a vanished moment. Mandarin was being taught in local schools. British politicians courted Chinese investment. Young Oxbridge graduates moved to Beijing, telling Knowles, “this is where history is happening.” After Covid, much of that energy disappeared. Britain, she says, has not taken much trouble to understand China. “I don’t see much interest in China.”
The money is never neutral. A lawyer she interviewed in Bulgaria told her that accepting Chinese investment can implicitly mute criticism of China’s treatment of Uyghurs or Hong Kong.
That lack of interest may prove costly. China’s power is not necessarily exercised through American-style military spectacle. It works more quietly: through networks, infrastructure, finance, technology and small deals that accumulate. “America’s retreat is China’s game,” Knowles says. China’s Belt and Road initiative to build new trade land and maritime trade routes now reaches around 140 countries and territories. In parts of Africa, she notes, Chinese money may be “the only money in town”.
But the money is never neutral. A lawyer she interviewed in Bulgaria told her that accepting Chinese investment can implicitly mute criticism of China’s treatment of Uyghurs or Hong Kong. “You do implicitly accept their authoritarian politics, if you take the money,” she says, even if nobody formally demands silence.
That is the uneasy terrain of Uneasy Streets: not a simple story of Chinese domination, nor a comforting account of British control. Instead, Knowles shows a Britain that has invited in global money without asking enough questions, universities that have built fragile business models on international students, and cities where the promises of regeneration can end as fenced-off holes in the ground. China is not one thing. “There are many Chinas,” she says. The trouble is that Britain has barely begun to understand any of them.
