Get real when dealing with dictators

This Green and Strangely Pleasant Land examines the new British government’s worrying plans for resetting relations with China

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been on the phone to China's President Xi Jinping expressing hopes that he can discuss areas of disagreement in a "open, frank and honest" manner. This is little more than an expression of hope over experience, but on the off chance that is contains an element of substance a good place to start this dialogue would be the guilty verdict handed down by a Hong Kong court last week on journalists accused of sedition for the ‘crime’ of publishing the views of opposition figures.

They were editors from the shuttered Stand News portal doing no more than what is expected from any independent media organisation and indeed was allowed before the crackdown on free speech  accelerated with the enactment of a draconian National Security Law in 2020.

Lamentably they are not the only victims of the media purge which has ‘cleansed’ the entire media, caused six outlets to be shut down, sent journalists to jail, caused a great many to face the sack and a large number to flee.

The Stand News trial makes it clear that the judiciary no longer pretends to be impartial as judge Kwok Wai-ku made no bones about the political nature of the trial, going so far as to conjour up a new offence of advocating ‘localist autonomy’.

The clampdown on freedom of expression is, among things, a direct slap in the face to Britain that signed a treaty for Hong Kong’s handover explicitly guaranteeing the continuation of liberties that prevailed in the former British colony.

Against this background Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy have been talking about a ‘reset’ of relations with the world’s largest dictatorship (a description they do not use). Indeed Mr Lammy is planning to beetle off to Beijing to make this point.

Will he ask his Chinese counterparts to justify what amounts to the criminalisation of independent journalism in Hong Kong? The suspicion lingers that he will not.

This suspicion is fuelled by Mr Lammy’s talk of ‘realism’ in dealing with Beijing. There is nothing wrong with realism but long experience shows that when British politicians speak in these terms with regard to China it almost always means turning a blind eye to the brutal nature of the regime while focusing on trade and investment.

There is no need to be naïve as every nation strives to preserve its own best interests. China is unflinching in this regard and not averse to bullying when it can get away with it. All that is being asked of Britain is that it should stand up for British interests and values with something approaching equal vigour.

Yet Britain is strangely mesmerised by the great China market, convinced that being nice to Beijing will yield impressive returns. The evidence for this is remarkably sparse. As matters stand there is a £42 billion imbalance in British trade with China in Beijing’s favour, counterbalanced by a British surplus of £38 billion in services trade, much of which exists only on paper, not in hard cash flowing into the UK’s coffers.

No doubt Mr Lammy thinks that his visit to Beijing can help to yield all manner of benefits to British business and no doubt his Chinese interlocuters will dangle these prospects before his eyes. But the actual situation is that China benefits far more from its trading relations with Britain than vice-versa.

Yet somehow successive British governments have persuaded themselves that they need to pander to Beijing for the sake of the economy. So desperate was Britain to attract Chinese investment during the Cameron premiership that it actually threw open the doors of the UK telecommunications network to a major Chinese corporation under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party and encouraged other forms of Chinese participation in Britain’s vital infrastructure, blissfully unaware of the dangers to national security.

Only recently has Whitehall woken up to the fact that Chinese manufactured surveillance cameras, harvesting literally millions of pieces of information, were commonplace in a host of public buildings, including those with a sensitive role. Chinese diplomats have got away with beating up protestors in Manchester, Chinese police outposts were established in Britain and a cackhanded plot ‘masterminded’ by a former Hong Kong cop was conducting surveillance on political and business targets on British soil.

What is that the new Labour government does not understand about dealing with this thuggish regime, one that signs a treaty with Britain and then blatantly flaunts its disregard of its contents?

As the Stand News editors Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam are marched off to jail for the offence of being journalists, it’s time to pause for a dose of realism about a reset of relations with Beijing.