[BITList] Only Britain can beg for scraps from China and tell them how to behave

[John Feltham]

Only Britain can beg for scraps from China and tell them how to behave

David Cameron says he will drum up trade in China, and tackle human rights. It is an exercise in bluff concealing hypocrisy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/09/britain-beg-china-bluff-hypocrisy

 

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 November 2010
 
 
How do you beg the Chinese for money and yet hold your nose and tell them how awful they are? The Merchant of Venice dilemma is old as diplomacy. Today it clearly vexed the David Cameron on his much-hyped visit to Beijing. The British empire may be dead, but a nagging desire to rule the world, or at least tell it how to behave, is embedded in the genes of every British politician.
Cameron seems overwhelmed these days by the evils and injustices of other peoples. He deplores the Burmese for daring to hold a dud election. He finds it "unacceptable" that the Iranians should stone women to death. The Indians are lovely, but they really must try to be less corrupt. As for the Chinese, when will they stop arresting Nobel prize-winners and persecuting artists, especially when Britain has just asked one to fill Tate Modern with glass porcelain seeds, "to raise awareness" of communist cruelty?

The current British delegation to China is strangely reminiscent of Colonel Younghusband's 1904 expedition to Tibet. Cameron has taken with him a retinue of four cabinet ministers, dozens of celebrity businessmen whom he has made ambassadors during the trip, and a cartload of publicists and hacks. The intention is not just to drum up trade but clearly to cure the heathens of their sinful ways.

The prime minister is thus bombarded with advice on how to "dialogue but not lecture" – be critical but understanding, delicate but firm – when dealing with fiendish orientals. He must "explain where we differ" and inform his hosts that the British people strongly disapprove of their customs, such as jailing and hanging dissidents, suppressing free speech and putting leading artists under house arrest. This Cameron must do and yet not provoke the Chinese into showing him the door. Like Shakespeare's Antonio, he must not drive them to Shylock's sarcastic response: "You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies / I'll lend you thus much moneys?"

Diplomacy has long been an exercise in bluff concealing hypocrisy. The truth of the matter is that there is nothing we can do about China's internal affairs or how it treats its people. We have had no lien on the Chinese mainland since the Boxer rebellion. If we are offended by how communists behave we have a respectable option. We can have nothing to do with them. We need not trade with China. We can refuse visas to its citizens, and declare China a no-go country for British investment. At the very least we can treat China as a country with which we deal only when required to do so for the conduct of international relations.

Yet money has trumped moral outrage. For a decade Britain has been obsequious towards China. Its media gasp in wonder at the Chinese economy. Business people eulogise the great leap forward of "red capitalism", praising the industry, the work ethic, the rate of growth, the export drive, the size of China's marketplace.

In 2008 Gordon Brown grovelled to participate in an outrageous Chinese publicity stunt, welcoming a posse of stooges running an Olympic torch to Downing Street. The whole Olympics farrago involved Britain turning a blind eye, as hundreds of dissidents were locked up, thousands of Beijing's historic buildings were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of citizens were evicted from their homes, all to make way for the "one world, one dream" games. British ministers on Olympic partnership junkets had "to raise the question of human rights" at every meeting. It became a running bad joke, a diplomatic breaking of wind.

Now we are at it again. We lie panting on the floor, begging for scraps from China's table, yet somehow requiring them to be wrapped in a "win" of some dissident being released from detention. How does Cameron square this ethical circle? With 20 plastic smiles gazing at him across the table, does he preface a reference to car factories, hypermarkets and science partnerships with a nervous cough and a "Forgive me, prime minister, if I mention a certain freedom-loving peace-prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, whose incarceration at your pleasure is of deep concern to my Witney constituents"? Does he add his worry over Ai Weiwei, of porcelain bean fame? Artists can be difficult chaps, he might add, and Weiwei's beans have caused huge bother to Britain's health and safety authorities. Perhaps we could bring in the British Council to sort things out.

I have been at such ridiculous masquerades in the past, and know how the Chinese respond. They first ignore everything and wait for what they regard as a spasm of western rudeness to pass. If pressed, they go into conclave and agree to forgive the foreigners; the lack of manners is doubtless the result of an Eton education. As for the subject itself, what on earth has it to do with Britain, or with Anglo-Chinese trade? The last time Britain meddled in such matters it resulted in opium wars.

Europe has long imported food from the Americas, minerals from Africa and manufactures from the Far East. Only Britain demands that such trade be dressed up in feel-good meetings and ethical decontamination certificates. Only Britain goes into trade negotiations wearing the cross of St George amid choruses of Hail Mary.

Such grandstanding diplomacy may give Cameron a statesman-like buzz and win plaudits from leader writers and the Anglo-Chinese lobby back home. But it makes no difference to the plight of the persecuted Chinese, except possibly to exacerbate their persecution. Meanwhile, it risks undermining whatever benefit to trade might come from the visit.
One day perhaps China will have enough of this posturing and send a return delegation to London. Before discussing British lingerie exports, the Chinese will profess a "deep concern" at Britain's prison overcrowding, control orders, housing benefit reform and cap on student fees. They will "raise awareness" of Abu Hamza's detention, the persecution of asylum-seeking children and house flipping by MPs.

Finally the delegation might beg advice on democracy. How can they arrange for seats in the houses of parliament to be sold to wealthy businessmen, or handed down from father to son? How could an election be fixed so the party that comes third finds itself in power? And perhaps Cameron could lend Beijing his admirable Mr Gove, to advise on the dictatorial centralisation of the Tibetan education service.

That feels better, the Chinese might say. How about those lingerie contracts?


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