Espionage. Repression. It would be sheer folly to do nuclear deals with the Chinese
THE Prime Minister’s decision to review the £18 billion Hinkley Point nuclear power project has won a cheer from everyone not in line to make money from it.
When the holidays are over, there are two good reasons why Theresa May should go further and cancel the scheme.
The first is that its electricity will be fantastically expensive.
The second, which we shall consider here, is that it was a critical error of judgement for the Cameron government to invite the People’s Republic of China to fund a huge national infrastructure project.
Allowing the Chinese access to Hinkley Point, and beyond it to other British nuclear plants, would give a hostage to fortune. The record shows that the Chinese can’t be trusted with sensitive industrial data. Fair dealing has no place in their system.
A decade ago, Robert Zoellick, then World Bank president, said the West’s future relations with China required the country to become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the international order.
This it has not yet done. Until it happens, we cannot do big business with Beijing.
The last government, and especially the then-Chancellor George Osborne, cherished naive ambitions to create a historic new trading relationship with the dragon.
The new Downing Street, and especially Mrs May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy, take a much beadier view. He recognises, and publicly warned about last year, the threat to Western interests posed by granting the Chinese access to our secrets and infrastructure.
Hostility
A nation that engages in global industrial espionage, employing an estimated 1.5million geeks to penetrate other people’s computers — while denying its own people online access — is not a comfortable business associate.
There seems a reasonable prospect of avoiding a major military conflict in our own or our children’s lifetimes with the world’s two most dangerous states, China and Russia.
But new forms of war, notably keyboarddriven ones, seem inescapable. We need to be much more wakeful than we are today about the inherent hostility of these two big, clumsy regimes to our values and interests. We underestimate at our peril the ruthlessness with which they pursue their objectives.
That is not to say the two countries dance to the same tune. Russia is fundamentally weak. President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism abroad is driven by economic failure at home.
He can keep the keys to the Kremlin only by sustaining a belief in the minds of his people that they are victims of Western enemies who are bent on depriving Russia of its rightful respect, prosperity and dominions.
In addition to military action in Ukraine and Syria, Putin has launched an ambitious global programme of disinformation, spearheaded by the TV channel Russia Today. He makes all the mischief he can, by such means as hacking and leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails.
China comes from a different direction. It is a rising power with an economy that will probably soon overtake that of the U.S.
Already, China’s long arm has stretched to Africa and South America, where it is effectively colonising huge areas by buying up the supplies of raw materials such as oil, copper and iron ore which it needs to feed its endless consumption of energy and its vast building programme.
David Cameron and George Osborne hoped to cash in on a slice of the potentially huge trade market available in China, which is why last October the British government staged an unprecedentedly chummy state visit for President Xi Jinping, at which the Queen herself was obliged almost to kowtow.
(You may recall that she was accidentally recorded by television cameras in May observing that Chinese officials were ‘very rude’ to the British ambassador during the visit.)
The objective was to forge a new bilateral trading relationship, heedless of the unease of the U.S.
Chinese involvement in the design of the Hinkley Point reactor is part of a wider plan, whereby by 2025 the Chinese could hold a £105billion stake in British infrastructure.
Yet for this to make sense, we need to believe that China can be a benign, honourable, honest industrial partner. None of those adjectives seems appropriate now, or in the near future.
President Xi has shown himself to be the most autocratic Chinese leader since the death of the genocidal tyrant Mao Zedong in the Seventies.
The price of industrial co-operation with Beijing is British silence about China’s systemic human rights abuses, of which the highest rate of state executions in the world is only the most conspicuous example.
Autocratic
We should we equally worried about the Second Bureau of the Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army — otherwise known as Unit 61398, which is engaged in the theft of intellectual property across the world.
President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice said last autumn that Chinese industrial espionage is ‘not a mild irritation, it’s an economic and national security concern to the United States’.
Chinese hacking of personal and corporate information, she said, ‘undermines our long-term economic co-operation, and it needs to stop’.
But Chinese assertiveness is not restricted to the cybersphere.
Only last month, China contemptuously dismissed the verdict of an international tribunal, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which ruled that its operations to create new islands and claim new territorial waters in the South China Sea are unjustified and illegal.
You may say Britain can shrug its shoulders about the South China Sea.
But we can scarcely ignore the evidence that Beijing scorns international law, personal freedom and property rights.
David Cameron and George Osborne seemed to believe that Britain, by treating the Chinese nicely, might persuade them to behave better, at least to us.
This seemed naively mistaken last year, and is mistaken now.
So, likewise, was British willingness to allow the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei to bid for contracts in this country, when the United States won’t allow the firm anywhere near its domestic systems.
The UK’s intelligence and security committee expressed dismay that the government was so eager to promote Chinese trade and investment that it seemed willing to ignore the obvious risks of admitting the Chinese to our telecoms networks.
For Huawei — like the China Nuclear Power Corporation (CNPC) — is no independent entity. Both are arms of the communist state. The CNPC’s website acknowledges its commitment to ‘the building of national defence’, alongside its economic and industrial objectives.
It’s not necessary to be an oldfashioned Cold Warrior to consider it folly for Britain to treat China as a friend while it promotes values and pursues objectives utterly at odds with those of this country and its allies.
George Osborne may have been flattered to be received in China as an honoured guest.
But then so, too, is the absurd British Marxist Martin Jacques, whose book entitled When China Rules The World is apparently popular in Beijing ruling circles since it predicts a time when this behemoth state will be the most powerful on the planet.
The Chinese are irked by the debate in Western capitals about how best they can be persuaded to moderate and modify their policies to fit in with the international order.
Repressive
President Xi and his comrades expect the international order to fit in with Beijing’s template.
The West is more likely, eventually, to achieve a tolerable co-existence with China than with Russia, because for all its problems China is becoming an economic success story, while Russia seems doomed to ongoing economic failure, with the bitterness this breeds.
For now, however, we need to sup with both nations using a long spoon. There may be a time, when Beijing has showed itself worthy of trust, when we should cut deals for Chinese investment in our infrastructure. But that time has not come yet.
The involvement in Hinkley Point of one of the most repressive and secretive regimes in the world poses unacceptable risks.
Britain will have to pay a stiff forfeit for abandoning the project, but it seems right for the Prime Minister to make that decision.
There are many powerful economic arguments for cancellation, but the threat to our national security is the clincher.