It’s still cold

Zeng Wei, the Chinese Consul, defends Chinese investments of all sorts in the UK (Letters,

11 March). He suggests all objections are based on “concocted cock-and-bull stories”, and advises us to treat such investments (by firms whose overriding loyalty, by law, is to his government) “objectively and impartially”.

Some of us take a different view, certainly about Hinkley nuclear power station and Huawei. Anyone asserting in 1990 that we would now be dependent, only 30 years later, on Chinese technology and finance for such basic needs, plus so much else, from vehicle components to medicines as current events show, would have been laughed out of court.

Having handed over so much of USA, UK and EU industries to China, it is, of course, our own money buying their products that is now being recycled back into these investments and into China’s economic colonisation policies elsewhere – with both risking our future security.

He avers that a “confident big power” should have a different mindset. Would he then agree that China, being confident and big, should now have a mindset confident enough to allow its well-educated citizens a free press and other media, an independent judiciary, and free multi-party elections, or at the very least open public debate within the Communist Party factions, from ultra-maoists to relative liberal leaders, such as those crushed in 1989?

If only the Cold War was “in the old days”. Sadly with dictators-for-life now running most of Eurasia east of Poland, and without the aforementioned freedoms, it will continue for many years to come – as many in Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and elsewhere would agree.

JOHN BIRKETT Horseleys Park, St Andrews