The West has become too reliant on its economic links with China
Excessive engagement has blunted our ability to respond to abuses carried out by the brutal regime
Take a moment and contemplate the bravery of the demonstrators in Hong Kong. Yesterday, confronted by mounting Chinese intimidation, 100,000 people took once more to the streets. Ominously, video footage has emerged of a Chinese military buildup in nearby Shenzhen, and Beijing has begun to refer to the demonstrators as terrorists. This week, a senior Chinese diplomat said, “if Hong Kong’s situation deteriorates… the central government will not sit by and watch.” The central government, of course, is not queasy about oppressing civilians. It has imprisoned around one million Uighur Muslims in detention camps.
Helpless minorities are not the only people in Beijing’s sights. Across the whole of China, the state is using mass surveillance, big data and internet technologies to build a social credit system to judge people’s civic worth. This Orwellian horror will allow the authorities to monitor and then either punish or reward individuals and businesses as they see fit. Even hardy British spooks – no strangers to surveillance – return from China shocked by the penetration
of the state into everyday private life.
The demonstrations in Hong Kong – and the deployment of military assets nearby – have caused comparisons with the last major protests that rocked the Chinese state, in 1989. Some critics predict with confidence that Hong Kong will not turn into another Tiananmen Square. Beijing certainly has no interest in provoking a global reaction.
But consider President Xi’s uncompromising attitude towards those who stand in the way of Communist rule. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he once asked in a speech to the party. “An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken… Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” Xi is not a man to compromise with dissenters and, with the stakes rising higher every day, it is difficult to see how he can back down.
He is, however, in a bind. Hong Kong’s status is guaranteed in international law by the 1984 Joint Declaration, the treaty that led to Britain handing over its colony to China in 1997. He cannot legally interfere with Hong Kong’s government, legal system and individual rights and freedoms. And in the age of the internet and social media, it would be impossible to use violence to overcome the demonstrators without global condemnation.
Yet China’s actions suggest they are seeking a casus belli to end the demonstrations forcibly. State propaganda says protestors are being stirred up by “black hands” from American intelligence agencies. State media outlets report that the protestors are violent criminals. It would be very surprising if the Chinese had not sent provocateurs into Hong Kong – a favoured trick by authoritarian regimes through the ages – to entrap protestors and make the case for a violent intervention.
Recent reports suggest that the Tiananmen Square massacre was even bloodier than we knew at the time. According to British diplomatic cables declassified last year, the death toll was not 1,000 but 10,000. And the cables tell us more about the appalling, indiscriminate and deliberate killing that took place that day.
“Students understood they were given one hour to leave [the] Square”, reads one message, “but after five minutes [armoured personnel carriers] attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down.” The personnel carriers then “ran over bodies time and time again to make ‘cake’ and remains [were] collected by bulldozer.” The remains of the protestors, the cable reports, were incinerated and hosed down drains.
Wounded female students begged for their lives but were bayonetted by Chinese soldiers. Survivors were told they could escape by specific routes only to be mown down by machine gun fire. Army ambulances trying to give aid to the wounded were “shot up” by their fellow soldiers.
This is a serious warning, not from ancient history but the relatively recent past. China might be more exposed to world trade, it might invest in western infrastructure, its nationals might own English football teams, and its leaders might seem more suave and urbane. But it remains the direct descendent of the brutal, one-party, authoritarian state of 1989.
Undoubtedly, some will say there is little Britain – or the wider West – can do. China is, after all, the world’s largest trading nation already, and is expected to have a larger economy than the US by 2030. But as a first step, we can do what Tom Tugendhat, the Chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, has recommended, and guarantee British citizenship to Hong Kong’s citizens. This would give these brave people a route to safety, make China think again before resorting to violence, and – by granting Hongkongers a guaranteed escape – give them the confidence to stay while life remains tolerable.
But we must think again about our economic engagement with China. The West is wilfully facilitating the rise of a brutal and authoritarian state. Britain has become so dependent on Chinese investment, its response to China’s human rights abuses, industrial espionage, cyber attacks, geopolitical expansionism and military development has been pitifully weak.
But it is not only Britain. As the European Union refuses to make fiscal transfers from richer to poorer member states, a policy required by the logic of its single currency, China is investing heavily in Eastern Europe and gaining diplomatic leverage. Even in America, which under President Trump has stood up to Beijing, China owns more than $1trillion of public debt. Meanwhile, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, building trading routes between 65 countries, covering more than 60 per cent of the world population, and investing $900 billion, marches on. The further it gets, the greater will be China’s diplomatic, economy and military power all around the globe.
Hong Kong might seem a great distance away. Our connections to our former colony might feel like something from history. But we cannot turn away. And we cannot continue to treat China like it is just another country.