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The idea that nothing can be done to help Hong Kong is misguided. We can and must take action
The sign said “no photos” and we weren’t taking any. But the Shanghai museum guard mistook our visual translation app for a camera. He was telling us to can it when a nearby student intervened to explain. The guard backed off and I asked the student where he was from. “Hong Kong,” he said. When I said I was British, he said: “Oh – we’re friends!”
Well, to our shame, Hong Kong’s students are looking distinctly friendless today. This week, police began using live ammunition, running into protesters with motorbikes and, on Tuesday, stormed the campus at the Chinese University of Hong Kong using tear gas and rubber bullets. Protesters escalated the violence, too, stocking up on petrol bombs and bricks. Their basic demands are for universal suffrage and free elections. They do not want to be absorbed into China’s dictatorship.
The UK is an explicit guarantor of freedoms in Hong Kong, as per the joint declaration concluded between the UK and China in 1997. Yet aside from hand-wringing, our Government has done nothing. The status of Hong Kong points to a trend that will be among the most important strategic developments of the next parliament: the increasing assertiveness of China.
This issue has yet to appear anywhere in the election campaign, obscured by Brexit and the NHS. Bread-and-butter issues will always matter more to voters. But lately, leading politicians have failed to do even the most basic thinking about our long-term interests. They haven’t even asked, let alone answered, the question of how to approach China. This catastrophic failure has a certain irony to it, because if Brexit is to be a success, it will require us to think more strategically than ever.
This matters because, much as politicians like to toy with the idea of a mega-trade deal with China, Beijing is already a very successful exporter not just of goods, but of its own ideology: totalitarian censorship. One of its most successful targets is the UK.
People in Britain find this very hard to believe. But consider a seemingly trivial case from this week. Every year, a cake-decorating competition is held in Birmingham, attracting entries from all over the world. This year, a café in Hong Kong decided to take part, contributing a cake that featured a Guy Fawkes mask, pro-democracy posters and a black-clothed protester. Like clockwork, the organisers soon received a complaint claiming the cake was “offensive”. It was duly barred from the competition. The reaction in Britain was largely that of bemusement. These “snowflakes”, people grumbled, taking offence at every this or that. They could not be more wrong.
This isn’t about snowflakes. Believe it or not, it is part of a sophisticated and ruthless propaganda operation mounted all over the world by a Chinese government department called the United Front. Over the past decade, the United Front has expanded its operations outside of China, where it relentlessly promotes unquestioning loyalty to the Communist Party. As China’s interests have expanded, it now seeks to do exactly the same thing across the world and we, utter chumps, are falling for it.
The campaign is running at full throttle in our universities, which are increasingly dependent on Chinese cash, but also affects think tanks, politics, media and businesses, as highlighted by a Foreign Affairs Committee report. Afraid of losing lucrative Chinese students, university vice chancellors have tried to suppress critical comment on China by their own professors. Administrators, like those at York University, have kowtowed to Chinese students (often pushed by their government) complaining that expressions of support for Hong Kong are “offensive”. The list of known examples is vast and still just the tip of the iceberg.
In the face of Hong Kong’s troubles and the ferocious, global propaganda campaign accompanying it, our leading politicians are minded to shrug. They seem to think there is nothing we can do and we should just shut up and trade with China. This is seriously misguided.
The UK does have levers to pull. At the most basic level, we must defend our own values on our own soil. Universities must explain to academics and students, wherever they are from, that they are obliged to respect the right to protest, and should offer support for anyone being threatened on campus.
Beyond that, we have tools with which to needle Beijing in Hong Kong. The first is the granting of citizenship to 200,000 Hong Kong holders of “British National Overseas” status, as pushed for by the Tory backbencher Tom Tugendhat. These BNO holders can already vote in UK elections and are meant to benefit from UK protection, but in effect fall under the sway of Beijing. Giving them full rights would provide an escape hatch that might help to cool heads and temper the violence.
Secondly, the UK can put pressure on Hong Kong’s position as a gateway to China. Its international credibility relies upon a network of senior judges seconded into its legal system from the Anglosphere. The UK and its common law allies like Australia and New Zealand should make clear that we will cease to look kindly on the Hong Kong work of our retired judges if the judicial system’s independence is eroded. It may be that China does not care and has decided to destroy Hong Kong as an example to its own cowed population, but if that is the case, our judges cannot stay anyway.
Thirdly, we should be using our permanent UN Security Council seat to criticise China. The Sino-british Joint Declaration, whose terms Beijing has clearly breached, is on file at the UN, creating an obligation on all UN members. China might rage, but it is acutely sensitive to embarrassment, as its obsession with censorship shows.
Despite China’s every effort, public opinion in Hong Kong is still largely favourable towards the protesters. But Hong Kongers also look fearfully at what Beijing has done in its restive western province of Xinjiang, where a million people have been sent to “re-education camps” and where all of the conditions that usually precede a genocide are now in place.
The only thing stopping Hong Kong from being the next site of China’s pre-genocidal experiment is the glare of global publicity. If we allow ourselves to be hoodwinked by Beijing’s campaign of control, if we become reluctant to speak for our values and affirm our friendship with Hong Kong, our reward will not be more trade and opportunity, but an emboldened, totalitarian dictatorship stepping boldly into the role of global hegemon, afraid of nothing.
The UK does have levers to pull. At the most basic level, we must defend our own values on our own soil