Now our China illusion is ending, can the West revive its love of freedom?

The CCP’S propaganda is wearing increasingly thin in Britain, but that will not solve our larger problems

There they were on Thursday, the three Huawei senior executives in a Zoom-talk with MPS. Greg Clark, chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, asked them whether, in their positions, they were free to express their views. “Very much so,” replied Jeremy Thompson, vice-chairman of Huawei UK, brightly.

So what did he think of the new Hong Kong security law imposed by Beijing, asked Mr Clark, sweetly. Mr Thompson coloured slightly: “I don’t think [saying anything] would be consistent with my role with Huawei in this forum,” he answered. His two colleagues claimed the same freedom, but, like him, declined to exercise it.

It was a comical encapsulation of the problem of British engagement with all organisations ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – which is to say, all important organisations in China. What can those who are thus engaged say in public? If they admit the truth, they will wreck their standing with an audience which believes in liberal democratic values.

Universities have as much trouble as businesses. Since April, this column has been trying to find out from Jesus College, Cambridge, about the character and finances of its China Centre and its China/uk Global Issues Dialogue Centre. The China Centre website extravagantly praised Xi Jinping’s “national rejuvenation”, until this column pointed it out. The wording was then hastily replaced by talk of “using the past to serve the present (gu wei jin yong)” and “harmonious global governance”. Many Chinese will recognise the phrase about the past serving the present as a favourite of the late, unlamented Chairman Mao.

The Dialogue Centre published in February a supposedly independent report about telecommunications reforms. It praised Huawei, advancing ideas on the subject beneficial to Chinese interests. Most unusually, the report carried a laudatory foreword from the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Stephen Toope.

On Thursday, however, menaced by Freedom of Information requests, Jesus College admitted it had accepted £200,000 for the Dialogue Centre from a branch of the Chinese State Council, £55,000 from another branch for the China Centre and £150,000 from Huawei for the digital report which Prof Toope liked so much. Until then, not even the Fellows of Jesus College – the governing body – had been informed.

In a gabbling late-night email rushed out on Thursday to Fellows and alumni, the master of Jesus, Sonita Alleyne, revealed some of the above – though not, important to note, the money from the Chinese State Council. She protested that the China Centre encourages “a wide array of views”. May we look forward, then, to a China Centre seminar on the treatment of dissidents in Hong Kong, addressed by some of them?

Many fingers are being painfully trapped in the hinge of history. Earlier in the Covid story, Prof Kerry Brown, head of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London, tweeted: “It’s a line I hear a lot – loving Chinese people, hating the Communist Party. But… on almost every level it makes no sense.”

He seemed to deplore criticism of the CCP. That was in April. This week, however, Prof Brown admitted a fear in academic circles of writing critically about China because of social media attacks by an “army of wumao activists”. (“Wumao” is slang meaning the trolls on Beijing’s payroll.) He writes of the danger of “selfcensorship”. Is he, perhaps, thinking of his recent self?

In academia, business and politics, it is dawning on Prof Brown and his equivalents that all that Anglo-chinese “Golden Era” stuff convinces fewer people each day. Covid-19 and the crackdown in Hong Kong have seen to that. Trust is draining away. Soon, the Chinese money will start drying up. The more hardline Ccp-backers, such as Prof Peter Nolan, who directs the Jesus China Centre, evade the problem by simply saying nothing.

There is a still a long way to go, however, in working out how best to think about China’s rise in the world, and where our own interests lie.

Those who praise modern China tend to argue as follows: China was the world’s greatest economic power until the British Industrial Revolution roughly 200 years ago, a wonderful civilisation. Unlike the Western powers, it was not imperialist. It was the victim of Western imperialism.

Also unlike the West, it followed a “harmonious” approach (note the use of that word on Jesus’s website), whereas the West preferred “conflict”. China favours the common good over individualism. It sees the world as a “community of common destiny” (a phrase it insists on writing into all UN human rights documents). A new order of international institutions needs to be constructed round that community, instead of serving Western interests.

In such a view, the CCP advances this common destiny. Yes, the Chairman Mao period was a bit of an aberration. The Great Leap Forward (more than 30million dead) and Cultural Revolution (perhaps a mere two million) were definitely mistakes. But, nowadays, all is pretty good. As Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean guru of the decline of the West and the rise of the East, puts it, China’s modern achievement is “the most glorious ever in its 3,000-year history”, and Xi Jinping is “exceptionally honest and competent”.

Some of these claims are questionable, to put it very mildly indeed. Take that anti-imperial point. Surely the Chinese rulers were called “Emperors” for a reason. If you Google “The Chinese Empire”, a clever map flashes different images across the surface of the Far East, representing the different areas China has ruled at different times. In some eras, the space is twice the size of others – pictures, in other words, of empire-building and -breaking. Supposedly peace-loving China has fought numerous wars, even in the latter half of the 20th century, invading South Korea, Tibet, India, the Soviet Union and Vietnam (where 150,000 people died).

But critics of the West – often Westerners themselves – are right that China’s success since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms does indeed challenge us. It may mean – though I tend to doubt it – that China is certain to become the world’s greatest power.

It does mean that a way of doing things quite unlike ours (though learning a great deal from us) has outpaced us in important respects. Those interested in global order and prosperity have to work out the best way of living with this.

This is immensely hard for the West to do in its current state of flux – the weakness of the EU, America’s divided politics, the clashes of Brexit, financial anxiety. An excellent new strategy document by Charles Parton from the Policy Institute at King’s College, London, (quite separate from Prof Brown’s outfit) struggles to find much positive in our current relations on which to build. Instead, it argues for the basics which we have so neglected: a much deeper study of China, an end to Chinese participation in our critical national infrastructure, a clearer sense of our long-term national interests, a consequent building of alliances not only with our “Five Eyes” Anglosphere friends, but also with the Asian powers which fear China most of all – South Korea, India, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan.

In his latest work, Has the West Lost it?, Mahbubani says that “we may be on the verge of utopia”. It is striking that, so far as I can see, the word “freedom” does not occur in his book. That unfreedom is central to the CCP’S Eastern promise to the world. It seems worth resisting.