Getting tough‘ on China makes headlines, but abroad nobody cares what Johnson says

Date: 30‑01‑2021

Source: The Guardian

Most countries do not feel the need to pontificate about the failings of others. Change comes from within, not without

‘There is nothing that Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson can do about China, any more than they can about anywhere else they noted in the morning news.’

Boris Johnson was last week pressed by senior Conservatives to “take a tougher stance against China” on Uighurs, Hong Kong and human rights. What this means is obscure.

A British foreign secretary reaches his office each day amid images of imperial might. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office is a gallery of murals of Pax Britannica, foreign victories, dazzling potentates, cowering enemies and grateful native peoples. By the time the minister’s feet are under his desk, he must feel the world is straining for his command.

The world is not. Tragic though it may seem to them, there is nothing that Dominic Raab and his boss Boris Johnson can do about China, any more than they can about Russia, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar or anywhere else they noted in the morning news.

Everything I have read about China’s treatment of its Uighurs is horrifying. It includes slave labour, mass incarceration, disappearances, cultural obliteration and reported forced sterilisation. Getting tough with foreign countries may make headlines at home, but damnation is seldom effective policy. Decades of pressure on Iran have the ayatollahs still in power. Vladimir Putin thrives on western abuse. Say what you like about Myanmar or Venezuela or Syria, their regimes seem entrenched.

Britain’s past 30 years of military intervention have mostly been disastrous. Wars in the Middle East and Africa have cost thousands of lives, their value for money unaccounted for. They have since been replaced by a regular global barrage of economic sanctions – occupying page after page of the FCDO website. Britain now has economic aggression in place against Iran, Myanmar, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Russia and many others. The net effect has nowhere been the liberation but rather the impoverishment of these countries’ citizens. In Iran it merely invited China to bail its oil industry for $280bn.

As for sanctioning the rich, the US now bans ever more “friends” of foreign regimes – currently 7,500 – to absolutely no effect. I recall a recent conference on sanctions at Chatham House at which a panel of experts was asked for one example of a recent effective sanction that “worked”. The only answers were that some had “hurt”. The truth is that, for a misbehaving regime, a British sanction is virtually a guarantee of longevity.

As for hot air, the purpose seems to be nothing but a few local headlines. Lending the veneer of sympathy to a regime’s opponents hardly lessens their prison sentences. During the Beijing Olympics in 2008, British ministers were under pressure to raise human rights issues whenever in talks with Chinese officials. So absurd did it get that I was told the Chinese treated it as “the British tea ceremony”. They understood it was a necessary ritual for when ministers got back to something called the House of Commons.

China is not Britain. It is not a democracy, and as far as I can see has no intention of becoming one. It has no concept of the state as upholder of individual liberty. Collective discipline, in all its brutality, is all. I might be sorry about that, but China is not my business and not my responsibility. At least not in the sense that is my own country.

Of all countries on Earth, China has done more in my lifetime to improve the wellbeing of its fifth of the world’s population than any other. As Henry Kissinger, a shrewd student of its politics, says repeatedly, this gives it a “singularity” and a sensitivity that brooks no external critique. It sees democracies destabilising themselves across the world and cannot see why it should imitate them.

Most other countries do not feel the need to pontificate on the failings of others. I am not aware of Germany or Sweden or Brazil issuing regular commentaries on the “acceptability” of the rest of the world as does Britain. This is quite apart from the hypocrisy of Britain doing so when it offers sovereign havens for the world’s illegally laundered cash.

The one form of power that a country such as Britain can project is what is termed soft. This comes in two forms that hold even the Chinese in awe. One is Britain’s schools and universities, the other is its English‑language media, notably the BBC’s incomparable World Service. When I was last in China, both came up in every conversation.

In the academic year 2017‑18, 106,530 Chinese students were enrolled in higher education in the UK – more than from any other foreign country. There are also now 36 British secondary schools with outposts in China, where middle‑class parents seems to ache for a British education. Most of these children will return to China, hopefully bringing with them examples of the virtue of a more liberal society than their own. The surveillance to which they are subjected when in Britain is evidence of how much the Chinese fear just this effect. For sure it beats any fear of Johnson’s posturing and his aircraft carrier dispatched to the South China Sea. I would divert half Britain’s defence budget to overseas student support.

Sovereign countries change not from without but from within. Short of horrendous wars, they change when their rulers know they must, as has China’s. If Britain really feels the need to set the world to rights it will do so by example, and no other way.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist