Britain ‘will not bow to China pressure over human rights’
The Telegraph, 26 September 2011
By Peter Foster
China’s attempts to use British business contacts to lobby Britain into taking a softer stance on human rights will fail, diplomatic sources have told The Daily Telegraph.
The comments come ahead of a UK-China Strategic Dialogue which opens Monday.
The one-day summit between the Foreign Secretary William Hague and China’s most senior point-man on foreign affairs, Dai Bingguo, comes after Britain received a public warning from China against daring to criticise its human rights record.
In a sign of China’s growing sensitivity to criticism over a wave of detentions in recent months, David Cameron’s Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao warned publicly against British “finger-wagging” at a Downing Street press conference last June.
The Daily Telegraph understands this was followed by Chinese approaches to senior British businessmen, including members of The 48 Group Club, a networking organisation that traces its roots back to pioneers businessmen who first did business with Mao’s China in the early 1950s.
However diplomatic sources said that Mr Hague would not be deterred by the pressure and would stick to the UK’s official position that human rights were at the “irreducible core” of the country’s foreign policy.
“The British government believes that the best long-term interests of the British business community in China are served by a China that follows the rule of law and upholds international norms on rights and freedoms,” the source added.
Mr Hague, who began his tenure as Foreign Secretary emphasising trade above all else, is understood to have softened his views in the light of the political upheaval in the Middle East which has demonstrated the link between upholding political rights and maintaining stability.
Earlier this month Mr Hague, delivering a speech at an event to mark the plight Iranian political prisoners, promised to “shine a spotlight” on Iran’s human rights record. “We will not forget those imprisoned in Iran”, he said.
Human rights groups covering China wish that Mr Hague would take a similarly robust approach to China, which continues to imprison dissidents, often without trial, using physical and psychological violence against its opponents.
The agenda for the four-and-a-half hour strategic dialogue is expected to include a broad range of issues including Libya and on-going Arab Spring uprisings that provoked a severe clampdown in China with dozens of activists, including the artist Ai Weiwei, being taken into custody.
Britain also has concerns about China’s growing military might and its increasingly bullying and belligerent attitude to its neighbours in the South China Sea, a body of water through which half the world’s shipping passes and large parts of which China claims for itself.
The ongoing unrest in Libya, Yemen and Syria is expected to give Mr Hague the opportunity to press Britain’s view that upholding fundamental rights and the rule of law are essential to the long-term future stability and prosperity of China.
However any private representations over human rights issues will have to be tempered by Britain’s stated ambition – agreed during the visit by Premier Wen in June – to raise its bilateral trade with China from its current USD$60billion (£38.8billion) a year to USD$100billion (£64.7billion) a year by 2015.
Fearing China will extract a commercial price for Britain’s human rights stance, politicians have attempted to de-link the issues, with Mr Cameron arguing: “There is no trade-off in our relationship. It is not about either discussing trade or human rights.”
British officials say they have seen no drop-off in British trade with China which is up 20per cent in the first half of this year. However senior businessmen in China remain concerned that the current government’s approach is damaging trade prospects.
China has shown in the recent past that it is prepared to take reprisals against countries that challenge it, plunging Norway into diplomatic isolation after the Nobel Institute awarded the 2010 peace prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and, in 2008, punishing France after President Sarkozy met Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
Alistair Michie, the honorary secretary of The 48 Group Club, told The Daily Telegraph that the Cameron administration had failed to grasp the “politics” of China in the way that Tony Blair had when he was prime minister, urging the Coalition to be more “pragmatic”.
“It [the UK government’s attitude on human rights] just frustrates the Chinese. It’s a distraction from the issue that really matters which is the politics and economics of the [Sino-British] relationship,” he said.
“The central drive of the British government is to build bilateral trade to USD$100billion dollars a year and if we’re going to reach that goal we’re just going to have to be a lot more practical about the politics.”
China, for different reasons, would also like to see a de-linking of trade and international politics from human rights issues, issuing a white paper last month promising a “peaceful rise” but rejecting Western “universal” values and urging other countries not to interfere in China’s internal affairs.
“China doesn’t agree to accept Western political practices or ‘universal’ values, but believes in a globalised world that China and the rest should seek common values, rather than individual countries trying to impose their own values over the others,” explained Prof Su Changhe of the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University.
“That doesn’t mean that China and Western countries can’t gradually seek where their common values overlap, such as an agreement that improving people’s livelihoods is important for good governance and that dialogue is essential to international political order.”
For human rights groups, however, bending to Chinese demands to keep silent on human rights issues only encourages China’s ruling Communist Party to keep up its round of illegal “disappearances” and detentions of anyone who dissents against one-party rule.
Phelim Kine, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch said that the Cameron administration – in contrast to the US or Germany – had consistently failed to raise Chinese human rights issues in public, which had only emboldened China to push for more concessions.
“Britain talks about human rights as being an ‘irreducible core’ of its foreign policy, and yet on China they dare to say very little on the issue in public. When Cameron visited China they say he raised Ai Weiwei’s in private, but they failed in public. Essentially, they want to have it both ways.
“The result is that Chinese know that they have the Cameron government on the run. That’s how you come to have a situation where the Chinese prime minister is publicly lecturing the British prime minister that China won’t stand for ‘finger-wagging’ on human rights.”