"China is what it is," says the U.K.'s chancellor of the Exchequer -- no longer any need to pretend to fret over Chinese domestic repression

British Chancellor George Osborne, the country's second-ranking official, says officially, "China is what it is." It's business, you see. Just business.

by Ken

In a new NYRB blogpost, "Who's Afraid of Chinese Money?," journalist Jonathan Mirsky -- one of our most valuable chroniclers of matters Chinese -- flashes back 20-plus years:

In the autumn of 1991, then-Prime Minister John Major became the first Western leader to visit China after the Tiananmen killings. I was part of the press group on that trip, and on the plane going to China, I gave Major a list of several hundred political prisoners in Chinese jails given to me by Amnesty International. After his meeting with Chinese Premier Li Peng, Major told us that he had handed the list to the Chinese leader and spoken forcefully about political freedom. Dazzled, I hurried to file a long story for my newspaper on Britain's moral courage. In fact, as I learned later from an official who had been in the room, no list was handed over and political freedom was never mentioned. Major's lie, I was told -- repeated by his Foreign Secretary Hurd, who was also in Beijing -- was intended to influence how we reported the trip.

Mirksy, tells this in support of the proposition that "a fundamental shift has appeared in British rhetoric in the fourteen years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown." For him this change is summed up in a comment by Britian's chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, during a trip to China "aimed at selling Britain to Chinese companies":

"China is what it is. We have to be here or nowhere."

Note that Mirsky speaks of "a fundamental shift in British rhetoric" (emphasis added), not a shift in British attitudes or policies.

Western governments used to go to great lengths to say they were standing up for human rights in China. Now, trade ties with Beijing are so lucrative that Western leaders no longer need to lie: China is what it is.

Mirsky invites us to contrast the fibbing then-Prime Minister John Major felt obliged to do in 1991 --

with the statements by Osborne and Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who accompanied him, during and after their trip to China last week. The trip, which involved no meetings with senior officials, was aimed solely at doing business with some of China's largest companies. In their enthusiastic deal-making, they were at pains to explain why they needed to avoid any moral concerns. "We've got to start by understanding that China is an ancient civilization with a long and proud history," Osborne said. That the Chinese Communist Party has turned its back on that ancient culture appears unknown to the chancellor; in any event, Syria and Iran, with equally long histories, are not treated with respect by the British.

Nor did Osborne and Johnson seem troubled by leaving Britain increasingly at the economic mercy of a huge and powerful neo-communist power. If the deals made by Osborne and Johnson are carried out, before long Chinese companies will own a controlling interest in Britain's nuclear power industry. On national security grounds alone, this is alarming. The Chinese government has been known to use whatever leverage it has to express its displeasure with foreign governments; following Prime Minister David Cameron's and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's informal half-hour encounter with the Dalai Lama last year in St. Paul's crypt, Beijing enforced a year-long freeze on ministerial visits. With British nuclear power in Beijing's hands, just wait until a British spokesman regrets an attack on Taiwan or China's warships firing on Japanese vessels in the South China Sea. Will the British like reading in the dark?

Mirsky cites other instances too of Chinese financial and technical concerns potentially exercising control over important segments of British life, which he says "sounds like a reverse of the nineteenth-century 'extraterritoriality' that allowed foreigners living and working in Imperial China not to be subject to Chinese laws."

"The Chinese regime," Mirsky says, "has neither friends nor allies."

It deals with other countries only on the level of its own interests and is always ready to take offense and then punish, as it did with Britain over the Dalai Lama. How gratifying it must have been to Chinese officials when Cameron recently said, "I have no plans to see the Dalai Lama," a statement Osborne took care to repeat. What really concerns Beijing are Tibet and Taiwan, and Taiwan's claims in the South and East China Seas.

The British government has taken note and will not be asking China's leaders any embarrassing questions. As Osborne put it, "of course you are not going to get people criticizing the president of China, because it's not a democracy."

Or, Mirsky points out, are British officials apt to make an issue of the fact that --

China is the only country in the world that keeps its only Nobel Peace Prize winner in jail. He is Liu Xiaobo, now serving out eleven years for "counter-revolution and subversion," only the latest of his many sentences since Tiananmen in May 1989, just before the massacre, when I saw him telling thousands of young protestors that what they should be demanding was democracy. His real crime was organizing with others to publish their views on free speech and democracy, a serious crime in China. When Oslo held a ceremony for Liu in absentia, the Chinese government wrote to all the foreign ambassadors to Norway not to attend; seventeen obeyed and didn't show up. Dozens of lawyers who defended dissidents like Liu, other dissidents, many of them unknown to most of us, also languish behind bars.

Mirsky wonders, finally:

Can Britain now be so poor and abject that it permits China to gain considerable control of its energy, banking, and communications sectors, let alone cede to it the construction of its newest buildings? If Osbourne and Johnson are any indication, the British government is falling silent about precisely the things that have made Britain great: freedom, democracy, and above all, speaking truth to power.

Obviously the question is rhetorical. Is there really any question that Britain is now just that poor and abject. And Britain is hardly the only Western country to have noticed: (a) the size of the still-emerging Chinese market for stuff they make, and (b) the amount of money China's huge trade surplus has made available for buying up a larger and larger stake in the Western world.

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