"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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The Current System In China May Be Ron Johnson's Ideal, But It Probably Isn't Liu Xiabo's

Thanks to the Supreme Court, China can run a candidate in our elections

Some politically astute friends of mine are in China. Both are Americans and the wife was born in China and grew up there. Her job has her working there nearly half the year and her husband spends a great deal of time there as well. They e-mailed me this afternoon, once they found out that jailed dissident Liu Xiabo won the Nobel Peace Prize. It wasn't easy for them to find the information.

China has reacted angrily to news that one of its dissidents has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize, labeling it obscene and saying the prize has gone to a criminal.

Nobel Committee president Thorbjoern Jagland announced the illustrious award in Oslo.

"The Norwegian Novel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 to Liu Xiabo for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China," he said.

In 1989, pro-democracy agitator Mr Liu joined a hunger strike in support of students in Tiananmen Square. He persuaded many to leave the square as troops were poised to enter.

He was jailed for 20 months and is currently serving an 11 year prison sentence for drafting Charter 08, which called for multi-party democracy and respect for human rights in China.

..."Liu Xiabo is a criminal who violated Chinese law. Awarding the prize to Liu runs contrary to the principals of the Nobel Peace Prize," foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement.

"The fact that Nobel Committee awarded the peace prize to such a person also lowers the peace prize itself."

The government's outburst was no surprise; it had told the Nobel Committee beforehand that Mr Liu was not a suitable candidate.

My friends, we'll call them Pete and Helen, were hoping to catch up with the news by tuning into CNN International. It started off fine and then...

the reporter is about to segue into the next piece of news and then the TV goes to black, as if a power outage, and shuts down. Thirty seconds or a minute goes by and the TV image returns. What happened? The Chinese government does not want the Chinese to know that the dissent, Liu Xiabao, has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Chinese internet does not mention that Liu Xiabao has won. The internet reveals winners of the award for economics, science, etc.  but no mention of the Peace Prize. The government treats it as non-existent.

I can get your site and others, but they are in English and they haven't gotten around to censoring you. I read your post about how money from here is being funneled into John Boehner's campaign. It comes as no surprise, believe me.

A standard part of Chinese culture legitimizes bribes and corruption as a way of life-- true Republicans at heart. They will pour money everywhere to win recognition for anything so the Government will take credit and show what a good job they are doing.
 
They do not want to give up the BMW's or the concubines that 99% of the government officials are enjoying. The president, Hu Jintao, has admonished the officials, but it's only lip service.

Follow the Money, remains the chant and still thrives since Tricky Dickies days. However, the Chinese deal in cash. A few well placed attache cases filled with our dead Presidents at the feet of the politicians, Blue Dog Democrats or Republicans,  will easily help sway the vote.

The vote by the House to reevaluate the Chinese currency won by a large margin. But, the ones who voted against it were probably bought by the Chinese. A wise person told me this as we had tea. China does not want the Democrats to be in power and they will do every and anything to get the Republicans elected. The only Democrat the Chinese loved was that REPUBLICAN President, Bill Clinton.

Well... what can I say? Pete and Helen, it turns out the BBC was blacked out by China too. I hope American voters look carefully at which candidates China is backing in our own country and what the motivations are. There's a reason they want John Boehner as Speaker of the House-- and it isn't to create more jobs for Americans. Ron Johnson has proclaimed that China is a model for America to follow-- and now they're helping to finance his campaign through the Chamber of Commerce. Wisconsin voters may actually elect this guy. And as we pointed out yesterday, Pat Toomey is another high profile Senate candidate the Chinese government is helping to run and who has expressed overt support for Chinese policies that kill America's economy and outsource jobs and whole industries. And the Chamber and their financiers among America's foreign "competitors" have selected a few reactionary, anti-American Blue Dogs to help the same way they help Republicans, particularly pro-China bribe-takers Frank Kratovil (MD), Glenn Nye (VA), Travis Childers (MS), Jim Marshall (GA) and Bobby Bright (AL). Good to know the perfidy is semi-bipartisan. This was President Obama's address to the nation yesterday. His message isn't something the GOP wants people to hear-- and it isn't something China wants American voters to hear either. The Republican Party and China are 100% in line on this one: