Jonathan Freedland and China

Let me declare an interest. Jonathan Freedland is my “Go To” columnist. I resist Dominic Lawson, Rod Liddell, Piers Morgan, Simon Jenkins and Richard Littlejohn and look to Freedland for quality Left of Centre political comment. Saturday begins with a cup of tea and a read through of his weekly column in the Guardian. Freedland went to the right school and supports the right football team but he is also an excellent observer of the activities of the Labour Party which is of great interest to me. He also has a clear view of the problem of anti-semitism in the Party and has provided balance to the right wing writings of Melanie Phillips. Additionally his broadcasts, interviews and media appearances are eagerly awaited. I say all this in genuine deep seated praise of a quality journalist and writer but when it comes to China I find myself on a different path and I want to explain why.

China is quite different to the UK. Its journey to the present day contrasts starkly with the route of the British to 2020. Here in the UK our political attitudes have been shaped by Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Civil War to topple the supremacy of Charles 1 by Parliament. There is more; the Great Reform Bill of 1932; One Man One Vote and the Westminster model of the Two Party System. We have the Rule of Law and the Separation of Powers between the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Executive. This is our DNA.

China’s narrative is quite different. Centuries of dynastic autocracy followed by a Century of National Humiliation from the Opium Wars of the 1840’s. The Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th Century followed by the creation of the Republic of China by Sun Yatsen in 1912 whose death in 1925 led to Three Civil Wars fought between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party leading in 1949 to the flight to Formosa of Chiang Kaishek and the KMT and the creation of the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing. China was ravaged – and called the Sick Man of Asia for good reason with the repression and brutality of the Japanese Invasion from 1937-1945 contributing to China’s poverty stricken status. No democracy. No mass franchise. No change of power after Elections.

So we come to 2020 with the two countries having travelled quite different routes. Today, many articles by Freedland and others focus exclusively on Covid-19, the new Security Law in Hong Kong, the position of the Uighurs , Tibet, Taiwan and Huawei.

By Western standards China is not democratic. The Chinese do not have the freedom to organise political parties. They cannot access a free media. They do not vote for their leaders. The West assumes, and this is implicit in Freedland’s article, that the people of China must feel oppressed and be yearning for the democratic freedoms of the UK. But Freedland has not considered the people of China, their progress, their life style, their priorities. There is a significant lack of balance in his approach. What concerns Freedland are traditional criticisms of China but there is no consideration of the progress in China – all achieved under the leadership of the Party that, I accept, he finds so distasteful.  

China compares itself with its past where there was no freedom, no prosperity, no progress. China was stagnant and brought to its knees by the 19th Century occupation of China by UK and other foreign powers. Today the Chinese can choose what work to do, what clothes to wear and where to live. Today the young Chinese cherish realisable hopes and achievements about the future that were so far beyond anything thought possible by their grandparents. They have a standard of living and a quality of life well beyond anything they could have hoped for during the height of the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1970’s.  In the last 40 years the Chinese have “Never Had It So Good” – as Harold Macmillan said about the British people in 1959. 800,000 students go overseas each year to foreign universities and in 2019 134m tourists from China visited the world and all 134m returned home. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer found that in terms of the domestic’s population trust in their government, China ranked top while America ranked 15th.

The West wants to believe that the people of China are groaning under a dictatorship, and are looking for every opportunity to escape the control and influence of the oppressive Party and flee overseas. They believe their jails are full to bursting with criminals and dissidents as gun toting police roam the streets arresting citizens at random. Many readers of this article will have visited China and have walked the streets of its cities – and found the atmosphere relaxed and easy going.

But critics of China never refer to the status of the Chinese – their lives, their clothes, their shops, their sports activities, their life style, their prosperity or their happiness No - critics of China start with the prejudice that China is not like the UK, and the Chinese are not like the UK people. The Chinese, think UK critics, must want our ways, our laws, our customs and our norms. It is wishful thinking. 1.4 bn Chinese have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. They are proud of what their government has achieved and that is the hardest thing for China’s UK critics to believe. The Chinese have not reached 2020 enjoying such success only to jettison everything for Western norms of democracy.

Now to the problem topics that the critics try to use to discredit the government of China. The S China Seas, the China/Indian border, Tibet, Taiwan and HK – all fall under one heading. China is fiercely protective of its own territory. Tibet belongs to China. Taiwan belongs to China, HK belongs to China and here China will brook no intervention. In 1949 Taiwan/Formosa was part of China – it remains so despite the encouragement to Taiwan to become an independent nation. Tibet has always been part of China and attempts by India to separate Tibet off from China has been resisted since 1954. HK was brought to a standstill by protests from HK citizens designed to separate HK from China and the Western leaders stood by quietly hoping that the street protests would encourage China to allow a measure of Hong Kong independence from China. That was never going to be and the Security Law is designed to remind the world that what belongs to China is China’s whether in Tibet or Taiwan or islands in the S China Seas or India – or Hong Kong.

But this is nothing to do with expansionism and superpowerism. China is surrounded by 52 US military bases. China does not have one soldier outside China. US aircraft carriers sail through the S China Seas but not one Chinese vessel has ever sailed outside the ports of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Acquiring land and taking control of overseas territories – the traditional activity of a burgeoning imperial power – is not on China’s agenda. The Belt and Road Initiative is something quite different.

So now to the Uighurs. There is a context here which is never given column space. For many years Hsinkiang has harboured Muslim extremists who have been responsible for considerable violence in the Province. China dealt with terrorists by arrest and prison but they found that prison merely gave the terrorists access to more terrorists. The Militant underground grew in prison when it was meant to diminish and then the terrorists came to Tiananmen Square and knifed Chinese citizens. Now the Chinese feared a Chechnya within its own borders and they decided to act. The action they have taken has never been attempted in the West and is automatically condemned. China is engaged in a wholesale attempt to change the thinking of Muslim terrorists and the people that the terrorists hope to convince. People are detained and put through a process of re-education which outrages Western democratic thinking. At first sight it does seem oppressive but before you condemn it take a look at the state of Chechnya – ad the constant military activity by Muslim terrorists that brought so much death and destruction to the people of Chechnya.

The purpose of this article is not to convince readers about the Uighurs or the Tibetans or the Hongkongers or the Taiwanese people. That debate will rage on but it is an encouragement to people to see the whole picture and not a selected part. Lifting 500m people out of poverty is not something that should be disregarded – any more than the 134m Chinese tourists travelling abroad and returning home or the 800,000 Chinese students overseas or the life style and aspirations and priorities of the Chinese people. China does not want to become like us any more than we want to live like the Chinese. But building a curtain and focusing only on the negatives and failing to realise the significance of China’s achievements will lead us into fundamental confrontation when what is needed now, more than ever before, is co-operation and participation in China’s long term goals to 2050 and beyond. Co-operation is the way forward not confrontation.

Graham Perry,

July 2020