Britain's changed relationship with China
By John Ross
Few things better illustrate the changed relationship between China and Great Britain than the Chinese government's refusal to allow United Kingdom MPs to visit Hong Kong in order to "investigate" the Occupy movement and the 2017 election for chief executive. This decision led to the U.K. Parliament holding an "emergency" debate on the matter in early December.
Confrontations between Hong Kong's riot police forces and 'Occupy Central' protestors take place again at Mong Kok late on November 28, 2014. [Photo: Chinanews.com]
In the 19th or early 20th century, the dispatch of a gunboat or military expedition would probably have followed such a U.K. parliamentary debate, as China learned to its bloody cost several times. In 2014, the debate merely led to the British Parliament letting off hot air.
The overall results of the proposed action and debate will probably damage the U.K. For two years after British Prime Minister David Cameron met with Tibetan separatist leader the Dalai Lama, China refused to allow any high-ranking British minister to visit. Only after the British government stopped such behavior because it urgently wanted to strengthen ties with China's rapidly growing economy was Cameron allowed to carry out this year's successful visit to Beijing. Damage to the U.K. this time may or may not be lessened by the fact that the Speaker of the House of Commons, the MP who calls such emergency debates, is not a member of any governing party.
China was justified in banning U.K. MPs from this visit. The 2017 Hong Kong election of a chief executive is China's internal affair. The "one country, two systems" governance that was agreed upon as part of Hong Kong's 1997 return to China means Hong Kong is subject to China's laws and to the decisions of the National People's Congress (NPC). The NPC's decision on the 2017 election clearly fulfils China's international obligations, as Lord Powell, the private secretary to Thatcher during negotiations on Hong Kong, has affirmed.
If the NPC had decided to visit Britain during the recent referendum on Scottish Independence or during the 2011 riots in London as a way of propagandizing its opinion on whether Scotland should be independent or to investigate "police repression of ethnic minorities" during the riots, this would have been seen as interference in Britain's internal affairs.
It is also worth adding that the U.K. Parliament's discussion was particularly ridiculous, since the 2017 Hong Kong election will be considerably more democratic than anything Britain ever allowed in Hong Kong. During the more than 150 years that Hong Kong was a British colony, the U.K. never permitted any form of election to select the governor general, who was the chief executive of the colony's administration.
Furthermore, the MPs who would potentially be involved in such a trip to Hong Kong have not taken a neutral stance on the events in the area, but have supported those opposing China's laws and disrupting Hong Kong's economic life.
The world has moved on. As Britain's empire has vanished, Britain's parliament no longer has gunships with which to attempt to interfere in China's internal affairs, but merely words. The blunt demonstration of this situation should induce Britain to reflect on what its relations with China should look like. Perhaps in China, this incident will induce the country to reflect on what it may or may not wish to receive from Britain.
Britain's specific position in the world is derived from the fact that the British Empire was the largest empire ruled by any single country in history. Britain was the world's most powerful state for several centuries. For that reason, its history has created many contradictions that directly affect China.
On the one hand, the British Empire was responsible for some of history's greatest crimes. It was the main organizer of the transatlantic slave trade that transported over 10 million enslaved Africans to the Americas, it was responsible for millions of deaths in India, it seized Hong Kong and carried out numerous military interventions in China. The British Empire's power and aggression was so great that it attacked almost 90 percent of the world's states - only 22 countries escaped British attack in their history. Cumulatively, over its long history, the British Empire was responsible for more deaths than Nazi Germany or Japan in its assault on and occupation of China.
On the other hand, the U.K. was one of the world's greatest centers of the arts and science. Shakespeare is universally recognized as one of the world's greatest writers, and Britain has numerous others of scarcely lesser rank - Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to name only two. Newton and Darwin produced revolutions in science. Britain has also produced some of the most well-known and popular figures in world literature, from Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter.
Economically, it is now China, not Britain, that is the great industrial "workshop of the world" and which has the greater military power. But the U.K. still has real abilities from which China can benefit in finance, life sciences and fields such as marketing and branding.
The overall context of the new post-colonial relationship between Britain and China is that China's "national revival" is vital not only for China, but also for the world.
China therefore has not only the right but the obligation to prevent other nations from interfering in its internal affairs.
China has lifted 630 million people out of internationally-defined poverty, while, regrettably, there has been no fall at all in the total number of people living in internationally-defined poverty outside of China. China has brought social security protection to 820 million people, more than the population of the EU or the entire continent of Latin America, and health care to over a billion.
To illustrate the consequences of these facts, it is merely necessary to note that a Chinese woman's life expectancy is 77 years, and literacy among Chinese women over the age of 15 is 93 percent. An Indian woman, in a country which at the time of the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 had a higher per capita GDP than China, has a life expectancy of 68, and the literacy rate in India for women over the age of 15 is only 66 percent. The magnitude of that difference for the overall well-being of humanity may be judged by the fact that women in China and India together account for one in every five people in the world.
In contrast, the interventions of the U.K. government in the internal affairs of other countries have produced chaos and enormous human suffering. Looking only at recent events, in Iraq, more than 100,000 people (as many as a million according to some studies) died as a consequence of the U.S. and U.K. invasion, and reactionary and internationally dangerous terrorist organizations such as ISIS now control large parts of the country as a result. Since the U.S., U.K. and other countries took military action in Libya, chaos has developed as arms have been exported to extremists in numerous African countries, and the latest reports show that ISIS is now establishing itself in the eastern Libya.
The principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries exists for a very practical reason. If one country intervenes in another country's internal affairs, it artificially alters the situation, so that chaos results when the interfering country inevitably withdraws, as the horrific outcomes in Iraq and Libya illustrate. China's government, which bears responsibility for the development of almost one fifth of the world's people, is therefore entirely correct to try to prevent other countries from interfering in its internal affairs.
As someone who writes regularly on China's Weibo and who has received literally hundreds of thousands of comments from people in China, I know that China's people are simultaneously hostile to Britain's attempts to revive its colonial past through interfering in Hong Kong and interested in Britain's many great cultural and economic contributions to the world. I wish I could report an equivalent knowledge of China's great historic and culture in Britain.
China, in my experience as a foreigner working there, is moving towards "intelligent patriotism" that is achieving a balanced appreciation of Britain's past - rejecting Britain's interference in China's internal affairs while acknowledging that something valuable can be learnt from Britain.
Hopefully, Britain will arrive at a parallel understanding. For a long period, Britain had the power to forcibly impose its will on other countries, the seizure of Hong Kong being just one example. Actions like this should be a source of national shame for Britain. But those things which other countries are keen to voluntarily receive from Britain are a source of great national pride and are seen as part of humanity's common "intellectual capital."
China teaches Darwin's theory of evolution in every school and invites innumerable British figures from Hamlet to Harry Potter into their country as welcome guests, all while keeping out British MPs who do not understand that the age of colonialism is over and China will run its own internal affairs. Hopefully, in the future, Britain will learn to demonstrate the same good sense in its choice of whom it sends out as China demonstrates in its choice of whom to receive.
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