UK’s prime minister Rishi Sunak talks tough when it comes to China. But the rhetorical brandishing of British democratic values vs Chinese authoritarianism, is hypocritical, argues Jane Hayward.
In a widely publicised speech at the end of November, Rishi Sunak declared the end of the “golden era” in UK-China relations, a reference harking back to David Cameron’s beer-in-a-pub moment with Xi Jinping in 2015, but an empty claim by Sunak since nobody anywhere thought we were still in that era. Sunak is right, however, that Britain must find a path which eschews a misleading yet overused Cold War-like rhetoric (which wrongly implies that China is, like the old Soviet Union, firmly outside the global capitalist system) as well as naïve and self-serving beliefs about how economic engagement will induce political reform in China to make it, supposedly, more like Western liberal democracies. Doing so has to start with recognising that our politics resemble China’s more than we might like to admit.
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Sunak named China a “systemic challenge” which requires “robust pragmatism”. The speech has been lightly mocked for its vacuity and lack of specifics, but to be fair to Sunak, he did promise to fill in the blanks later, when the updated Integrated Review comes out early next year. We should not be surprised if a new Prime Minister might take a while to figure out a renewed and meaningful stance towards China. Sunak faces the difficulty of navigating between hawkish backbenchers and business interests keen to encourage Chinese investment, as well as a lack of clarity about China’s own path forward.
There is no consensus among China analysts on whether internal troubles will result in a more restrained China, or if the regime will turn to nationalism coupled with outwards aggression to boost its legitimacy
Chinese policymakers currently face a near perfect storm of domestic problems. Widespread public dissatisfaction about seemingly endless lockdowns on account of Xi Jinping’s flagship Zero Covid policy boiled over last month into a spate of public protests of rarely seen simultaneity across the country. This is layered onto pre-existing discontent about poor working conditions, slow growth impacting on livelihoods and local government revenue streams, and disruptions in the property and tech sectors following government efforts to rein in excessive wealth accumulation which will have, we may be sure, unsettled powerful vested interests. We cannot know at this point where all of this will lead, or what impacts domestic issues will have on Chinese policies overseas. There is no consensus among China analysts on whether internal troubles will result in a more restrained China, or if the regime will turn to nationalism coupled with outwards aggression to boost its legitimacy. Given these crucial unknowns, Mr Sunak is right to tread cautiously.
Mr Sunak is, however, clear on one thing: Britain must be robust in its defence of democratic values against an authoritarian regime. In his speech, he admonished China for the recent assault of a BBC journalist covering the lockdown protests, and abuses in Xinjiang, a province where citizens of the Uighur ethnic group, as well as other Muslim peoples, have been subjected to intense surveillance and repression, including the confinement of at least hundreds of thousands to internment camps, supposedly for purposes of ‘re-education’.
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However, if Sunak wishes to brandish the shield of British democracy at China, he should take care – it is not very shiny. Authoritarian streaks in different countries, including liberal democracies, tend to cooperate, and the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not as clear as some would like to think. At a recent panel discussion hosted by the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, anthropologist Darren Byler discussed the back and forth between UK experts involved in the controversial counter-extremist Prevent programme and Chinese counterterrorism experts, as they exchanged ideas on how best to exercise surveillance over their own domestic populations. This was as recent as 2017, as the internment camps in Xinjiang were being set up. Are strategies of surveillance and population control in China and Britain the same? Of course not. Yet, as British parliamentarians criticise repressive actions in China, they must also hold the mirror up to themselves.
If Sunak wishes to brandish the shield of British democracy at China, he should take care – it is not very shiny
Indeed, we should be wary of how denunciations of Chinese governance practices serve all too easily to distract from increasingly authoritarian policies over here. There is much that can, and has, been said on the slow but sustained erosion of British democratic institutions over the last two decades.
It is noteworthy and timely that the National Security Bill is currently passing its way through parliament. The bill which, among other things, seeks to guard against foreign espionage, has been strongly criticised by the National Union of Journalists for being so open-ended and vaguely worded that it will overreach its stated goals to threaten journalistic freedom here in the UK. As such, Security Minister Tom Tugendhat’s tweet on November 27th promoting the bill over an image of Chinese university students in Beijing calling for freedom of expression portrayed a twisted logic that should ring alarm bells. We may well be concerned about China, but so often the threat comes from within.
Zinziberruderalis on December 13rd, 2022 at 19:00 UTC »
Of course all states do evil. Their foundation is violence.
Malodorous_Camel on December 13rd, 2022 at 18:07 UTC »
A point i've been making for quite a while now. We maintain the facade that there is a vast chasm between democracies and autocracies by intentionally interpreting anything they do through an extremely warped lens that paints even the most normal things as entirely sinister. But it's a fiction we sell ourselves to that we can maintain our infallible beliefs without ever having to confront them. If we pretend that we are so different that there is no comparison to be made then you can't ever make a comparison and realise that we are far more similar than we claim.
The 'surveillance state' rhetoric with regards to china is all sorts of wild. I was listening to a podcast recently where they were discussing Huawei selling surveillance systems to countries around the world. They discussed how Huawei had 'won a bid' to install such a system in an african country and the government had then used it to advance their own political goals, and whether this was a sign of China 'exporting authoritarianism' and trying to undermine global democratic norms.
What they of course failed to mention that discredited the entire narrative was that Huawei had won a bid against...... western firms trying to provide the exact same service. The entire discourse is absolutely bonkers. It relies on misrepresenting the situation entirely and framing things through an extreme lens to the point where the issues being discussed might as well be works of fiction.
As a brit i grew up in the most heavily surveilled country on the planet. It was considered normal. Nobody cared. Now that other countries are doing the same suddenly it's an egregious violation of human rights. When there are protests in china it's scary because 'they will just identify you on video and arrest you later'. I'm curious how people think the 950+ Jan 6th 'protestors' have been arrested and convicted (not saying they did nothing wrong, but the surveillance principle is the same). the consistent double standards and inability to even admit that these things are capable of being compared makes no sense to me.
It does kind of make sense though. Because what we really have is bog standard economic competition that is being sold as a national security threat to justify extreme anti-competitive measures. It just so happens that due to existing or unrelated reasons (Such as Taiwan or Xinjiang) it's an easy sell to the wider public and becomes a self sustaining narrative courtesy of a number of systemic factors.
Politicians LOVE an enemy that they can rally people behind. in the post war-on-terror world there wasn't one, so trump found a new bad guy to direct nationalist sentiment towards.
The media in its state of decay (collapsing sales, overworked and underinformed journalists & need for clickbait) also loves a good scare story. See how they have almost unanimously reported the recent meetings with Xi and the gulf states as if they somehow have anything to do with US-China competition and had sinister and concerning undertones. They didn't. If anyone thinks the gulf states are abandoning the US security umbrella they're mad.
China (partly due to its inherent authoritarianism, partly due to covid, partly due to a backlash against the ever escalating rhetoric) has become more closed off, making it both harder to understand what's going on and harder for any fallacious or misleading narratives to be disproven.
Cold war rhetoric/propaganda has already spent decades laying the groundwork (as have 'yellow peril' racist narratives for a good 2 centuries). We already treat them with suspicion and people are primed to believe things they would never believe about a country that hadn't been subjected to such long-standing discourse. Just look at how completely differently china and vietnam are perceived, despite having very similar backgrounds and current political systems.
When it comes to perceptions of foreign states i recently came across an interesting little statistic, https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/human_rights_rule_law_index/
Looking at the human rights and rule of law index, 3 countries have the same score, but all 3 are perceived in VERY different ways regarding those very issues.
Hungary - a Nato and EU member and implicitly one of the 'Liberal democracy gang' in biden's characterisation despite the obvious moves otherwise.
Ukraine - a country with its issues but with regards to the issues of democracy currently a bit of a 'media darling' so to speak. Seen as moving in the right direction etc.
Qatar - currently being demonised throughout the Western world as an illiberal, regressive, backwards hell-hole
That is to say, perception is everything. Tangible, empirical realities are largely irrelevant. (though i'm open to critiques of the methodology used by this index)
IAI_Admin on December 13rd, 2022 at 12:12 UTC »
Submission Statement: Recent critiques of Chinese authoritarianism by UK prime minister Rishi Sunak have an element of hypocrisy to them. As recently as 2017, as the internment camps in Xinjiang were being set up, there was a back-and-forth between UK experts involved in the controversial counter-extremist Prevent program, and Chinese counterterrorism experts, exchanging ideas on how best to exercise surveillance over their domestic populations. Of course, the strategies of surveillance and population control in China and the UK are not the same, or even on the same scale. But British members of parliament ought to hold up a mirror to themselves when they criticize repressive actions in China, argues Jane Hayward. This is especially the case now as the new National Security Bill is making its way through parliament, which the National Union of Journalists has described as threatening to journalistic freedom in the U.K.