Long-Term Strategic Challenges Posed by China

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, everything that we thought we knew about China turned out to be wrong. Between 1979 and 2012, there was a steady, fitful but none the less one-directional move towards liberalisation. A lot of us—and I certainly do not exclude myself from this—made the mistake of assuming that there was a link between economic liberalisation and political pluralism. It seemed to stand to reason that, if people became accustomed to choosing a television station, a car, an internet provider or a phone network, they would start to demand choice in who was their mayor or regional governor. For a long time, with some setbacks and patchiness, that seemed to be the case—but we were wrong. As Kaiser Kuo, the head of the international part of Baidu, said, “Just because you don’t know the truth about what happened in Tiananmen Square doesn’t mean you can’t build a mobile phone app”. I think that we all tended to overlook that.

We have certainly been taken off guard by the suddenness of the changes since Xi Jinping took office. Before 2012, there had been the beginning of a burgeoning independent blogosphere in China. It was permissible to make some criticisms of what was going on. Okay, you could not come out and say that the entire party system should be overturned, but you were allowed to make complaints about prison conditions and even ask for a wider choice of candidates in some of the local elections. All of that stopped, almost overnight.

First, a prominent blogger was brought out on television and made a Stalin-type self-recriminating tearful confession. Then, one by one, others began to be arrested. Then the lawyers who defended them began to be arrested. Then the lawyers who defended the lawyers began to be arrested. After that, people got the message. In 2013, the axe fell; the Supreme People’s Court declared that, if you spread an unhelpful rumour—that is how it put it—online and it got more than 500 shares or more than 5,000 views, you might be liable to three years in a labour camp.

I think all of this passed us by in this country. I cringe when I look at what I was writing as recently as five years ago, about how these arguments were still going on in Beijing and there were still more moderate figures from the Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin eras. We absolutely missed the extent to which an autocratic regime was being built—a revanchist, aggressive and centralised dictatorship. It happened almost overnight. I sometimes think of that classic “The Simpsons” episode where the Soviet Union comes back and the whole end of the Cold War is shown to have been a massive maskirovka. The Berlin Wall comes charging out of the ground and Lenin rises, zombie-like, from his tomb. Imagine something like that but with modern technology.

The Chinese have built a terrifying panopticon state in which some of the world’s largest and notionally private companies—Weibo, Tencent and Alibaba—act both as proselytisers for the regime, employing people whose job is to propagandise, and, rather more scarily, as spies monitoring online activity. We are seeing a terrifying use of facial recognition and geolocation technology to build the kind of dictatorship that would recently have been unimaginable.

This goes furthest in Xinjiang. Those roadblocks you see on the news are to check that some clever young member of your family has not taken the mandatory spyware off your mobile phone. That spyware looks for antisocial behaviour, covering everything from growing a beard to talking to foreigners, covering your hair, observing the fast or trying to access the wrong websites. If you do too much of that, an algorithm will sentence you to re-education with almost no human oversight whatever. If it can do that in Xinjiang, why not all over China? Why not export the technology to any friendly dictatorship in its sphere of influence? The world is becoming an altogether greyer, scarier and colder place.

I will not go over it again because it was so well described by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, but at the same time we saw China, which until then had observed the letter if not the spirit of our accords on Hong Kong, suddenly stop bothering to pretend. With the security law, we saw the end of any serious dream of one country, two systems surviving. We also saw China beginning to press territorial claims on and cause disputes with not only almost every contiguous country—noble Lords will remember the clashes on the Indian border during lockdown, when Indian soldiers were shot—with the significant exception of Russia, but some remarkably distant countries. China maintains territorial claims against the Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei, not countries that would seem from a map to be especially nearby.

The notion of playing it long and peaceful global co-operation, which had been the defining notion since Deng Xiaoping, suddenly ceased. We saw that very clearly two years ago when China celebrated the centenary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. We saw it in the iconography and the language. As noble Lords will recall, Xi Jinping spoke of foreigners dashing themselves to pieces against the mighty wall made up of 1.4 billion Chinese people. Marxism may have been ditched and the country may have adopted market mechanisms, but it remains hideously Leninist. There is still an absolute emphasis on the supremacy of the party and a disdain for any mechanisms of representative government.

When Xi Jinping spoke at the centenary, he donned a Mao suit. As in George Orwell’s 1984, proletarian overalls are the uniform of the party elite. Tempting though it is to push the Orwellian analysis, I am not sure it is quite right. For one thing, Orwell’s telescreens did not come close to the terrifying powers now being wielded by some of the spyware of Chinese tech companies. Actually, it is not so much Orwell as Huxley. China has begun to change the way in which people think. My late friend Roger Scruton got into terrible trouble, and was horribly misquoted in the New Statesman, when he said the Chinese Government were creating robots out of their own people. I recommend to your Lordships We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter, a China-based German correspondent. It talks about the way in which, when Chinese students are in foreign universities and do not need to worry about censors or paywalls, they still do not access websites that might be considered dangerous in China. Even when, in observed experiments, they were given links to what actually happened in Tiananmen, or to what are the claims of the Tibetans, or who is the Dalai Lama, or what is the argument with Taiwan, or any of the forbidden topics, they would not look at them because they had been conditioned to see it all as dangerous propaganda. That is why I say Huxley rather than Orwell; Huxley has a line to the effect that a population of slaves did not need to be coerced because they had been taught to love their servility.

So what can we do about it? I rather agree with the position set out by the Minister in his opening statement. There is not much point in engaging in economic sanctions of any kind. I generally think there is almost never any point in them because they hurt the wrong people; they prop up dictators and they hit poor people in your own country and in the other country. In this case, what we dislike economically about China, such as the theft of intellectual property, the insertion of bugs into things and reverse engineering, has all been happening now without any trade. That is not a question of economic sanctions; it is a question of invigilating the rules under the existing system. Our policy, as set out by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary in his Lancaster House speech, which was the first one that I can think of—there may have been others, but I am not aware of them—devoted to a single subject, is the idea of being engaged regionally in CPTPP and AUKUS, of standing by our allies but continuing to engage with Beijing, seems to me, in a world where we are necessarily choosing among imperfect options and where our resources are not unlimited, about the most effective.

I will finish with a point raised by my noble friend Lord Swire, about something that would have been much bigger news were it not for the horrifying abominations we have seen in Israel: the summit that happened between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on Tuesday. What we see there is the illiberal powers combining quite openly and flagrantly against us. It is a reminder of how limited our liberal democratic ideals turn out to be in their geographical reach. We like to imagine that our system of government is so obviously preferable to the alternatives because nobody would want to live in a state where you can be arrested for saying the wrong thing, or disappeared, or where rulers can make up the rules as they go along and ignore the law. We have tended to think that that would just spread because people preferred it—but in their response both to the Russia-Ukraine war and to Hamas, we see how many countries simply do not see things that way.

The number of countries prepared to impose sanctions on Russia, in defence of the rule of law and the international order, was tiny. It was the anglosphere, western Europe and a handful of advanced east Asian democracies. The line-up over the horrifying Hamas atrocities is very similar. For a lot of people, victimhood has been elevated as the supreme virtue and claiming to be an anti-colonial oppressed power of some kind is a moral get-out-of-jail card that allows you almost any kind of atrocity. It turns out that those who really believe in personal freedom, individualism, the elevation of the individual above the collective and the rule of law are remarkably few.

Perhaps those values were always a little contingent, counterintuitive as they are in a tribal species that evolved in hierarchical kin groups. It may be that, when we look back at that summit, we will see it as marking the end of a brief liberal era that rested, when the chips were down, on the readiness of western countries to pursue their policy goals with force of arms. It may be that we are coming to the end of a brief interglacial; that the planet is now tipping again on its axis; that the cold weather is returning; and that the glaciers are creeping back.