Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 29th June 2020 Lords Chamber

Given all that we now know, the question for Parliament is whether it is willing to turn a blind eye and let Huawei march on regardless. In Committee, I drew a parallel with Siemens and its role in the Reich when, 80 years ago, it built its vast commercial interests on the backs of slave labour in Ravensbrück. Do not let us pretend to ourselves that this is any different; it is not. While a delay may suit the Government, it does not suit the Turkic Muslims in western China. For all these reasons, I commend the amendment to the House.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to have added my name to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, whose expertise on human rights is paralleled by no one else in this House.

Deng Xiaoping, one of China’s most impressive leaders, had a lesson for his countrymen: “Hide your light and bide your time,” he told them. What he meant by that was that China’s power was extant but that it needed to be cautious as it became more important to the world for fear that the disruption that rising powers bring to the international system might paradoxically damage its interests. Under President Xi Jinping, this has been thrown aside as China stakes out its ambition as a global hegemon.

The current impasse between the United States and China is often referred to as the “Thucydides trap”, from his description of the Peloponnesian war. The idea is that, when two great powers are rivals for the top place, they will inevitably come into conflict. The choice then for middle-level powers, like the United Kingdom, is to decide on which side of the conflict they sit. I do not subscribe to this view of the inevitability of conflict, not least because the US is a democracy that operates with public accountability and checks and balances. The Chinese people not only have no such right of democratic consent, but for many of them the fact of their birth seals their fate—think of Xinjiang or, to a lesser degree, the Hong Kong of the future.

As we enter a harsher state of international relations, the display of Chinese power, some would say assertiveness, poses choices for the rest of us—those who are middle-ranking powers, be they Germany, France or even India—as we will have to confront it in the years ahead. The choices will be around values, economics and the rule of law.

If this Parliament has any meaning, it is as the expression of constitutional democracy. Its very purpose is to protect the citizens of this country from harm, be it their national security, however narrowly defined, or, more broadly, their privacy, their finances and their jobs. It is the job of the Government today to partner with Parliament in order to uphold those functions. We are not seeking to undermine the Government through this amendment; we are simply asking them to uphold their own responsibilities in the protection of the interests of the United Kingdom. That is the context in which the Modern Slavery Act and this amendment should be seen.

So let me speak of our values. I have not heard anyone outside China deny that, without trial, it has thrown more than 1 million people in Xinjiang province, the ethnic Uighur Muslims, into gulags. It has built internment camps, carried out a programme of forced and compulsory re-education and, as the Economist magazine put it this week,

“They have been selected … because of habits such as praying too often to Allah, showing too much enthusiasm for their Turkic culture or refusing to watch state television.”


Add to this the fact that men are not allowed to grow a beard, even during Ramadan, women are not allowed to wear headscarves—something I have witnessed myself in Beijing—and they are forced to eat pork, which is reminiscent of the treatment afforded to the Muslims of Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. This is the largest round-up of a minority anywhere since the Second World War who, since these people do not face charges in a court of law, do not know when they will be released. Today, we have also seen evidence that Uighur women are undergoing forced sterilisation.

According to several different reports from academics in the US, Australia and Germany, one of which has already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, the Chinese have official schemes to send tens of thousands of ethnic Uighurs from the camps to perform forced labour all across China. Factories are paid by the Government for each worker taken. They live in dormitories with watch-towers and undergo forced indoctrination—we called it brainwashing in the old days—and are unlikely to be paid. All of this is in violation of international human rights law.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has named 83 companies which have used this forced labour. When the firms are challenged on their supply chains, they ask us to work with them to change behaviour through legislation. They are so frightened of Chinese economic power that they need essentially to hide behind us, the western countries, to pressurise China. The Chinese companies whose products we use have no such qualms. While the US is moving towards stronger legislation as regards the use of Uighur forced labour by firms, we are not asking for that in this amendment; we are merely asking the House to vote to uphold legislation that it has passed previously, the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Let me turn to the potential harm that high-risk vendors can pose to our citizens. As Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has explained with regard to the future of the internet and telecommunications, the most likely scenario that we in the West are facing is bifurcation of the internet into a Chinese-led internet and a non Chinese-led internet led by America. When describing the Chinese alternative, he has said:

“There’s a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc.”


That should serve as a warning about defending our rights.

At the heart of Chinese attitudes towards its tech dominance is a view of cybersecurity. At the second World Internet Conference held in 2015 in Wuzhen in China, President Xi Jinping defined cyber sovereignty as something that

“covers all aspects of state-to-state relations, which also includes cyberspace. We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber development, model of cyber regulation and Internet public policies, and participate in international cyberspace governance on an equal footing.”

Of course, we know that there is no international cyberspace governance that China subscribes to. It pushes us to incorporate its firms into our markets, but it does not give our firms market access. It is a vision of global corporate dominance that is based on unfair competition, data capture and flagrant breaches of commercial law. What is evident is that this idea of cyber sovereignty does not extend to other countries following their own path, as he advocated. No sooner did Australia announce that it did not want high-risk vendors such as Huawei and ZTE in its 5G network than it got the most vociferous bullying campaign directed against it.

Huawei—the high-risk vendor in question here—tells us that it is

“a private company wholly owned by its employees”

and therefore independent of the Chinese state. I think that the notion of independence is stretched in this description. Huawei is headquartered in China, regulated in China, while the lack of transparency in its financial and technological rise is not verifiable in terms of the transparency in corporate governance that we subscribe to here in the West. The founder, Mr Ren Zhengfei, and his daughter, Ms Meng Wanzhou, are members of the supervisory board, while almost all the members of that board have been at Huawei since the 1990s—something that corporate governance norms would frown at. We can safely deduce that the very fact that they have been there for some 25 to 30 years implies that they are party men and women.