China: Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, on the subject before us. I am only sorry that because of the pressure on the House of Lords over the past few days there are not more people present to take part in this debate, because we are now looking at the second greatest economic power in the world, and perhaps the third greatest military power, and it is important that our Parliament understands better than it does at present, and takes a greater interest in, what is happening in that remarkable country.

I shall start by bearing out even further what the noble Lord, Lord Browne, was saying about the significance of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which held a meeting in Beijing. It is a body that, as he rightly says, has great influence in the United States; it has been consistently strongly in favour of multilateral nuclear disarmament, has great influence with the Houses of Congress, particularly the Senate, and is greatly respected in many parts of the world. Indeed, it has access to an astonishing extent to countries where even foreign offices do not have the same kind of contacts or relationships that they ought to enjoy.

Furthermore, we also had great help from the University of Tsinghua, one of the key Chinese universities. There has been a lot of the discussion in our own House recently about universities. This particular university has great standing in China, is very internationally minded and has enabled many students to come forward with a real understanding of the global situation. It is a matter of great regret that that university, like many others, has run into the extraordinary visa problems that have been thrown up by the new immigration policies of the United Kingdom, which in many ways are very discouraging to people in China who we ought to relate to very closely.

The other thing to say about Tsinghua University is that its rector—Dr Yang Fujia, who, as it happens, is also chancellor of Nottingham University—has been a significant bridge between this country on the one hand and the United States and China on the other, and he has consistently and continually worked on trying to create better and more understanding relationships between this country and China.

I shall begin by saying a word or two about the situation thrown up by the change of leadership in China. I am delighted to see that there are speakers in this debate who know a great deal about this subject, and I hope that they will contribute their knowledge to this discussion. It is of the first importance that we understand what opportunities and difficulties confront what is, after all, a generational change. There has been no change for over a decade in the system of Chinese leadership, as distinct from the personalities, and it is that system that we have to try to understand, and which I believe China will have to try to change.

The election of Mr Xi Jinping as the new leader of China, following Wu Jintao, does not bring about any huge change in the doctrinal policy likely to be followed by the country. Some people in China believe that Mr Xi Jinping, partly because of his background, is likely to be rather more open-minded to the world and perhaps rather more liberal, but that view is not necessarily correct and is not tremendously widely held.

There were no systematic changes in this leadership shift. Although it was relatively seamless in appearance, there was obviously a great deal of difficulty, chaos and indecision over the past year or two running up to this change. We need only look at the fact that Mr Bo Xilai, the very popular leader of one of China’s major provinces, Chongqing, has been not just removed, but purged from the Communist Party. I understand from my Chinese contacts—and I have been to China quite a few times in the past few years—that one of the reasons behind this was precisely the clash between his popularity and the policies that he was suspected of being likely to pursue. When the Politburo made the decision to purge Mr Bo Xilai, one of the real problems it had was deciding on what basis it was going to purge him. It ultimately purged him on grounds of corruption, but there were certainly many rumours in China that he might be purged on grounds of treason. I mention that only because it is of such significance to look at a leading Chinese who was not a member of the Politburo, but a fast-rising star, in a situation where regime change began to be widely discussed.

I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, and others Members of this House will make their contribution to this debate.

That purging suggests that we are looking at a very much more stormy period than most of us recognise or believe. Why is there such a stormy period? I shall mention some of the factors that remain unresolved in China. I speak as somebody who passionately hopes that China will make her way to a more open society because she is a country of great significance and importance. I shall list them very quickly. The first major factor is the rift in the leadership. The second is that the leadership has left itself wide open to the challenge that it is overtaken by cronyism and that far too many of the new leaders are princelings. The sons—alas, not the daughters—of the great leaders of the long march and the original red revolution have become significant financial players. In many cases, they are chairmen or vice-chairmen of the big state-owned enterprises and banks, and are, in fact, becoming something of an oligarchy. That is ironic in a way, given the original ideals of the Chinese revolution.

The third big factor is corruption. It is widespread in China, not least in local government, where it is fed consistently by the seizure of land and its sale to developers for large sums of money, most of which do not find their way back to the peasants who lived on that land. Very often, the money is siphoned off, sometimes abroad, or to the private fortunes of those who have the ability to turn that land from peasant, farming land into development land, with huge planning gains.

The fourth factor is that China has been slow to recognise the need for at least a basic welfare state. It is beginning to move on this. For example, at present something like 95% of the Chinese population is covered by some sort of very basic healthcare, whereas the figure only five years ago was 15%. The Chinese are beginning to move, however slowly, in that direction, but they are still a very long way from something like the National Health Service, in which they have shown considerable interest.

The fifth factor, but I shall not go on about it, is crucial to understanding the unrest in China, which is very great. Three years ago, when I went to speak to the China Reform Forum, the training college for the young elite of the Chinese Communist Party, one of the things that surprised me was the sheer scale of demonstrations in China, running into the thousands, all too many of which had to be put down by the People’s Liberation Army. In other words, those demonstrations were much more than the flag waving and shouting of slogans that we have day after day across the street under King George V’s statue. They were altogether different.

I shall mention one other factor, which is very important. It is the house registration system, with which many people in Britain are not familiar. Other people know more about this than I do, such as the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, and other Peers. It is a system under which you are registered in the house in which you are born. That house registration becomes your passport to whatever benefits or, for that matter, duties, you have in that province of China. Quite basically, it means that if you are born in a rural state, you will have only the most basic education and health services, very many benefits will not apply to you, you will have a very low pension, if any at all, and you can leave the province where you are registered only as a migrant worker carrying with you the lack of the benefits and rights that people in Shanghai, Beijing or Guangdong undoubtedly enjoy. One might almost describe the house registration system as a blockade to social mobility, and it is one of the reasons why the leadership of China has consistently become more an elite divorced from a large number of the people.

Having said all that, let me return to the issue we are discussing in this debate: the nuclear issue. I shall say a few words about the problems that China confronts in foreign affairs, which have already been adduced by my noble friend Lord Browne, but are worth saying a little more about. The first thing to say is that the United States’ modernisation of nuclear weapons is regarded in China as an extremely serious challenge. Whether we like it or not, China still sees three countries as posing a certain threat to itself. One of those countries is the United States, the second is India and the third is Japan. I shall say a word about each. I am not pleading for China, but I understand why the modernisation of conventional and nuclear weapons in the United States troubles China very much indeed. After all, the United States is the biggest naval presence in the Pacific and its defence budget is equivalent to the next 13 countries in the world, which include China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and many more, and, if Mr Romney had become president, it would have been increased very substantially.

I want to say a few words about nuclear modernisation. One of those words concerns the attempt to get smaller and more effective nuclear weapons—thermobaric weapons—which add a number of other fragmented materials to uranium or another nuclear product, usually U-235, to make the effect of those bombs much more explosive and much more devastating.

A perhaps equally frightening weapon is the “mother of all weapons”—the MOAW—so called, unfortunately, by the nuclear military industry. It is so powerful and so explosive that it is capable of knocking out anything buried several meters under earth, or even several tens of meters under earth. It is the biggest explosive device that anyone has ever invented.

Also very troubling is the introduction of nanotechnology into nuclear development. It means the opposite of the mother of all weapons; it means tiny nuclear bombs which can blow up a whole city but which are extremely hard to detect. It will be very difficult for the NPT—or to be more precise, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva—to inspect, discover and track nuclear weapons as tiny as are now being developed. Therefore, China has some reason to be worried, as does the world. Not just China, but nuclear weapon countries—P5 and outside—all over the world are developing this highly sophisticated and rather terrifying technology.

I referred to India, which China sees as a rival. One of the most destructive steps ever taken in the world of attempting to deal with multilateral disarmament was—I said it rather loudly at the time but not many people were listening—the US-India agreement of 2008. It was a terrifying agreement because, not only did it exempt India from any of the controls by the nuclear suppliers group—an essential element in the whole structure of trying to control and govern nuclear weapons—it also enabled India to bypass issues about the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and fissile material induction, simply by the United States agreeing with India that it would not be pressed on any of those issues. It was a desperate act of irresponsibility by George Bush. I share my noble friend Lord Browne’s view that we are lucky to have seen Mr Obama re-elected if we are really concerned about the possibility of nuclear destruction in this world.

Let me add a little to what my noble friend Lord Browne has already said about what we might do. It is crucial to build on China’s doctrinal addiction, as he said, to the concept of no first use. China likes no first use because, effectively, it means that it is protected from being morally blamed when it deals with a country which is, for example, likely to move towards the development of nuclear weapons. For 20 years, it has enabled China to take a moral position in the P5 and then to argue to everyone else that they should take the same moral position. So far, no one else has done so.

However, in 2000, when the members of the nuclear proliferation treaty met in order to discuss what might be done, they strongly argued for—under great pressure from the non-nuclear weapon states—the idea of what was called at the time a major move towards an attempt to get multilateral agreement on no first use. They called for negative security assurances; in other words, a promise that, “If you meet certain conditions, we will not attack you with nuclear weapons or, in some cases, any other kind of weapons”.

Since 2000, there has been very little move forward on negative security assurances, which I believe to be one of the key elements in trying to get a sensible world of nuclear order. But I would say loud and clear that one of the things that this country and the Foreign Office—I give due credit to the Foreign Secretary and others in the Foreign Office for the work that they have tried to do in this field—should do is discuss the possibility of bilateral no first use agreements between the P5, and beyond the P5 between the P5 countries and those which are so-called nuclear weapon states not recognised within the P5—in other words, build up a network of no first use rather than simply making an announcement about no first use.

I am sorry if I have taken some time but this is a rather major subject. Finally, the other area where we can go a very long way to try to bring China within a more globally responsible structure—it is not very good at global responsibility—is by agreeing to start negotiating on things such as no first use, and moving on to things such as CTBT, of which China is a member, and the fissile material cut-off treaty, in an effort to bring this country, which is not an aggressive country but is certainly a troubled country, within the sphere of global responsibility. That very much includes its very special relationship with North Korea, which I am glad to say is getting somewhat better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Howe of Aberavon]

My Lords, as is the case perhaps too often when I speak in the House, I find myself reverting to the ancient past in my own recollections. I will try to avoid it, but there is no doubt that on the subject brought before us by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, on which the two subsequent speakers emphasised the importance of the threatening weaponry concerned and of multilateral consideration of how we handle it, there is common ground. The question that may interest other people, as it has me, is how far we can be confident in a country such as the People’s Republic of China, which has a history that is unique in so many ways and which is overwhelmingly important in the consideration of this subject.

Remarkably, this reminds me—this again is one of my faults—of the occasion some 60 years ago when I first became aware of the importance of China. I was proceeding with two other Cambridge undergraduates, my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding and EAW Bullock—I think that he later became a diplomat—through south Wales, campaigning for the Conservative Party in the Constitutional Club of Ebbw Vale. On the evening we were in Tredegar Constitutional Club, the news was announced that the Labour Party Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had announced Britain’s decision to recognise the emergence as a country of the People’s Republic of China. We were asked with some anxiety whether we agreed with this hazardous Labour Foreign Secretary in taking such a view. Fortunately, we had all been instructed in international law by Professor Eli Lauterpacht at Cambridge, and were able to say that, if a Government have been established with clear, credible control of a clearly defined territory, we should recognise it.

I have been facing this question in prospect for some 60 years and I now underline what other speakers have already said about the huge importance of China in this context. I shall add one other thing: it could have been historically uncomfortable if we had not given that answer because 250 years before that, George III, in consultation with Emperor Qiang Long, agreed on the importance of communication and a relationship between our two countries. So there has long been mutual respect, which makes this debate important.

In today’s context, one wonders about the western media’s outpourings on China’s party congress and its constitution, focusing too often on Chinese leaders as though they were old men in black suits, ignoring political reform and being highly challenged. We have to underline—as others have already done—the importance in this context of hoping for active participation by the People’s Republic of China. It is an area where there is some anxiety—as there often is about the People’s Republic of China. How we can be sure, our media often ask, about the sincerity and credibility of the people that I have indicated they describe? Fortunately, there have been a number of examples of the Chinese Government’s respect for the importance of law and the legal system, not only in the international fields that we are talking about, but in relation to their Government and, for example, to the discussions with us about the future of Hong Kong, which became an important issue. From that time they had respect for the special nature of Hong Kong in the context of a two-country system, which in a way exceeded our legitimate claim.

Our title to Hong Kong, under the lease we had agreed at the end of the 19th century, extended only to some 18% of Hong Kong’s territory and we had claimed the remaining 82% by the sheer force of our presence there. The Chinese had become accustomed to regarding the legitimacy and unity of the entire territory, recognising the importance of it being distinguished from and identified as a special component in the China where Hong Kong was thereafter going to live. That shows the respect we can expect from the attitude of Chinese leaders to the importance of an international legal approach to this question, and of securing agreement between China and the remainder of the world—not just with ourselves, but with all those concerned with the continued existence of these nuclear weapons.

It is important to remember that China in fact has respect for law as such. I have had some contact with this, apart from the Hong Kong negotiations, because of my presidency of the Great Britain-China Centre for many years. Perhaps I should have declared that interest earlier than now. The truth is that considerable discussion and negotiation takes place between our own modest GBCC and Chinese authorities about the role of law in a society, whether national or international. We have been able to discuss with the Chinese a range of important aspects of the legal system nationally, including the need for professionalism in China’s judges, the establishment, with our help, of a judicial studies training programme, the improving role of judicial management, consideration of strengthening the rights of defence lawyers, and a code of conduct for Chinese lawyers in other respects. In administrative law, there is the promotion of media freedom and ethics and, although it may be difficult for all of us to believe it, pushing human rights up the Chinese news agenda and improving the position of media regulation within that society.

All this may seem to be a departure from the subject we are primarily addressing, but I hope it helps to assure colleagues in this House of the importance of the subject of the possible possession of these fearful weapons by one of the world’s largest societies, but alongside that, the importance of its awareness of the role of law whether within the nation or between nations. We should note the extent to which, for historical reasons, our country has the capacity to undertake this kind of discussion. That is because of a substantial, historic—and conceited, if I may say—Government as important as the People’s Republic of China. So I feel much assured—

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

Perhaps I may ask the noble and learned Lord a question. He conducted a brilliant negotiation over Hong Kong when he was Foreign Secretary, but does he regard the fact that Hong Kong has survived for 20 years as an indication that we now have a well settled two-regime system in China?

[Lord Howe of Aberavon]

Indeed, of course I do, and I would add that I have shed Hong Kong behind me because of the extent to which it has been established. We can all take from that some comfort about the nature of the People’s Republic of China as well. It is that satisfaction which has enabled me to go on other missions to China to discuss matters of common interest, including that which we are discussing today.

I am delighted as always to find myself speaking in the same tone and striking the same note as the noble Baroness who has just so kindly intervened in my observations. It is time that I came to a close.