China

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the Chinese have a long memory. We have to cultivate the same sort of long memory; that will be one very important weapon if we are going to fight the Chinese. First, they all remember the opium wars, because before that China was practically the number one country in the world, and they want to get back to that time.

I think we occasionally have to do a sort of role-playing. Suppose I was China—how would I feel about Taiwan? Why would I accept that Taiwan is an independent country of any sort, and why should anybody think that it does not belong to China? I see no reason for that view if we look at it from the British point of view of its being a British province or island, and another country is pretending that it belongs to it. I am saying all this because we have to remember that the Chinese do think differently, and they are not going to go away.

Secondly, look at the contrast between the Soviet Union, which tried to establish a powerful league of friendly nations, and China. China has obviously thought about all the Soviet Union’s defects very carefully and built its camp not on ideology or preaching Marxism but on giving money to other countries and getting them into debt with China—originally on very friendly terms but ultimately, it is quite ruthless at capturing those debts.

Thirdly, China has not rejected capitalism like the Soviet Union did. It has not only adopted capitalism but invested massively in cybertechnology, artificial intelligence and all the new directions of science. We should take China seriously, and I advise Her Majesty’s Government to carry out this role-playing exercise, which will tell us how the Chinese are likely to think about the challenges we pose to them.

I end with this. France was our enemy between, let us say, 1750 and 1850, and later on became a friend, while Germany became our enemy. The same situation exists between us and Russia and us and China: Russia will very soon stop being effective, and China will continue to be the enemy.