The Telegraph: 'Britain must not give an inch to China', Benedict Rogers

On his visit to Beijing, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly must speak truth to power. If that upsets his hosts, so be it.

Not long after the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly lands in Beijing, I will arrive in Taipei to meet Taiwan’s defenders of democracy, exactly five months after meeting Tibet’s spiritual leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. 

At around the same time, at least 50 Parliamentarians from every continent will gather in Prague for a conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), discussing China’s human rights crisis and how to counter the challenge which Xi Jinping’s regime poses to the free world.

The optics for Mr Cleverly are not great. He arrives in the aftermath of the disappearance of his counterpart, Qin Gang, who served just seven months as China’s Foreign Minister before he vanished. His visit also comes just under two months after the Hong Kong authorities issued arrest warrants and bounties for eight exiled Hong Kong activists, three of whom now live in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile China’s property market and currency are crashing and its economic growth is deflating.

In such circumstances, I feel some sympathy for Mr Cleverly. He drew the short straw. Although human rights advocacy can be tough, I’d rather be with the inspiring Taiwanese democrats, the Dalai Lama or brave parliamentarians from around the world prepared to speak their mind than with the genocidal, mendacious, murderous and economically illiterate tyrants in Beijing, any day. 

So just what can Mr Cleverly hope to achieve and why is he going? 

To be clear, I do not oppose engagement with China. You cannot ignore an emerging superpower, and it makes little sense to refuse to talk to the leaders of the world’s second most populous country and second largest economy. Even at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we still talked with Moscow. So the question for me is not whether to engage, but how, on whose terms, with what objectives and about what? 

We should engage from a position of strength, standing up for our values, freedoms and security, rather than kowtowing and appeasing in the hope of short-term trade deals. Mr Cleverly should speak truth to power. If that means displeasing his hosts in Beijing, so be it. They will be more likely to respect us in the long-term.

When Xi Jinping visited the UK in 2015 and was given the red-carpet treatment by then prime minister David Cameron, I vividly recall an experienced American businessman, James McGregor, a former Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who had lived for many years in China commenting on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He was very critical of the Cameron-Osborne approach. His words which have stayed with me ever since: “If you act like a panting puppy, [China] is going to think they’ve got you on a leash. China does not respect people who suck up to them.” Those are salient words for Mr Cleverly to ponder.

If his visit to Beijing – the first by a British foreign secretary in five years – is to mean anything, Mr Cleverly must manage expectations and be as robust as possible in his messaging. 

In managing expectations, he cannot be naïve in thinking that Xi Jinping’s regime will listen to him on human rights, or on our concerns about the Chinese regime’s threats to our security, through their infiltration, intimidation and influence operations. 

Not when the United States, whose economic leverage over China is far greater than ours and whose preparation for reducing dependency and enhancing security is far more advanced than ours, has so far failed to appeal to Beijing’s better angels. Mr Cleverly is unlikely to extract any concessions from the Chinese regime – and therefore he should not be offering any himself.

The great Chinese general, philosopher and strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

On this basis, in the forefront of his mind, Mr Cleverly should have the report of the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), published earlier this summer, which said that China had penetrated “every sector” of the UK economy in a “whole of state” assault to which the Government’s response has been “completely inadequate”. Without swift, decisive action, we face a “nightmare scenario” where China could pose “an existential threat” to liberal democracy, it concluded.

And so in every meeting, Mr Cleverly should raise every issue that his hosts will hate but which should matter profoundly to us and the free world: the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy, the genocide of the Uyghurs, atrocities in Tibet, the crackdown on dissidents, journalists, lawyers and religious adherents across China, the threats to Taiwan. 

And not just in broad terms, but in specifics. 

He should utter the two words “Jimmy Lai” and ask why a 75 year-old British citizen and entrepreneur is languishing in jail. 

He should ask why Tibetan singer Lhundrub Drakpa is in prison for writing a song. 

He should raise the case of Uyghur economist and intellectual Ilham Tohti. 

He should demand their release, and the release of thousands of other political prisoners held by the Chinese regime.

At a more domestic level, he should stand by the decision of Tower Hamlets council to deny planning permission for a new Chinese embassy on the site of the old Royal Mint near Tower Bridge – and not be bullied by Beijing into trying to overturn it.

He should raise the behaviour of Chinese diplomats, who just under a year ago beat up peaceful Hong Kong demonstrators outside the Consulate in Manchester, and Chinese students in the UK, who have assaulted Hong Kongers on the streets of Southampton and elsewhere.

There cannot be high hopes for Mr Cleverly’s visit to Beijing, given how Xi Jinping’s regime has behaved in the past decade. But if he is bold, speaks truth to power and stands up for what is right, and does not give an inch on our values and security, he may come away empty-handed but will deserve some credit for having tried. 

This article was published on The Telegraph on 29 August 2023.