'When will the West stand up to Xi Jinping?', Sir Geoffrey Nice and Benedict Rogers

Since the Umbrella Movement democracy protests in 2014, China’s president Xi Jinping has been dismantling Hong Kong’s freedoms – and its very democratic essence – in plain sight. The culmination of the city-state’s metamorphosis from open society to authoritarianism is marked by the trial of Hong Kong entrepreneur, media mogul and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, which began a week before Christmas and resumed on 2 January.

Initially the erosion of Hong Kong’s way of life was gradual. But over the past four years, since the imposition of a draconian national security law in June 2020, the destruction has been rapid, far-reaching and comprehensive. Freedoms of expression, assembly, association and of the press have been torn up, the rule of law trampled on and Hong Kong transformed from one of Asia’s most open cities to one of its most repressive police states.

Too many in the West don’t care that much. Being no fool, Xi understands this

Lai was charged with conspiring to collude with foreign forces, a crime under the national security law, and publishing ‘seditious’ materials. But in reality, the Chinese state view him as guilty of, in the words of his lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, the ‘crime’ of conspiracy to commit journalism, conspiracy to talk about politics to politicians and conspiracy to discuss human rights concerns with human rights organisations. It is a sham show trial.

The dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, in total breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the city state’s handover – an international agreement registered at the United Nations – is just the latest in the litany of Xi’s crimes. 19 December this year will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Joint Declaration’s signing, which was meant to stand valid until 2047. So far, Xi has faced no consequences for this complete disregard of the ‘world order’. Will Xi continue to be allowed to flout it with impunity?

Xi’s regime is still committing genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur population in China’s western region of Xinjiang. They are imposing measures such as forced abortion and sterilisation, incarcerating millions and separating children from their parents – all intended to prevent Uyghur births. The United States government recognises the Uyghur genocide, as do several parliaments around the world. In 2021, our own parliament also declared that China is committing genocide, yet the government still refuses to address the tribunal’s findings

The list goes on. The Chinese Communist party (CCP) has been persecuting practitioners of the Falung Gong religious movement since the 1990s. For nearly 20 years now, it has faced allegations of harvesting the organs of Falun Gong and other prisoners of conscience; the independent China Tribunal concluded in 2019 that this was ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and constitutes a crime against humanity. The tribunal advised that, as such, China should be recognised as ‘a criminal state’.

In addition, there are the atrocities in Tibet which continue, as well as the persecution of Christians and the brutal crackdown on dissidents, human rights defenders, bloggers, journalists and civil society activists across China.

How have Xi and the CCP been allowed to get away with this for so long? The answer is because the West is all talk and no action – and often they don’t even do much talking. Xi knows that the ‘freedoms’ the West boasts of are precisely what permits him to commit genocide in Xinjiang, destroy democracy in Hong Kong and murder prisoners of conscience, in order to trade in their human organs.

Why? Because while those very freedoms allow those in the West to care about genocide, crimes, democracy and freedom of speech in other countries, those same freedoms also include the freedom not to care that much. Too many in the West don’t care that much. Being no fool, Xi understands this and so has relatively little to fear.

But, there is something Xi clearly does fear. Not foreign parliaments or governments, but ideas. Specifically, he has a fear of ideas grabbing the imagination of his own people: as the cases of Falun Gong in the 90s, and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in 2014 and 2019 and, earlier, in China itself in 1989, showed.

That is why the CCP persecuted and murdered Falun Gong practitioners and turned them into cadavers of spare organs for China’s transplant business. It is why most of the leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy movement are now in jail or in exile, and why thousands were massacred in Tiananmen Square.

The idea behind the UN Genocide Convention – and its requirement to prevent and punish that crime – might worry Xi and his people. All parties to the convention are obliged to act immediately to prevent and punish genocide once detected anywhere in the world. But the Genocide Convention is a paper tiger. Governments around the world are frightened of what it would make them do – so they do nothing and delay condemning atrocities as ‘genocides’ for as long as possible.

Those with power in the West do not care enough about the freedom of speech to defend it. When British, European and American politicians and activists were sanctioned by China for criticising Beijing’s human rights violations, did we hear much expression of support for them? Very little. Governments made statements, but did nothing beyond that. Several of those sanctioned were lawyers, but the sound of silence from the ‘Magic Circle’ of commercial law firms in the City of London so focused on their profits in China was deafening. 

If we are to defend the values we claim to hold dear, we need to change our relationship with China completely. We must make our words mean something. We must deploy targeted punitive sanctions, diversify supply chains, boycott products made by slave labour and come as close as is practically possible to saying to China: ‘Until you change, we will not trade.’ Only when Xi gets that message is there a chance that he will think twice before holding politically-motivated trials of citizens who dare to disagree with Beijing, or committing further atrocity crimes.

This is a year of poignant anniversaries: the 40th anniversary of the Joint Declaration, the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the 25th anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong, the 10th anniversary of the Umbrella Movement and the fifth anniversary of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. December also marked the 75th anniversaries of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Let us make those remembrances mean something. Let us ensure that Xi Jinping and the CCP cannot get away with their litany of crimes forever.

This article was published in The Spectator on 9 January 2024.