Who’s Afraid of Chinese Money?

By Jonathan Mirsky

The New York Review of Books - October 19, 2013

“China is what it is. We have to be here or nowhere.” Chancellor George Osborne, Britain’s second-highest official, was laying out the British government’s view last week, near the end of his trip aimed at selling Britain to Chinese companies. Western governments used to go to great lengths to say they were standing up for human rights in China. Now, trade ties with Beijing are so lucrative that Western leaders no longer need to lie: China is what it is.
A fundamental shift has appeared in British rhetoric in the twenty-four years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown. In the autumn of 1991, then-Prime Minister John Major became the first Western leader to visit China after the Tiananmen killings. I was part of the press group on that trip, and on the plane going to China, I gave Major a list of several hundred political prisoners in Chinese jails given to me by Amnesty International. After his meeting with Chinese Premier Li Peng, Major told us that he had handed the list to the Chinese leader and spoken forcefully about political freedom. Dazzled, I hurried to file a long story for my newspaper on Britain’s moral courage. In fact, as I learned later from an official who had been in the room, no list was handed over and political freedom was never mentioned. Major’s lie, I was told—repeated by his Foreign Secretary Hurd, who was also in Beijing—was intended to influence how we reported the trip.
Contrast that with the statements by Osborne and Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who accompanied him, during and after their trip to China last week. The trip, which involved no meetings with senior officials, was aimed solely at doing business with some of China’s largest companies. In their enthusiastic deal-making, they were at pains to explain why they needed to avoid any moral concerns. “We’ve got to start by understanding that China is an ancient civilization with a long and proud history,” Osborne said. That the Chinese Communist Party has turned its back on that ancient culture appears unknown to the chancellor; in any event, Syria and Iran, with equally long histories, are not treated with respect by the British.

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