Ron Liddle, writing in the Spectator, weighs in on the appeasement policies of the British government towards Communist China. Sad to say, of course, a similar indifference (even cowardice) is being demonstrated by most countries...including the U.S....It is one thing to behave cravenly toward the appalling Saudis in order to ‘protect our security interests’; it is another to suck up to the even worse Chinese simply because they are bigger than us and we want a slice of their burgeoning economy. Gordon Brown mentioned human rights, as a sort of afterthought, of course, the last time he visited Beijing — and was told by his cheerful hosts, ‘Oh, don’t you worry yourself about that, everything will be fine.’ This seemed to keep Gordon happy. He did not visit opponents of the world’s most long-lived totalitarian communist regime; he did not raise the plight of human rights lawyers imprisoned in China, nor the dissidents, nor the journalists. He did not so much as mention Tibet. He posed with ping-pong players and visited interesting power plants instead — conveying, every time he grinned that weird rictus grin of his, British support for a regime which 50 years ago visited genocide upon the Tibetans and continues to oppress, torture, detain and murder those who voice the mildest objection to its policies.
It is estimated that the Chinese murdered one million Tibetans and destroyed 6,000 monasteries back in the 1950s. It would take too long to catalogue the crimes against humanity committed in every year since then by a succession of China’s Communist party leaders; it would take decades worth of Spectator issues to list the names of those murdered or starved to death or imprisoned for so-called ideological crimes, for believing in a God of one kind or another, or those forcibly relocated from their homes. We are enjoined to understand that China has changed; that it is embracing, to a certain degree, a liberalism. But ‘liberal’ means many different things to different people, from Tariq Ali to Milton Friedman — to the extent that it means very little at all. China is, if anything, worse today than before, combining the most oppressive aspects of state Marxism with the most brutally rapacious aspects of capitalism. In this new improved China there are still no independent trades unions, scores of Catholic clergy have been arrested for proselytising, hundreds of human rights activists bundled into the back of police vans to disappear for ever; journalists censored and detained; lawyers roughed up by police thugs. Minorities, such as the Uyghur Muslims, are persecuted and find their leaders arrested and executed. Those beneficial, if accidental, consequences of capitalism — improved standards of living, better health and safety and so on — are denied to the vast majority of Chinese people. So too, with the connivance of greedy Western corporations, is freedom of information...
Abroad, China lends its diplomatic support and implied military muscle to anybody sufficiently basket-case and despotic enough to be considered a pariah by the rest of the civilised world. If they’re whacko and vicious enough, you can bet that China will be the closest ally. Especially if they’re whacko, vicious and, uh, what was the word... ‘socialist’. For years, China has blocked the United Nations Security Council from doing anything meaningful about Burma; we are always told, in earnestly optimistic tones, that China will use its influence independently, don’t worry. It has done nothing of consequence, of course...
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