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East Asia

I am grateful for the opportunity to make some brief remarks, and am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) and the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), who made excellent contributions not only to the debate but to the report on which it focuses. I associate myself particularly with the right hon. Gentleman’s comments on a robust approach to promoting and defending human rights in other countries. I shall come to that, but I believe that the traditional softly-softly approach has not paid dividends and that we have a right and a responsibility to stand up for the values that we cherish. We learned many things on our visit to east Asia last year. I have been used to describing the UK as the fourth richest country in the world, and it came as something of a surprise to discover that we are now not the fourth richest but the fifth richest, as defined by gross domestic product. I thought that being fourth was pretty good, and I put that down to a long period of guidance by a benign and wise Chancellor of the Exchequer, but there we are—we have slipped to fifth. The reason for that is not that we are not performing well, but that another country, China, has overtaken us. To be honest, we should not beat ourselves up about that. China overtook Britain in 2005. It will overtake Germany in 2009, on current trends, and Japan in 2015. At some point in the next 30 years, it will overtake the United States of America. That is the position if one considers only GDP. We might view China’s economy as a matter of its purchasing power parity, which is $8 trillion a year—making it second only to the United States. China is a rising economic power and a rising military power, as other hon. Members have mentioned. There are ground forces of 2.3 million in the People’s Liberation Army, and 8,000 battle tanks. There are 3,500 aircraft in China’s air force. In some ways, the most worrying development is the fact that China is achieving blue-water-navy status. That is a striking development. When the Foreign Affairs Committee was in India and Pakistan a couple of months ago, we learned that China has negotiated with Pakistan access to Pakistani ports for part of its fleet. That is a quite worrying development. It exponentially increases China’s influence in the Arabian sea and the entrance to the Gulf. Of even greater concern, as the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling mentioned, is Taiwan. China has developed a sophisticated submarine presence in the strait of Taiwan. It is also developing a fairly sophisticated anti-submarine presence to deter the American navy in that area. When we were in Beijing, we were left in no doubt by officials of the Communist party who were responsible for relations with Taiwan, and in our talks with the Chinese Foreign Minister, that they were none too keen on the concept of self-determination for the people of Taiwan. In passing, I want to say that I have been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee for six years, and have in that time visited a number of countries and met a number of Foreign Ministers. I have never before been treated as we were treated in Beijing. The pressure put on the Committee not to visit Taiwan was intolerable. It is important that, as we have a right of free speech in this country, we should stand up and say that it is not acceptable for free parliamentarians to be treated in that fashion. It is worth bearing that in mind in the context of the none-too-subtle hints that China made only last year that it had not ruled out the possibility of military intervention in, or even invasion of, Taiwan if the Government of Taiwan continued to take steps towards independence. The United States has traditionally been the guarantor of Taiwan’s freedoms, but the response of the United States army to such pressure from the Chinese was to invite representatives of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to go on military manoeuvres with the US army in Guam. One need not be a fully paid-up supporter of Taiwanese independence to think that, on balance, that might send the wrong message to the old guard in Beijing. In addition to China’s approach to Taiwan, other aspects of its foreign policy and its economic policy overseas give great cause for concern. China’s attitude to Africa, as the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South, suggested, is not dissimilar to that of western nations at the height of imperial power, in the scramble for Africa. One aspect of that is the environmental damage that is being caused by the plundering of precious and irreplaceable natural resources in Sudan and other parts of Africa. China’s attitude towards Zimbabwe should also cause concern to people in this country, because it is involved in directly selling arms to the dictator Mugabe. The picture is not all bad. There are some encouraging signs—welcome signs that the People’s Republic of China is at long last ceasing to see its membership of the UN Security Council solely through the prism of self-interest. We should point out that the People’s Republic has played a good role in seeking to temper North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. As the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) mentioned, China’s relations with Iran put it in an almost pivotal position on the UN Security Council, in which it could choose to play a constructive role. Let us hope that it does so. I hope also that the Minister will explain some of the things that Britain is doing in the Security Council to help China to emerge and play such a role. China is a rising economic power but not yet the leading economic power in the world, and a rising military power but not yet the leading one. However, there is one area in which it is an undisputed world leader, head and shoulders above its nearest competitors. China is far and away the world’s No. 1 abuser of human rights. Amnesty International estimates that about 3,400 people were executed by the Chinese state in 2004. To put that in context, those executions account for more than 90 per cent. of worldwide judicial executions in 2004. That is if we accept the figure of 3,400. Other people have made different estimates. Chen Zhonglin, a deputy in the National People’s Congress, put the figure at more than 10,000 a year. As my colleagues have pointed out, it is not only the death penalty that is a cause for concern. There is widespread torture, detention without trial and re-education through labour. There are no meaningful freedoms of speech, association or assembly, and there is little freedom of religion. Culturally, the Foreign Office—I shall try to put this gently—has not been great on this issue. I emphasise that I am not referring to my right hon. Friend the Minister when I say that, because he has an excellent track record. However, even the Foreign Office, which traditionally has not been China’s sternest critic on human rights issues, concluded in its last, and previous, human rights reports that there have been widespread abuses, yet we continue along the path of the human rights dialogue. We have a bilateral human rights dialogue with China, and the EU has a similar dialogue. Having looked at this issue over time, I have concluded that those dialogues achieve little and, arguably, allow the People’s Republic of China to compartmentalise human rights concerns. China seems to show that it is serious about tackling human rights concerns simply by saying, ““We are serious: here is the dialogue; this is what we are doing about it,”” while the human rights abuses continue apace. Internet restrictions have been mentioned. There are also restrictions on broadcasting. When the Committee was in China, there were not a great deal of television channels available in our hotel in Beijing. We were reduced to watching BBC World—not the most reliable provider of information—to get an approximation of what was happening elsewhere in the world. I noticed that when the presenter said that the programme was going over to a BBC correspondent in China, the channel closed down for about 10 minutes until the broadcast had ended. It is startling to see such censorship at first hand, and we are right to speak out against such things. We ought to change tack with China and how we view its economic rise. Far too often, we say that it impacts badly on Britain and talk about cheap imports and intellectual property rights. We do not spend enough time talking about the opportunities for British business in China. Lots of our businesses are doing well over there, and we have a well-established presence in the banking and financial services sector. There are lots of other areas in which we could do business with China, but we need to be more robust and aggressive about it. There must be business opportunities for us in a country that is building, on average, one new coal power station a week over 10 years, given that we are a leading developer of green technologies. We discovered from our visit that business people feel that the language training that is meant to enable them to do business better in China is inadequate. Perhaps the Government should consider that. On Taiwan, I believe that our policy is right. We must continue to encourage China to pursue its objectives by purely peaceful means. A period of prolonged good will on China’s behalf towards Taiwan might produce more dividends in trying to achieve its objectives than the kind of bullying that we have seen. When I was there, I was reminded of other territorial disputes in which a large neighbour has behaved badly, such as that between Spain and Gibraltar. It is not surprising that the people of Gibraltar do not feel as warm as they might towards their Spanish neighbours precisely because of the problems with handling the border and telephones. A lowering of the temperature and a period of good will are generally welcome in such disputes. One thing that the Government of the PRC could do is open up more direct transport links. Many people in Taiwan have family in the PRC, but it is difficult to get from one to the other. Opening up those links might be a step in the right direction. On human rights, I associate myself with the comments of the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling. We should accept that the dialogues are not working and break them off. They provide a cloak behind which China routinely abuses its citizens’ rights. We should stand up and be proud of our liberal values, and tell the Government of China that their record is not good enough. One thing that struck me greatly on our visit was how much China desperately wants to be part of the modern world. It wants to be more outward looking and to play a proper role on the UN Security Council. We ought to tell it that we would welcome that, but that if a country wants to be part of the modern of the world it needs to embrace modern values at its heart. People must have the freedoms of association, of religion and, most importantly, of speech.