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China and the West

I beg your pardon, Mr. Taylor. I am being diverted from my subject. My point was that our parliamentary delegation and the one the previous week, which included the Minister of State, headed to Tibet and Beijing for high-level discussions, and those meetings were dominated not by the potential for trade with China, nor by its economic influence in the world, but by the issue of an aging, retired priest living in north India; namely, the Dalai Lama. Important as other issues are, that little issue of Tibet—a country whose population is some 2 million, compared with China's population of 1.25 billion—has such overwhelming influence on our relations with the People's Republic of China. We tried to make the argument to the senior Minister whom we met that it would surely be in China's best interests to find some sensible solution to the difficulty of Tibet and the Dalai Lama, so that the effect on China's relations with the rest of the world is removed. It seemed to us that several things could be done. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster mentioned in passing the military presence in Tibet, and we certainly saw plenty of evidence of that. Tibet was opened briefly for the visit of the Minister of State and for us, and then of course was closed again for the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic, but during our brief visit we certainly saw a significant military presence. There were many soldiers and vehicles and definite evidence of suppression of pro-Tibet or free Tibet feelings within Tibet. We sought to raise with the Chinese in Tibet a large number of human rights issues, including absurdities such as Tibetan monks who put up a picture of the Dalai Lama being arrested for doing so and any Buddhist monk refusing to condemn the Dalai Lama being arrested. Such things are absurd. They are symptoms of a totalitarian state of the kind that we no longer see in western Europe. We tried to argue to the Chinese authorities that suppressing pictures of the Dalai Lama was not dissimilar to our attempts to suppress the speaking voice of the Northern Ireland IRA. Do Members remember that we used to have pictures on television and actors reading out the words over the picture? Suppressing pictures of the Dalai Lama is an absurd thing to do. It calls attention to him and gives wrong messages. We tried to develop with the Chinese a middle-way solution, to use the Dalai Lama's expression. Lord Alton was particularly keen on the potential of looking at some parallel with Vatican City, where the Pope reigns supreme in an independent little parcel or palace in the middle of Italy. There is a variety of different solutions and all sorts of ways that we could think about the situation. The first thing that has to happen is face-to-face negotiations between senior Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama himself. There is absolutely no point in having the Dalai Lama's representatives; there must be face-to-face negotiations. Surely, then, the Chinese could find some kind of solution to the problem. The all-party group produced a weighty document yesterday. I will not bore hon. Members with it this morning, but I recommend that people—officials in particular—have a look at it. We took forward some discussions with Chinese officials. As my hon. Friend mentioned briefly, I found that there was some degree of puzzlement about why the Chinese should allow Tibet to become such an important matter and such a big fly in the ointment. We have to ask why the Chinese built the railway on which the train in which we went from Xinang to Lhasa ran, which cost, along with the road, many billions of US dollars to build. The Chinese said, "Oh, it is to encourage tourism." It really was not. There has not been all that much tourism in Tibet, particularly not when the borders are closed and visas are refused even to visiting ambassadors. I am not sure that it is do to with tourism. They said that it was to do with economic development in Tibet. If that was so, there are large parts of China where they could, today, be building railways. The notion that they built the railway simply for economic development in Tibet seems wrong. A glance at the map shows that Tibet lies somewhere between China and India, and I suspect that that probably has much more to do with it. The large number of troop movements that we saw on the trains, as we passed them on the way in, seems to suggest that it has more to do with the Chinese interest in Tibet. All of that is worrying. I hope that Her Majesty's Government begins to look at the matter as follows. This is an insignificant dispute, involving an ageing priest living in north India and the questions of who is in charge of Buddhism and what the exact meaning of "autonomy" is. The area is called the Tibet Autonomous Region and there is some dispute between the Dalai Llama, the Chinese and ourselves as to what autonomy is and what sort of autonomy Tibet should have. Is it the same as Scottish autonomy within the United Kingdom, for example, or the same as the Tamils might wish for in Sri Lanka? There are many different kinds of autonomies. Is it not extraordinary that such a detailed, historical matter of insignificance in the big picture of world events should be souring our relations, and those of western Europe and the United States, with the People's Republic of China? It seems to me that the officials to whom we spoke were beginning to accept that argument. I got the impression that they were slightly yawning and saying, "This is all very silly, can't we talk about important matters?" Her Majesty's Government ought to try to find a way of saying to the Chinese Government, "Let's solve that one. Let's move forward. Let's think about your strategic reasons for the vast Chinese investment in Tibet. Let's have a look at what our real relationships ought to be. Let's find a way of solving a rather silly little problem in the big picture and move forward from here." I found it chilling, when we returned to our hotel in Beijing, on the way back to London, to be told as we tried to go for a walk along one of the main boulevards after Tiananmen square that we were not allowed to leave. Being British, I just ignored that and strolled out down said boulevard and no one seemed to object, although it could have caused an international incident had it gone wrong. We were told not to leave our hotel because of the rehearsal for the 60th anniversary parade through the centre of Beijing, for which the whole of the middle of Beijing was closed down, with all the population removed from it. This gave us a bird's eye view of the military part of the parade—the whole parade was quite extraordinary—amounting to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of military vehicles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, endless nuclear weapons and a vast array of military hardware redolent of the Soviet Union at the height of Soviet power. I found it slightly chilling that, at a time like this the Chinese should not, in this parade, focus on trade, industry or history, or on joyful peasants dancing in the streets, but on hundreds and thousands of vast pieces of military equipment parading. They did that to send a strong message to the west. It certainly sent a strong message to us. I endorse the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster. There is more to China than the vast economic potential that we all know about. We have to think carefully about precisely what its military, diplomatic and international ambitions may be.