Speech given in China Debate: October 20th.
I declare my interests as VC of the All-Party Groups on Uyghurs and Hong Kong. I am a Patron of Hong Kong Watch and a member of the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China.
Notwithstanding disappointment that it has taken so long for the Select Committee report to be debated I would like to record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, for her superb chairmanship of the Committee, and for navigating us through controversial issues to produce a Report which moves the UK beyond the naivety of the Golden Era – which was, Lord Patten of Barnes told us, an “example of doubtless well-meaning failure”; and tackles hugely important questions about trade and security – not least the gaping wounds of lost national resilience and our phenomenal dependency on a country which stands accused of genocide. Sir Malcolm Rifkind told us that China had “become much closer to a totalitarian state than at any time since the death of Mao Zedong.”
We heard what we called “conclusive evidence that China also poses a significant threat to the UK’s interests” particularly in light of the tilt to the Indo-Pacific region.
We concluded that the UK has had a lack of clarity and a policy of “deliberate constructive ambiguity” what Lord Patten described as the “cakeism” of the 2021 Integrated Review regarding China as both “a systemic competitor” and an “important partner”.
We criticised the failure to provide any details on how the Government will balance plans for “increased economic engagement “with “the need to protect the UK’s wider interests and values”; and called on the Government to produce a “single, coherent China strategy” warning of serious risks to our security and prosperity—including to our international trade and investments over the longer term.
This month’s announcement that China is to be formally designated a “threat” to Britain rather than a “systemic competitor” is a belated but welcome move towards a clearer strategy and follows the recent warning by Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, that the CCP’s efforts to exploit control and surveillance capabilities in emerging technologies such as satellite location systems and digital currencies represent “a threat to us all”.
I have eight questions to the Minister about specific threats to which I hope he will be able to give answers.
First, during the passage of the Telecommunications legislation the Government said it would strip out 5G Huawei components in our telecom network. This was to happen by January 2023 with fines if the deadline was not met. Now we are told that there will be delays even though a designated vendor direction has been issued identifying “covert and malicious functionality could be embedded in Huawei equipment.” When will the decision on Huawei be fully complied with?
Second, why has the Government – unlike the US- still made no move to ban and remove Hikvision and Dahua cameras made in Xinjiang and used to collect data up and down the length and breadth of the UK. Will the Procurement Bill be used to address this threat?
Third, on Monday the Minister told us that the assault on a Bob Chan at the Chinese Consulate in Manchester was “a very serious incident.” I met that man yesterday. Can the Minister tell us when the Police will provide a report to him and spell out the consequences when the brutality for which the CCP is renowned is exported to the UK – threatening the safety of the 133,000 Hong Kongers who have fled to the UK under the Government’s admirable BNO resettlement scheme.
Fourthly, the BBC has reported that up to 30 former UK military pilots are believed to have gone to train members of China’s People’s Liberation Army, lured by the CCP with large sums of money to pass on their expertise to the Chinese military, it is claimed. What are we doing to address that threat?
Fifthly, with Baroness Anelay and Lord Anderson we were in two of the Gulf states last week and were concerned to learn of joint military exercises between China, Russia and Iran. So imagine my consternation on return on reading a report in The Telegraph that “British academics have collaborated on thousands of research papers with Chinese military scientists, according to a government funded report that universities sought to suppress.” 13,415 collaborative partnerships with China, Russia and Iran were identified – 11,611 were between Chinese and British academics. Why was the report suppressed and what are we doing in partnerships as sensitive as rail gun design, hypersonic missiles and tracking systems for nuclear submarines?
Sixthly, despite our Intelligence Service publicly warning Parliament of the presence of CCP operatives on the parliamentary estate, with one claiming she had secured amendments to legislation in your Lordships’ house, why has no action been taken to bring her here to shine a light on these subversive activities. I hope that the National Security Bill currently in the other place will include measures to limit the foreign interference of Chinese agents.
Seventhly, in addition to subversion of UK institutions we have seen the subversion of international institutions – with the votes of countries being bought and linked to Belt and Road indebtedness. How are we countering this?
Eighthly, the Minister is one of this country’s leading champions of renewable energy and sustainability. What does he make of reports drawn to my attention by Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, that BMW is to stop producing electric cars in England in 2023 and moving the production of electric minis from Cowley to China. Last year Cowley made around 40,000 electric minis – why are we ceding our aspirations be a leader in global electric car manufacturing? What can be done to avert this?
I will have more to say about resilience and dependency.
Ken McCallum, MI5s director general has said “what us a risk from the Chinese Communist party aggression is …the world-leading expertise, technology, research and commercial advantage developed” by technology companies and universities in the UK
In addition to threats to cyber security and technology the Committee highlighted threats to maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region; to Taiwan – where we said conflict would be “catastrophic” and “that managing this risk should be the Government’s top strategic priority”; and serious maritime threats; the imposition of the National Security Law, the trashing of an international treaty and destruction of democracy in Hong Kong – illustrative of the CCP’s contempt for international rules based order – and what Michele Bachelet recently described as “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.
In his evidence to the Commitee Charles Parton went further and said that a genocide is underway in Xinjiang. Elizabeth Truss, while Foreign Secretary, said the Sam thing.
Discrimination against the mainly Muslim Uyghurs escalated into intense surveillance – much of it manufactured by Hikvision – mass detentions, forcible sterilization, and insertion of IUDs, forced migration, kidnapping of Uyghur children, abducted from their parents, and placed in state institutions, accompanied by terrible violence, torture and killing.
Both Sir Geoffrey Nice’s Uyghur Tribunal and the Holocaust Museum found evidence of coercive interventions of the Chinese government to prevent sizable numbers of Uyghurs from coming into being, suggesting that the deliberate goal is `to biologically destroy the group, in whole or in substantial part.’ Nice’s Tribunal concluded that this is genocide.
I ask the Minister the same question that I put to George Osborne when he appeared before the Committee. Nor should we curtail with all countries who commit human rights violations but is it licit to do business as usual with a State accused of Genocide – the crime above all crimes.
We recommend that the Government “should incorporate an atrocity prevention lens in its overall approach to trade. Current atrocity prevention tools and strategies have fallen short.” When will it do this?
Then there is our appalling dependency on the CCP. Compare it with the clarity of their strategy of undermining resilience and security; acquiring intellectual property and data; destroying competitiveness through slave labour in everything from green energy to surveillance equipment.
One of the CCP’s reasons for wanting to destroy the freedoms of Taiwan’s 23 million people is to control the production of the world’s semiconductors – the cornerstone of modern economies. One Taiwanese company, TSMC, makes over 80% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors
And meanwhile, further illustrating our incoherent strategy, we seriously consider allowing the sale to China of Newport Wafer Fab – our biggest producer of semiconductors. As Germany has discovered, love affairs with dictatorships can come at a terrible price.
I was surprised to hear witnesses tell us how fortunate we were that China had made available invaluable help during a pandemic that had its origins in China.
This included a reluctant admission that the Government had bought one billion lateral flow tests from China. They subsequently confirmed that they bought 24.1 billion items of Personal Protective Equipment where China is recorded as the country of origin at a phenomenal total cost of £10.9 billion. That’s about the equivalent of the entire (reduced) British Overseas aid budget.
This is not philanthropy.
Increasingly, developing nations are being turned into dependent vassal states – and as we saw in the recent vote on the Bachelet Report on Uyghurs in the Human Rights Council their votes are being bought via indebted dependency. A diplomat recently said it was like having a “1,000 lb gorilla on my back.”
Note that by September, in the face of a global food crisis China had give just $10 million to the World Food Programme compared with $5 billion from America.
We see the same attempted, systematic, appropriation and subversion of international institutions – including the World Health Organisation and WTO. We see it in the infiltration and financial dependency of British universities. We see it in the presence of CCP agents inside Parliament and political parties.
Xi Jinping and the CCP have demonstrated time and again that they are unwilling to abide by international treaties, are untrustworthy, cruel, and unpredictable.
This includes when it comes to the ongoing breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the human rights crackdown in Hong Kong, the crimes against humanity/genocide taking place in Xinjiang, the launching of trade wars against Lithuania and Australia, the unlawful detention of Canadian diplomats, and the flouting of basic obligations under the WHO when it comes to the sharing of information regarding pandemics.
Ministers, would do well to look at the Biden Administration and recent legislation in the US Congress, including the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, to see a government willing to invest in domestic industry, tackle climate change, and reduce its dependency on authoritarian regimes.
If the West wants to protect itself, it must face up to the reality of the CCP’s history and its future intentions. Executions, famine, deaths through forced labour, mass deportations, forced sterilisation and coercive abortion, purges of opponents, incarceration for dissent or unwillingness to comply with a brutal ideology, these are all the hallmarks of the CCP.
With Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signing a declaration that there will be “no limits” to their friendship we must underlines the importance of NATO, AUKUS, and regional partnerships and alliances of like-minded nations.
The CCP has been holding its rubber stamp Congress. Obsessed with control – evidenced by their lockdown policy- and it is veering in the direction of belligerent nationalism. But as Tank Man – in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Bridge Man on the Sitong Bridge last week or Bob Chan protesting on behalf of those who remain in Hong Kong– and the brave people of Taiwan, Ukraine and the young women of Iran have demonstrated, authoritarians often overestimate their hold on power.
Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and dissident, and Nobel laureate, who died in 2017, after serving four prison sentences, said: “There is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom.”
He was right
