By kowtowing to China we simply betray its people

The old China wrapped in the new: female members of a Chinese militia celebrate today's anniversary
12 April 2012

Today's 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China sees huge celebrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the world's largest man-made space.

Tiananmen was also the scene of a massacre on the night of 3-4 June 1989, where hundreds died - and must not be mentioned in China.

When official Chinese spokesmen mention Tiananmen at all, the night of 3-4 June is called "the incident" or the "events".

President Jiang Zemin, China's last president, called it "much ado about nothing".

Here's something that would surprise even George Orwell. Go to your computer and tap in the address "Google.cn" - then search for "Tiananmen". Don't forget the cn.

You will see a stream of articles about the march and air force fly-pasts today and the weather forecast. You will see children flying kites in the square. Now tap in "Tiananmen" into the British Google site - no cn.

There is a Wikipedia article on the massacre along with the most famous picture from Tiananmen: the man standing alone in front of a couple of tanks. That man has vanished. We don't know his name. When asked, Chinese officials say: "He is where he is supposed to be."

This is the old China wrapped in the new one. Certain words and ideas are taboo and dangerous. If you tap in "Tiananmen", "Dalai Lama", "democracy" or "Taiwan" in the wrong context in China, soon there will be a knock on your door and perhaps detention.

How do the Chinese security services manage this? Why, by using the technology for screening and hacking sold to them by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, something one of Google's founders, Sergey Brin, said he was "unhappy about" but business is business.

Indeed it is. Yesterday's Daily Telegraph carried a 15-page China supplement sponsored by Beijing's embassy here in London, including two pieces by foreigners, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, congratulating China on the anniversary and looking forward to plenty of economic interchange.

Fifty words from the end of his three-column article, Lord Mandelson hopes that frank speaking can handle "frictions such as freedom of expression, the rule of law and civic freedom".

What would Lord Mandelson write about similar frictions in Iran or Myanmar?

Or if tackled about Tibet? Within a year of Mao's declaring the establishment of the new regime in 1949, Chinese soldiers began the occupation of Tibet.

This is China's most neuralgic international issue, largely because of the charisma of the Dalai Lama - which explains why "the criminal splittist Dalai" is treated as he is by Google China.

Beijing maintains that Tibet has always been a part of China. In six visits to Tibet I have never met a single Tibetan, including official guides off the record, who thinks that.

But, I hear you ask: aren't millions of Chinese better off now than they were in 1949, or when Mao died in 1976, or even as recently as 1989? Yes, indeed.

If you exclude the 400 million rural people below even China's very low poverty line, life is better. More money. More things. More freedom of travel. Some freedom of spoken speech.

But this is hardly the regime's doing. It has just moved out of the way. Just like us, the Chinese have always longed for better lives, more money, more things.

But until about 1980 this was condemned as bourgeois materialism, a bad attitude, blood-sucking.

Now money-making is good, the Party itself, up to the pinnacle of power, is riddled with corruption, as its leadership occasionally bewails.

A tiny few work in the international financial sector, drive expensive cars, go out clubbing at night and buy their way down Bond Street.

The rest sweat their guts out in fields or, during recent years, in factories making dirt-cheap clothes for Oxford Street and Westfield, crammed into firetrap factories, with no unions, no proper medical care and draconian penalties if they try to leave for another job.

These young workers, often teenage girls, do this because they have travelled great distances to south China to escape their peasant poverty.

And now that so many of those satanic mills have closed - China, too, is experiencing an economic crisis - the girls have returned to their squalid villages, where the government has almost completely stopped making any kind of investment.

Yet, although former Maoist slogans like "serve the people" have gone into history's dustbin, hundreds of thousands are still jockeying to join the Communist Party.

It is the way to economic power, to graft, squeeze, influence and real exploitation.

And what about Beijing the new presence at the top international table - does it co-operate? Not really.

What it has to offer are trillions of dollars, the "sovereign wealth funds" China has made from selling its cheap goods abroad and increasingly from investment abroad, including Britain, where the Chinese are now prowling W11 looking for posh houses to buy and sell.

It is no accident, as they say in the Party, that last November Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced that Tibet is a part of China, something that no British official had ever said before. Subtext? Please, please let us have some of your huge pile of dollars.

Hence Mr Brown in yesterday's Telegraph: "We in Britain have a deep interest in your continued stability, prosperity and success."

What a coincidence: these are the very words China's leaders invariably use to describe their own goals. In China, stability has a special meaning, regularly defined: no Westminster-style democracy, no written criticism unless vetted first, no competing political parties.

Mr Brown is not alone in his subservience. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, equally keen on those Chinese trillions, said recently that during this period of co-operation, human rights must take a back seat.

So no one complains much that China carries on helping Myanmar cow its people, ditto Iran, where China gets 15 per cent of its oil, ditto much of Africa, especially Zimbabwe, a good customer for Chinese weapons.

That is post-Cold War, post-Mao China. Go for the money?

Fine. Go for political change, freedom of speech or mention the Dalai Lama on the internet? As they say in the board game Monopoly - Go Directly to Jail. And we literally buy into it.

Jonathan Mirsky is the former East Asia editor of the Times.

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