the view from Portland Place

Let’s assume for a moment I’m a staffer at the Chinese Embassy down on Portland Place, and it’s my job to report to my superiors on various political and social developments in Britain. What do I make of the bout of low rent McCarthyite thuggery directed at Amnesty International, an organisation with a long record of extensive criticism of the PRC?

First things first. I’m a Chinese official, so I don’t believe there’s any such thing as autonomous civil society. If I’m a crude thinker, I put AI’s criticisms of China down to a Western plot. If I’m more sophisticated, I regard it as a kind of dereliction of duty. A nation is responsible for everything said in a public forum about another nation. As a nation with extensive business, political and cultural links with China, Britain is therefore failing in its duty to suppress AI’s criticisms. At any rate, the fact that AI is implicitly permitted to go about its business should be viewed as an aspect of how the states in which it operates view China.

How, then, do I interpret the current dispute? Amnesty claims to uphold certain principles. Its critics claim to uphold the same ones. It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with red guard factions fighting each other and all declaring themselves true upholders of Chairman Mao thought. It’s also reminiscent of general factional conflict within the Communist Party, with various elements wrestling to get control of policy, each trying to aggrandize itself, all pretending to work for the same end – or so I would think, as a Chinese diplomat.

Then there’s the specifics of the issue. The essence of the complaint is that AI is working too closely with Muslim groups. This is mainly interesting to me as a Chinese diplomat because of the Uighur issue. It’s already evident from the events of last year that events in Xinjiang don’t get nearly as much publicity as those in Tibet, and that this may be partly related to the fact that the Uighurs are Muslims. The Amnesty row would seem to confirm that, and along with it the idea that Beijing can expect a free hand in Xinjiang without too much untoward criticism. Beijing has also consistently tried to link Uighur independence activism with Islamist terrorism. This should continue; important elements of Western opinion are invested heavily in promoting the dimensions of this threat and would likely welcome anything that helps them do it.

But that’s minor stuff. The important thing here is that it signals a wider change in the political dynamic. Amnesty are being criticised for their “closeness to Islamism” because they invite Moazzem Begg to talk publicly about his experiences as a man arrested without charge and detained in the black prison network set up by the United States after 9/11. China too has its laogai, to which people can be confined for years without charge or trial. And torture, of course, is a feature of the Chinese system too.

Back in the fifties, Mao Zedong – in response to Allen Dulles - elaborated the theory that the West would try to undermine China through “peaceful evolution”, which in essence means that it would demonstrate that it had both a stronger economy and more freedoms and thereby encourage change. In other words, China and the West were involved in a competition between systems. This still informs a lot of China’s policy stances, including that towards Amnesty: these civil society groups. They may criticize the US as well as China, but what do they really want?

But what we have in the Amnesty row is further evidence that this policy may no longer be operative. The Chinese economy has grown relative to that of the US. The US, under the pretext of the war against terror has introduced a carcerial system with remarkable similarities to the one found in China. The attack on Amnesty reveals that important sections of opinion want to stop that organisation to using the cover of civil society to criticize everyone and become an open weapon for Western countries to use against their enemies and competitors*. So my report would conclude that the age of competition between systems has ended. What remains is competition between nations.

* “cover of civil society” “open weapon” I’m drawing on CPC official jargon here in character, so to speak.

Comments

[Chris Williams]

OK, that's the pre-interview exercise sucessfully completed, but how are you going to couch the covering letter?