Dunkirk and the appeasement of China

An old narrative makes itself felt

Britain’s debate on Covid has had a subterranean aspect that has largely gone unnoticed. Many accuse Boris Johnson’s government of being unprepared for and flabby about the virus. Partly in response, Johnson now wants to show grit by reducing the UK’s dependence on China as a source of important goods – and not just medical ones. Johnson wants to re-orientate UK manufacturing and supply chains away from China. According to one report, he also wants to ratchet China’s involvement in UK infrastructure, and especially Huawei’s in 5G telecommunications, down to zero by 2023.

Altogether, the silent semaphore from No 10 reads: I might have been guilty of appeasement of the virus in the past, but I won’t now make the same mistake again with another, bigger, longer-term threat – China.

Johnson sends his signal not a moment too soon. On 26 May 2020, Britain woke to the 80th anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk, on the northern coast of France. On that searing day and until 4 June, 338,000 British, French and Allied troops had to be rescued from Nazi forces gathered round and in the skies above Dunkirk.

The evacuation of Dunkirk was widely seen as the bitter fruit of prime minister Neville ‘Peace for Our Time’ Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler. So with this and plenty of other Second World War anniversaries coming up, Johnson, a Churchillian, has had little choice but to fasten upon the myth of created by his hero and portray himself as an early, principled and courageous opponent of appeasement – an opponent, nowadays, of Xi Jinping. As early as 23 March, after all, a leader in The Times warned Johnson that dilly-dallying about the virus, at least, could see ‘the prime minister who dreamt of being Churchill… cast as Neville Chamberlain’.

Well: should Britain continue to ‘appease’ China? The desire to take steps against Beijing, Tory Lord Patten tells us, now unites ‘both the right and left of the Conservative Party’. Given the vivid title ‘Stop kowtowing to China and don’t deal with high-risk Huawei’, an article in The Conservative Woman similarly denounces the ‘appeasement of China that runs through the UK’s political, civil service and security establishments’. For Charles Moore at the Telegraph, Johnson is merely edging slowly away from Beijing and ‘what some call “authoritarian tech”’; worse still, ‘even the Labour Party is in danger of looking stronger against China than Her Majesty’s Government’.

So: should we adopt the same stance as the Tories, and insist that China be quarantined? To get an answer, it’s vital to understand something of what appeasement and Dunkirk were all about. Were Boris really to cut China off, that would be historic; so history is relevant here.

Not long after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain conceded control of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938, the dangers of appeasing mortal adversaries became a staple part of Britain’s national political discourse. In particular, after retreat and rescue at Dunkirk, the fatal consequences of being unprepared for the enemy suggested that appeasement of a foreign menace would always bring disaster in its wake.

Now as James Heartfield has shown, the real, military evacuation of Dunkirk had little in common with the myth of mass civilian heroism promoted by J B Priestley and accepted ever since. To invoke the Dunkirk spirit today, against Covid, is therefore a mistake. But on one facet of Dunkirk everyone can agree: within a matter of days, a top bestseller was written, and by early July 1940 published, indicting a rogues’ gallery of politicians, of every stripe, for appeasing Hitler. Put together by the Labour Party journalist and left-wing firebrand Michael Foot, as well as by Foot’s Liberal editor at the Evening Standard and a Tory hack on the Daily Express, Guilty Men opened with the beaches of Dunkirk and the plight of what it described as The Doomed Army there.

From that point on, the book attacked three previous prime ministers: Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and, above all, Chamberlain. The last had taken Hitler at his word, and, on 30 September 1938, had signed a piece of paper at Munich giving away Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. ‘Chamberlain’, wrote the authors of Guilty Men, ‘trusted Hitler’ (fifth impression, Gollancz, August 1940, p59).

About government ministers, the book went on: ‘Ever since Munich they had been assuring the public that they were ready, aye, ready now for the war which was never going to come.’ Yet ‘the state of armaments of the British Expeditionary Force stranded on the blood-soaked dunes of Dunkirk’ more than a year later showed that readiness had proved a mirage (pp64, 65). Indeed, even after Hitler completed his takeover of the Czech regions of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, the appeasement of Hitler, though dead, ‘still took some 15 days to lie down’. And after that, 16 months had gone by, only for government sloth and inefficiency to deny Britain’s footsore soldiers the tanks and fighter aircraft that could have reversed their fortunes at Dunkirk (p72).

Michael Foot’s diatribe against the appeasers had a simple message. Apart from some honourable exceptions such as Churchill, the Tories, Guilty Men argued, should have armed the nation against Germany earlier, and been more ruthless with Berlin.

Perhaps so. But to cast Boris Johnson as a Chamberlain bungling before the virus, or as acting against China too slowly for fear of causing offence and a cut-off in PPE supplies, is to take a foolish path.

First, it is to draw an inadmissible historical parallel between the domestic repressions and international designs of Beijing today – severe measures in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, serious influence in Africa and elsewhere – and those of Nazi Germany eight decades ago. Such a parallel rules out of the picture the unique historical experience of the Holocaust, and the six million Jews who died in it.

We cannot do that, any more than we can pass over the great famine that Mao presided over in the middle of the so-called Great Leap Forward years of 1958-62.

Second, various elite forces in British society invoked appeasement and Munich as grounds for the Falklands war against Argentina’s General Leopoldo Galtieri, and as grounds for the destruction of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in two Gulf wars. In this they have often followed glib, right-wing, American narratives about Munich; and even today, in Canada, we find the Conservative leader Andrew Scheer denouncing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government for its appeasement of the Chinese regime.

Those who want to boycott China are not just unrealistic, given the clout China has and the difficulty a heavily globalised economy such as Britain’s is bound to have in disentangling itself from the workshop of the world. The boycotters are bent, too, on pursuing measures that can all too easily escalate from the economic – import controls, repatriation of British capital from China, breaking off from Huawei – to military: counter-manoeuvres against China’s own manoeuvres in the East and South China Seas, and elsewhere.

A crusade against appeasement soon turns into just that: a crusade. One need not be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party or the Democratic Party in the US – myself, I dislike both of them – to ask: do we really want to join with Donald Trump in that crusade?

We should refuse that course out of courage, not out of fear of retaliation by Xi Jinping. We should refuse it because, in the 2020s, we will find our own methods of showing solidarity with China’s population. In their reckless historical amnesia about appeasement, Boris and the Tory right would like us to subordinate negotiation with and positive change in China to their agenda. Nothing good will come of that.