Taking China to task
Andrew Marr was right to grill the CCP over its brutal treatment of Uighur Muslims. Brits must resist easy moral posturing, however.
Just 15 minutes into the BBC’s Sunday morning current-affairs show, The Andrew Marr Show, Marr himself proceeded to roast Beijing’s ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming. He confronted him about the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of Hong Kong, and its brutal persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Liu weathered Marr’s questioning through outright lying. He was emphatic that free speech would be ‘fully respected’ in Hong Kong, despite the plentiful evidence that this is clearly not the case. He even portrayed his party’s new Safeguarding National Security Law as targeted only at ‘a very small group of criminals’. Hong Kongers will be ‘free to leave’ the Special Administrative Region if they want, he concluded.
It is hard to believe any of this. Mainly because it is not true.
Shown a video of Uighur convicts blindfolded, handcuffed and shaven, being led to waiting trains, Liu replied that the city of Xingjiang was the most beautiful place in China. There was no ‘pervasive, massive’ forced sterilisation going on in Xinjiang, he continued, though he could not rule out ‘single cases’ in ‘any country’. The ‘majority’ of Uighurs were living happily and peacefully.
His performance was polished, smooth and almost entirely mendacious. There was the occasional truth (the lack of democracy in Hong Kong under the rule of Governor Patten) but they were few and far between.
But perhaps Marr overdid it. The footage of Uighur convicts being led to waiting trains, he chided, ‘reminds people of what was going on in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s’. Marr is right to condemn the CCP for what it is doing to Uighur Muslims. But analogies with the Nazis help no one. They also allowed Liu to mutter that there were no concentration camps in Xinjiang. And, in the Holocaust sense of industrialising death on a factory basis, he is right.
There is no defence of the CCP’s oppressive actions in Xinjiang or Hong Kong. But when UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab appeared later on The Andrew Marr Show, and boasted of raising Xinjiang at the UN’s Human Rights Council, it is right to raise questions about the British state’s approach to China. After all, look at who is on that Council. Its 47 members include such paragons of democracy as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan; it even includes Bahrain, where Britain has its own sordid record of collaboration with oppression. Britain’s sudden concern about oppression in China sits ill at ease with its tolerance of oppression elsewhere.
So long as we are in Britain, we have a duty not just to expose the CCP’s denial of democracy, but also the hypocrisy of our own governments. Fulfilling that duty is the only way to win the confidence of the vast majority of Chinese who are not members of the CCP.
Unfortunately, the Marr-Liu run-in is part of a broader narrative that is now gripping Britain’s political and media elites. A narrative in which China and Russia are being turned into the world’s great wrongdoers. On both, so this liberal narrative goes, Britain needs to be far harder.
It is an irresponsible and dangerous narrative. It can lead to arbitrariness in international diplomacy and, even worse, potentially hasten the threat of military conflict itself.
Details in this Sunday Times article are extraordinary but unsurprising: Seems the PUBLIC are seen as a problematic threat to be managed/manipulated. Surely CPS impartiality is compromised by this decision? Read on...
1.6GW total from wind and solar this morning, from a total of ~45GW installed capacity. We're keeping the lights on by burning trees and gas. Nukes and reliance upon interconnectors making up the difference. No chance we can hit Net Zero grid by 2030.
“Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust”.
Ex-cop Democratic Party mayor, indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges, supported by Trump and critical of antisemitism, tells people to tighten their... throats.
What a mess! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/new-york-water-shortage?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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