Did
you notice that the Saudi ambassador to London has stamped his foot to
warn that relations between our two countries may suffer if we don’t
stop talking about them in the abusive tone recently adopted?
You can see Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz’s point. Up to a point anyway. The British establishment has spent most of the past week kowtowing to Xi Jinping, authoritarian president of nominally communist China, a regime whose past excesses against its own people makes the House of Saud look like a coven of Guardian readers. Kowtow is a Chinese word, I seem to remember – not necessarily pejorative either.
But governments all over the world have to deal with people they don’t approve of. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saudis and Chinese who know their history don’t harbour a few reservations about pasty-faced Europeans who have done them harm in the past. It doesn’t stop them using some of their spare cash to buy up swaths of Britain.
That’s life, we all face similar choices in the smaller space that is our private network of relationships, some of us much more fastidious than others, often at great personal cost. So where we draw the line varies.
On the micro-issue of whether or not to let clever Germaine Greer speak at Cardiff University because of her tough comments on transgender women (she’s a very tough woman) Zoe Williams gamely explains her own “no-platform” boundaries. These things aren’t easy. I’m an admirer of Greer, who once promised to spit in my eye (but didn’t). She can look after herself, but as the Saudi ambassador might put it, “mutual respect” is a good guiding principle except in extreme situations.
Michael Gove and Jeremy Corbyn both decided recently that a £6m UK contract to help the Saudis run their prison system was a step too far in view of the reactionary penal code it implements. Downing Street sided with them against the Foreign Office. I think Mike and Jez were right on this occasion. Abdulaziz made his complaint in the punitive Daily Telegraph on Monday, so if ex-Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne is to be believed (I think he is), some handy advertising may follow. Our prisons expertise may be handily redeployed in our own prisons.
As I say, none of us is perfect. Saudi oil helps us all to wander around our heated homes in cotton T-shirts in February and to leave the lights on in skyscrapers (and homes) at night. We sell £7bn worth of kit to Saudi Arabia each year, much of it military to keep their demons at bay. They also provide us with a lot of intelligence on the kind of extremists its own repressive politics and theology nurture, information which helps thwart murderous Islamist plots in Britain, so we are told.
After all, we’re allies and necessity makes for strange alliances. Even before oil, the British were heavily involved in the Middle East. Along with Barack Obama’s US administration, we’re trying to get on better with Islamist-lite Iran so the Saudis getting touchy about small-change prison contracts may be part of the bigger picture.
By the same token the Chinese are protesting on Tuesday over a US warship “incursion” near an archipelago in the South China Sea which Beijing says belongs to China but all its Asian neighbours say doesn’t. I hope the evolving Corbynista foreign policy goes in for nuances, which include grey as well as black and white.
China is not an ally of ours, though we were quick formally to recognise the communist regime after Mao took Beijing (Peking as we then called it) in 1949, unlike the US, which did not normalise relations until 1978 – six years after Richard Nixon’s historic visit and two years after the chairman’s death. Building diplomatic trust takes a lot longer than destroying it.
Everyone can see why a “no-platform” policy towards modern China, fast regaining its lost place as one of the world’s great powers, would be even more stupid than it was when Mao was busy murdering many of his fellow Chinese for ideologically wacky reasons. Even China’s most severe critics, inside the country as well abroad, can’t but admire its recent achievements.
As with the Saudi prison system and Greer’s robust views on sex, the question is “where to draw the line?”, both ethically and practically. Ever since reading Simon Leys book Chinese Shadows nearly 40 years I’ve not fallen for the line that Maoists avoided the excesses of the Russian or French revolutionary terrors.
But I also know enough to be very queasy about imperial Britain’s high-handed treatment of the prostate Chinese empire during what they call the “century of humiliation”. The Opium wars are a shocking tale of drugs-peddling on an industrial scale. No covert supply lines for those Brits!
So we should go easy on the moralising as our guests told us to last week and leave it to those better placed like the artist Ai Weiwei? Having his travelling exhibition coincidentally showing at the Royal Academy during Xi’s visit was the one bit of towkowing (the opposite of kowtowing, I just made it up) we can be proud of. Xi couldn’t fit a visit in to his crowded schedule, but I did. To my surprise and delight it was wonderful: clever and witty, moving and wise, expressed in ways I had not previously encountered.
So business is business, but both sides can leave themselves space for independent action, as Britain showed when it became the first significant financial player to sign up to China’s new investment bank – to the dismay of Washington. The government wants a slice of China’s outward facing banking and investment policy and last week’s visit seems to confirm the City will get the renminbi exchange market prize.
Good. The City needs the cash, just as UK higher education needs Chinese students (they don’t work as hard as they did 10 years ago, academic pals tell me) and Chinese shopaholics (some students now shop more than they read, I hear). We also seem to need whatever foreign investment money – expertise, too, on some cutting edge technologies – they can spare now that they are trying to rebalance the fragile Chinese economy in a healthier way. Get used to it.
In the Times, Yale’s Prof Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian and the cleverest man he knows, says it’s a good idea, not least because it provides a bridgehead to Europe and a bridge to the US, the Brits playing a familiar role as Washington’s trusted satrap. David Cameron made a poor mistake in meeting the Dalai Lama and upsetting the regime in 2012, now he “shows good historical judgment”, says Ferguson.
But the Jeremiahs in both London and Washington have a point, too, even if they include the Daily Mail and nice Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s ex-best friend, who sounded off indignantly in the Guardian. We should be wary of the alleged benefits that will flow our way in terms of jobs and infrastructure projects we won’t own. We should question both the financial details and the security dimension of the Chinese role in building the nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point in Somerset.
So we should be polite in our dealings, more sensitive than Margaret Thatcher was in Beijing in 1984 but also as hard-nosed in watching our own interests as Xi and his party will theirs. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron – they do sound a little naive on these occasions, only vaguely aware that they are dealing with the Asian equivalent of the Roman empire, albeit one which has survived through hard times to recover and march proudly on.
Not convinced? Check out what happened to the pampered golfers at the prestige-laden Wentworth golf club in lush Surrey the other day. Members who pay £8,000 a year to play there have been told their fees will be doubled, and new members are required to fork out up to £100,000 for a debenture to help upgrade the club. Some think they’re being purged to make way for assorted foreign oligarchs and they’re probably right.
Who are these brutal new owners? Didn’t I say? Why it is secretive rags to riches Thai-Chinese billionaire Dr Chanchai Ruayrungruang. Here’s a flavour of what he has in mind for us. Enjoy!
You can see Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz’s point. Up to a point anyway. The British establishment has spent most of the past week kowtowing to Xi Jinping, authoritarian president of nominally communist China, a regime whose past excesses against its own people makes the House of Saud look like a coven of Guardian readers. Kowtow is a Chinese word, I seem to remember – not necessarily pejorative either.
But governments all over the world have to deal with people they don’t approve of. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saudis and Chinese who know their history don’t harbour a few reservations about pasty-faced Europeans who have done them harm in the past. It doesn’t stop them using some of their spare cash to buy up swaths of Britain.
That’s life, we all face similar choices in the smaller space that is our private network of relationships, some of us much more fastidious than others, often at great personal cost. So where we draw the line varies.
On the micro-issue of whether or not to let clever Germaine Greer speak at Cardiff University because of her tough comments on transgender women (she’s a very tough woman) Zoe Williams gamely explains her own “no-platform” boundaries. These things aren’t easy. I’m an admirer of Greer, who once promised to spit in my eye (but didn’t). She can look after herself, but as the Saudi ambassador might put it, “mutual respect” is a good guiding principle except in extreme situations.
Michael Gove and Jeremy Corbyn both decided recently that a £6m UK contract to help the Saudis run their prison system was a step too far in view of the reactionary penal code it implements. Downing Street sided with them against the Foreign Office. I think Mike and Jez were right on this occasion. Abdulaziz made his complaint in the punitive Daily Telegraph on Monday, so if ex-Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne is to be believed (I think he is), some handy advertising may follow. Our prisons expertise may be handily redeployed in our own prisons.
As I say, none of us is perfect. Saudi oil helps us all to wander around our heated homes in cotton T-shirts in February and to leave the lights on in skyscrapers (and homes) at night. We sell £7bn worth of kit to Saudi Arabia each year, much of it military to keep their demons at bay. They also provide us with a lot of intelligence on the kind of extremists its own repressive politics and theology nurture, information which helps thwart murderous Islamist plots in Britain, so we are told.
After all, we’re allies and necessity makes for strange alliances. Even before oil, the British were heavily involved in the Middle East. Along with Barack Obama’s US administration, we’re trying to get on better with Islamist-lite Iran so the Saudis getting touchy about small-change prison contracts may be part of the bigger picture.
By the same token the Chinese are protesting on Tuesday over a US warship “incursion” near an archipelago in the South China Sea which Beijing says belongs to China but all its Asian neighbours say doesn’t. I hope the evolving Corbynista foreign policy goes in for nuances, which include grey as well as black and white.
China is not an ally of ours, though we were quick formally to recognise the communist regime after Mao took Beijing (Peking as we then called it) in 1949, unlike the US, which did not normalise relations until 1978 – six years after Richard Nixon’s historic visit and two years after the chairman’s death. Building diplomatic trust takes a lot longer than destroying it.
Everyone can see why a “no-platform” policy towards modern China, fast regaining its lost place as one of the world’s great powers, would be even more stupid than it was when Mao was busy murdering many of his fellow Chinese for ideologically wacky reasons. Even China’s most severe critics, inside the country as well abroad, can’t but admire its recent achievements.
As with the Saudi prison system and Greer’s robust views on sex, the question is “where to draw the line?”, both ethically and practically. Ever since reading Simon Leys book Chinese Shadows nearly 40 years I’ve not fallen for the line that Maoists avoided the excesses of the Russian or French revolutionary terrors.
But I also know enough to be very queasy about imperial Britain’s high-handed treatment of the prostate Chinese empire during what they call the “century of humiliation”. The Opium wars are a shocking tale of drugs-peddling on an industrial scale. No covert supply lines for those Brits!
So we should go easy on the moralising as our guests told us to last week and leave it to those better placed like the artist Ai Weiwei? Having his travelling exhibition coincidentally showing at the Royal Academy during Xi’s visit was the one bit of towkowing (the opposite of kowtowing, I just made it up) we can be proud of. Xi couldn’t fit a visit in to his crowded schedule, but I did. To my surprise and delight it was wonderful: clever and witty, moving and wise, expressed in ways I had not previously encountered.
So business is business, but both sides can leave themselves space for independent action, as Britain showed when it became the first significant financial player to sign up to China’s new investment bank – to the dismay of Washington. The government wants a slice of China’s outward facing banking and investment policy and last week’s visit seems to confirm the City will get the renminbi exchange market prize.
Good. The City needs the cash, just as UK higher education needs Chinese students (they don’t work as hard as they did 10 years ago, academic pals tell me) and Chinese shopaholics (some students now shop more than they read, I hear). We also seem to need whatever foreign investment money – expertise, too, on some cutting edge technologies – they can spare now that they are trying to rebalance the fragile Chinese economy in a healthier way. Get used to it.
In the Times, Yale’s Prof Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian and the cleverest man he knows, says it’s a good idea, not least because it provides a bridgehead to Europe and a bridge to the US, the Brits playing a familiar role as Washington’s trusted satrap. David Cameron made a poor mistake in meeting the Dalai Lama and upsetting the regime in 2012, now he “shows good historical judgment”, says Ferguson.
But the Jeremiahs in both London and Washington have a point, too, even if they include the Daily Mail and nice Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s ex-best friend, who sounded off indignantly in the Guardian. We should be wary of the alleged benefits that will flow our way in terms of jobs and infrastructure projects we won’t own. We should question both the financial details and the security dimension of the Chinese role in building the nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point in Somerset.
So we should be polite in our dealings, more sensitive than Margaret Thatcher was in Beijing in 1984 but also as hard-nosed in watching our own interests as Xi and his party will theirs. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron – they do sound a little naive on these occasions, only vaguely aware that they are dealing with the Asian equivalent of the Roman empire, albeit one which has survived through hard times to recover and march proudly on.
Not convinced? Check out what happened to the pampered golfers at the prestige-laden Wentworth golf club in lush Surrey the other day. Members who pay £8,000 a year to play there have been told their fees will be doubled, and new members are required to fork out up to £100,000 for a debenture to help upgrade the club. Some think they’re being purged to make way for assorted foreign oligarchs and they’re probably right.
Who are these brutal new owners? Didn’t I say? Why it is secretive rags to riches Thai-Chinese billionaire Dr Chanchai Ruayrungruang. Here’s a flavour of what he has in mind for us. Enjoy!
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