Why denouncing China is hypocritical
There are good reasons why China is likely to be impervious
to lectures from Europeans on the morality of the drugs
trade
Michael White
The Guardian
I'm sorry too that the Chinese have just executed Akmal
Shaikh, an apparently mentally ill Briton. He was clearly
an expendable drugs mule, cynically exploited by
traffickers who are still alive and well today.
But I'm also sorry about the international clamour to
denounce China, which sounds at least as hypocritical and
insensitive as the act itself. Can Gordon Brown and David
Cameron – to name but two – hear what they sound like?
Let's start with the basics. Most of us (not all) deplore
the drugs trade – from cultivation to distribution and sale
– which is illegal in most countries (not all) and has
spawned a huge and lucrative global industry.
Some think the "cure'' – the worldwide campaign against the
trade – worse than the disease since it underpins major
criminal enterprises on all continents. It has long been
the case, though I would personally hesitate to risk
legalising it and hoping for the best.
Different countries tackle the problem in different ways.
China, which has a rising drugs problem as it enters the
modern consumer era, is one of those which takes a tough
line. As the Guardian's Q&A points out today it is one of
the few crimes to attract a mandatory death sentence.
Enter poor Akmal Shaikh, who seems to have gone off the
rails in middle age after leading a quiet family life as a
north London taxi driver. Someone who struck acquaintances
as very odd after he emigrated to Poland with grandiose
ideas, he falls into bad company which exploits his
gullibility.
So he ends up landing in Urumqi, northern China, in 2007
and being caught at the airport with 4kg of heroin in his
luggage. He told police he knew nothing about it. It's a
tragically familiar story and, in his case, it's probably
true.
In the wake of his execution the Chinese authorities sound
quite angry at criticism of their judicial system. Shaikh
had a fair trial, complete with interpreter, they say. He
was deemed fit to plead.
Mental illness? Ah, that's a tricky one. But it's easy to
see how the Chinese might take a very different view of how
it is defined. So do many jurisdictions – as we all know –
on this and many other legal issues: "self defence",
"crimes of passion", "third degree homicide", "honour
killings", lots of scope for moral relativism in all of
them.
Reprieve and other admirable campaigns which fight for the
rights of prisoners in foreign jurisdictions have the
virtue of consistency. Thus they oppose the death penalty
wherever it exists, including the US, where it was
abolished as a "cruel and unnatural punishment'' in 1972 –
and restored in 1976 when the supreme court changed its
mind.
Though they are pretty half-hearted about it compared with
China's 1,700 or so known executions (they are reported to
sell body parts for medical use) a year, southern US states
are keenest.
As governors both George W Bush and Bill Clinton – whom so
many of us admire – signed off on questionable executions
of vulnerable, marginalised people like Akmal Shaikh. A
high proportion of the 3,000 or so Americans on Death Row –
few actually executed – are black. Britain? We last
executed a man called Peter Allen at Walton jail on 13
August 1964 for murder – three years before the final
abolition of the death penalty.
Not so long ago really (our last Etonian PM, Sir Alec
Douglas-Home, was in No 10) and, as China's very smart UK
ambassador has probably told Beijing, capital punishment
still commands as much enthusiasm here 40 years later as it
does in China, ie lots.
So there's a sovereignty issue. China – like the US – has
the right to pass and implement its own laws and
governments, governments-in-waiting in Cameron's case,
should pause before getting too mouthy. Apparently 27
representations were made to China by Britain over the past
two years – mostly quietly, I assume, which is always the
best way.
But the execution took place during the Christmas news
lull: hence the sudden high profile. Thank goodness Ivan
Lewis, the junior foreign office minister put up to talk
about it today, saidL "I'm not going to make idle threats"
– or we might be starting 2010 going to war with China.
Talking of which, the really toe-curling fact, of which
neither Dr Gordon Brown with his PhD in history, nor David
Cameron with his 1st in PPE should be ignorant, is
Anglo-Chinese history.
When Europeans started forcing the reclusive China of the
late Ming and Qing dynasty to open its doors to trade in
the 16th and 17th century the visitors wanted more Chinese
goods – all that tea, silk and lovely porcelain – than the
Chinese wanted of ours.
Sounds familiar? What the Chinese would accept was silver,
a better bet than the US dollars they now hold in such vast
quantities. This was unsustainable and in the 19th century
the British East India Company hit on the idea of importing
Indian opium to China – though it was banned by imperial
Chinese law.
I hope you've spotted where I'm heading. If not here's
Wiki's starter kit on the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60
which culminated in the so-called "unequal treaties" and
the eventual overthrow of the Qing in 1912.
Result: China was forced to accept the trade with
devastating social consequences. In fairness I should add
that the stuff was legal in Britain at the time – as
readers of Victorian novels can confirm. The Chinese
governor Lin Zexu became a hero for opposing the trade – as
did young William Gladstone at Westminster.
All the same, it is a pretty shameful story. Perhaps it
slipped your memory? It certainly hasn't slipped theirs and
is still unravelling: they only got Hong Kong back in 1997
and have never rebuilt the burned Summer Palace at Beijing
– their Windsor.
So, one way or another, poor Akmal Shaikh was the wrong man
in the wrong place. But China is likely to be impervious to
lectures from Europeans on the morality of the drugs trade.
As the world's rising power it's unlikely to be lectured
anyway, but that's another story – one we'll rapidly have
to get used to. No declaration of war this week, please
Ivan.
I am currently reading Jenny Clegg’s brilliant new book “China’s Global Strategy – Towards a Multi-Polar world”, and I will write a review shortly.
One of the excellent points that Jenny makes is that the absence of substantive discussion in the West about China’s historical background, its actual level of development, and the difficulties of ruling such a vast country, then Sinophobic mythology has built up that draws more heavily on “Yellow Peril” images from the colonial era than it does on the reality of modern China. What is more, many from the Western left either do not counter this Sinophobia, or actually collude in it.
Louis Proyect’s recent article is a frankly disgraceful example, but rather than exchange a polemic with Louis, let us refute his arguments by looking at the concrete situation today in Xinjiang province.
The Sinophobic reading of the situation there seems to be that the Chinese government are Han chauvinists, suppressing national minorities, persecuting the Islamic religion, and seeking to swamp Xinjiang with Han settlers. But this analysis simply doesn’t accord with the facts.
Firstly, historically the Chinese state has not been built on ethnicity, but on a Mandarin speaking civil bureaucracy, where Mandarin provided a lingua franca for an ethnically, socially, religiously and linguistically diverse society. Secondly, since the Communist party of China coming to power in 1949, they introduced a nationalities policy that created certain rights and privileges for minorities that met the criteria – for example the right to promote their own language, and in modern China, the very significant complete exemption from the one child policy.
Islam is not in any way persecuted or repressed in modern China. Nowadays in China there are ten national minorities, including the Hui and Uyghur, with a total population of 18 million, whose faith is Islam. There are some 30,000 mosques served by 40,000 Imams and Akhunds. Islamic Association of China is an independent organisation promoting the interests of Muslims. Islamic organisations in China run their own affairs independently and can set up religious schools, publish religious texts and periodicals, and run social and welfare services.
Article 36 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China protects freedom of religious belief as a basic right enjoyed by all citizens, and religious institutions enjoy the rights to own and dispose of property, and to proselytise. Currently Buddhism is enjoying a major revival across China, without any government interference.
It is true that during the Cultural Revolution, there was repression and oppression of all religious faiths – but this has been consciously reversed for thirty years now – and most significantly, the campaign against religious institutions was much more moderate in the Autonomous Regions, like Xinjiang and Tibet than in the main urban centres.
The Hui national minority, who are Muslim, often Turkic peoples, but who speak Mandarin, are integrated into every aspect of life in the People’s republic, and have often played prominent roles, for example Hui Liangyu was Vice President. It is interesting that systematic racist attacks against Hui have characterised both the riots in Tibet last year, and the recent violence by Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang has been part of China since the mid eighteenth century, when its main significance as a poorly populated mainly nomadic region was as part of the land-route between the Middle Kingdom and Europe. The urban centres were built by the Chinese, while the indigenous population were rural, ethnically diverse and often nomadic.
During the early part of the twentieth century, when China was dismembered by colonialists, and invaded by the Japanese Empire, Xinjiang fell under the sway of the warlord Sheng Shicai, (who really was a Han chauvinist, suppressing the Uyghur and Kazakh peoples).
There was a short lived Soviet republic between 1944 and 1949, also known as the Three Districts Rebellion, that reacted to the chauvinism of Sheng’s warlord regime by seeking to drive the Chinese out altogether, but this republic was concentrated in the Kazakh parts of Xinjiang, while the Uyghurs were predominatently under the rule of the Chinese nationalist KMT. The existence of this mini-state was also only possible as the USSR supported it as a buffer between themselves and the Japanese.
In 1949 the East Turkestan Republic agreed to join the People’s republic – somewhat pressurised by Stalin who is believed to have assassinated their government leaders, and the KMT ruled parts of Xinjiang surrendered to the People’s Liberation Army.
The importance of this background is to understand that there is no modern history of a Uyghur nation state, the relative autonomy of Xinjiang can only be understood as the unravelling of stable government under the colonialist onslaught of China, and the rise of warlordism. Xinjiang has always been linguistically and culturally diverse, and the modernisation and urbanisation of the region has occurred entirely within the context of Chinese rule, and Han and Hui have always formed a large part of the urban population. It is not at all uncommon in pre-industrial societies to find the urban centres and the surrounding countryside having different languages and cultures, and in the case of the Chinese Empire the two were united under a Mandarin speaking bureaucratic class.
We need to be very cautious of Uyghur nationalist organisations mythologizing a fictitious pseudo-history of themselves as an oppressed nation. Most obviously, if there was any real intention to swamp the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, then the PRC would not exempt them from the one child policy while enforcing it for the Han.
The biggest area of misunderstanding relates to the “Go West” policy, formally launched in year 2000 as part of the tenth Five Year plan. This was a victory for the left within the Communist Party, to seek to overcome the growing regional inequality, and direct US$200 billion of capital investment into the underdeveloped Western provinces, including the Autonomous Republics of Xinjiang and Tibet. So for example, the previously very poor region of Tibet has achieved economic growth of 13.4%, and the oil and gas fields of Xinyiang have been opened up by improvements of transport infrastructure, But far from being a “colonialist” asset grab, these have involved a massive transfer of wealth and technology to the poorest regions from the Eastern coastal region.
Han migration has increased in Xinjiang, but whereas the Uyghur peoples mainly live south of the mountains of the Tarim basin, the Han migration has been into the previously largely unpopulated region north of the mountains. For example the Karamay region is almost 80% Han.
A further area of ethnic tension has been experience of those involved in the inward migration of Uyghur peoples to the Eastern coastal region, along with the 150 million other rural migrants, who have been sucked into the black economy, but where linguistic and cultural obstacles, as well as their semi-illegal status, severely disadvantage them. The recent violence seems to have been preceded by rapes and murders, and ethnic tensions in Guangdong.
There has been a longstanding Uyghur nationalist movement, that partly expresses legitimate grievances in ethnic rather than economic terms, for example over rural impoverishment, and the relative disadvantage of rural people as opposed to urban dwellers; the relative disadvantage of Uyghar speakers compared to Mandarin speakers in the job market and for social advancement is also a pressing grievance. But Uyghar nationalism has also been clearly linked with Islamist terrorism, and the desire to separate Xinjiang as an Islamic republic away from the PRC, despite the fact that the Uyghur represent only half the population of Xinjiang.
There have been a series of terrorist incidents, including the racist murders of Han and Hui, attempted suicide bombings on an airliner last year, and riots during the Olympics that left 16 members of the People’s Armed Police dead. Both the Chinese and US governments accuse Uyghur separatists of links with Al Qaeda.
The security crackdown by China in Xinjiang is therefore a decisive attempt to restore order, and prevent racial tensions from further developing. It is necessary to understand the imperative drive for China to achieve economic growth in what is still a developing country, where many people still live on a $1 per day. It is also necessary to understand the great historic achievement of defeating the Japanese, throwing out the colonialists and reuniting China as one country.
The division of China is simply non-negotiable for the government in Beijing, and they are correct in seeing the unity of the republic as an important precondition for their economic and political independence, which is itself necessary for developing and improving the living standards of their 1.3 billion population. But they clearly do need to rethink how the “Go West” policy is in practice impacting on the autonomous regions, where an understandable and commendable desire to pull these Western provinces out of extreme poverty has created the unintended side effect of increasing wealth differentials, and ethnic tensions.
-----------------------------
One of the comments arising from this article:
Excellent article Andy.
Much of the negative comments in reponse are not at all surprising. The Sinophobia of the Left in the UK (and the west) frankly reeks of yellow peril racism, but when has the British Left ever done anymore than represnt the ‘revolutionary’ wing of the Foreign Office, when it comes to either the socialist countries or former British colonial subjects - for which China qualifies on both counts.
My partner is a Muslim Hui Chinese woman, deeply patriotic, highly educated and generally supportive of the Communist Party leadership (especially the very popular Wen Jiaboa and Hu Jintao - as you will generally find young Chinese in the UK to be) without considering herself to be at all political.
She comes from a family of practising Muslims (although she herself doesnt practise it), so if it were true that Islam is persecuted in China, you would expect her to have some experience of it. The contrary is the case.
Within her family, most are involved in Higer Education, several family members are professors, others are High School teachers. Two are ranking members of the Ministry for State Security. Another works for the Saudi Embassy (a devout Muslim, he studied in Saudi, his wife is a muslim convert who wears the hijab).
Around half her extended family are members of the Communist Party (bear in mind only around 5-10% of applicants for CP membership are accepted).
Were Muslims and ethnic miinorities discrimiated against by the state, it surely would not be likely that this extended (and not untypical) family of ethnic minority Muslim’s would either want to, or be allowed to have such positions within Higher education and the state security? Or want to or be allowed memberahip in the Communist Party?
They go to Mosque, they eat Halal meat from a Muslim butcher, they celebrate Islamic holidays (for which they get extra time off from work), they get guidance from their Imam, hold family funerals in a Muslim a cemetary and they practise their religion without any intereference from the state whatsoever.
In actual fact, ethnic minorites have special priviliges over the majority Han population. For example, along with the aforementioned extra holidays for religious events, they are not subject to the same rules regarding the one-child policy and get extra points in school leavers exams to help ehtnic minorities get better representation in University.
Whether or not you agree with such ‘positive discrimination’ (which does lead to some resentment amongst some Han), it can hardly be said to be representative of some sort of ethnic oppression, or worse, ‘geneocide’ by the State now can it?
For the Left to be, as usual, tailing after the most reactionary, pro-western elements in a developing socialist country isnt unusual. For them to be championing the lumpen, anti-social perpetuators of muderous racist pogroms is a new level of disgrace though.
That street level racism and prejudice exists in China, as in every society, is without doubt. But to suggest against all the facts that it is encouraged by the central government is just an out and out lie.
I would suggest that perhaps some of those people spouting CWI/SWP or whatever bullshit about China actually try and discuss it with Chinese students and workers in the UK (or whom there are several tens of thousand from many ethnic and cultural/religion backgrounds) and see what they think. I think you will substantially find more often than not, that your patronising and ill-informed attempts to ‘educate’ and ‘liberate’ them from their ‘oppression’ will be about as appreciated as a British gun-boat on the Yanstze.
