In his article on China’s latest tool for suppression of minorities, the “ethnic unity” law, Simon Tisdall seems to take it as read that western governments will continue to pay lip service to notions of human rights in China while pursuing short-term economic goals, ultimately destructive to their own productivity (President Xi never wastes a good crisis. As Iran, Ukraine and Palestine distract the world, he tightens his grip, 8 August).
This has been the pattern since June 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre. His faint hope that the young urban Chinese might overturn Xi’s regime is a judgment on the failure of western governments to show any foresight, integrity, effective diplomacy, joined-up thinking or action. They rely on the self-sacrifice of individuals such as Jimmy Lai, Lobga Rangzen and countless – often to us nameless – individuals who put their lives on the line while we wring our hands and weep crocodile tears.
Their response to this latest abuse of power seems to be limited to a change in their extradition policy to protect their own citizens. They should understand by now that the law alone will not protect critics of Xi’s regime, wherever they are. Meaningful diplomacy on an international level is well overdue, but just as Europe has had to wean itself off dependence on the US for defence, so it will need to wean itself off China for trade.
Jennifer Hubbard
Burton-in-Kendal, Cumbria
Very striking is what Simon Tisdall’s article concedes and then ignores. It notes in passing an American administration displaying “disdain for international law and national sovereignty (as seen in Venezuela and Greenland)”, tariff wars against allies, and partners who now have to regard Washington as unreliable. Every charge laid against Beijing’s ambitions applies to conduct the article treats as merely regrettable background.
Tisdall asks us to imagine a British prime minister banning the Welsh language from schools. It is an unfortunate choice. Britain did precisely that – the Welsh Not was an instrument of state policy, Gaelic was suppressed, and Irish self-determination was resisted by force for centuries.
The analogy does not illuminate China’s conduct so much as remind us that the moral vantage point being claimed is a recent acquisition.
The repression in Xinjiang and Tibet is real and deserves condemnation. But condemnation is weakened, not strengthened, when it is deployed selectively as an instrument of strategic competition. Britain’s silence is not the “debilitating fatalism” Tisdall diagnoses; it is the ordinary conduct of a state that raises human rights with rivals and sets them aside with customers. Further, quoting a statement from a US admiral without criticism – from a rogue nation engaged in economic and political warfare against China – shows a bias I did not expect to find.
Geoffrey Dixon
Burston, Norfolk
Simon Tisdall writes “imagine what would happen if a British prime minister in London told the Scots they could not have their own parliament”. We don’t have to imagine – it happened in 1979. In the referendum that year, a majority of those voting said yes to a Scottish parliament. But because of the Cunningham amendment from an MP representing Islington in London, which required 40% of the electorate to vote yes, we had to wait another 20 years for our parliament. Had this rule been applied in the Brexit referendum, we would still be in the EU. Val McDermid writes about this in her novel 1979.
Jane Renton
Edinburgh
