Once Rishi Sunak became the United Kingdom’s prime minister on Oct 25, 2022, he adopted a more statesmanlike approach toward China. He realized that the pathological Sinophobia of his predecessor, Liz Truss, was bad for Britain and that if he was to revive its economy, he had to engage with Beijing. This was what “Global Britain” was supposed to involve, although some people were only interested in souring Anglo-Chinese relations.
However unsavory, the ideologues are a force to be reckoned with in British political circles, and they are making Sunak’s life as difficult as possible. Led by the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Patten and Liz Truss, these Cold War throwbacks have tunnel vision. Nothing incenses them more than signs that relations between London and Beijing are improving, or that Sunak is going “weak on China.”
They were, for example, furious when Sunak refused to close the UK’s Confucius Institutes, and they regularly fired broadsides at him, often in conjunction with their US allies. Whereas, for example, David Alton (a patron of Hong Kong Watch, the anti-China propaganda outfit) has condemned Sunak for not describing China as “a threat to this country”, Iain Duncan Smith, who co-chairs the sinister Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), has called the UK’s reliance on cheap goods from the “brutal, dictatorial” Chinese regime a “trade-off of human lives”. Although both individuals were sanctioned by China for their hostile activities in 2021, they continue to spread their venom, and would undoubtedly be delighted if the UK were to decouple from China.
It cannot be easy for Sunak to have to deal with such people, but he has pushed ahead with what is best for Britain, however much it upsets the “reds under the beds” brigade.
They were, for example, less than happy when the secretary for financial services, Christopher Hui Ching-yu, was received by three government ministers when he visited London on April 26. They were even angrier when the UK’s trade minister, Dominic Johnson, visited Hong Kong on May 9 for talks, the first official visit in 5 years. And, when the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, signaled a more mature relationship with China recently, they were apoplectic.
Egged on by the US anti-China lobby, Britain’s own neo-McCarthyites are a potential threat to Sunak, and he is always looking for scraps of “red meat” to toss their way, hoping to pacify them. One such “scrap” is the UK’s six-monthly Hong Kong report, which the British foreign secretary has issued since 1997. The latest report, issued by Cleverly on May 25, covers the period from July to December 2022, and while it is strong on smears, it is weak on substance, given that it is designed to keep the fanatics at bay.
Whereas, after 1997, the UK’s initial six-monthly reports were generally balanced, objectivity has long since been thrown to the wind, and they are now little more than propaganda sheets (not dissimilar to the diatribes issued in the US by, for example, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China). This means, therefore, that while myths are paraded and difficulties exaggerated, good news is played down or simply suppressed.
When, for example, the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in 1984, the UK only envisaged that Hong Kong’s way of life and capitalist system would endure for 50 years after 1997. It was, therefore, sensational news for the city when, on July 1, 2022, President Xi Jinping announced the “one country, two systems” policy would continue after 2047. If genuinely concerned over the city’s future, Cleverly would have been as delighted by this as everybody else and might have been expected to thank Xi profusely, but far from it. Although there is a brief reference to Xi’s announcement, his report expresses no gratitude, and he makes no attempt to evaluate its significance, which is huge.
Whereas, moreover, in a passing slur, Cleverly noted that Xi’s speech made “no mention of universal suffrage”, he failed to remind readers that the joint declaration also made no mention of it. It was only when China promulgated the Basic Law in 1990 that the possibility of universal suffrage raised its head for the first time for the elections of both the chief executive and the legislature, and this was duly acted on in 2014. Although proposals were brought forward by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government (with Beijing’s endorsement) for the chief executive to be elected by universal suffrage in 2017, they were blocked by the so-called “pan-dems” in 2015. This, however, was ignored by Cleverly, undoubtedly because it would discredit his twisted narrative.
Whereas the National Security Law for Hong Kong (NSL) has proved to be the city’s salvation, and has provided it with a secure future after the insurrection of 2019-20, Cleverly bizarrely called for its repeal. Although the British government’s own national security bill, currently before Parliament, has been condemned across the political spectrum for its clamp down on freedom of expression, particularly journalistic, Cleverly now trashes the very law that saved Hong Kong from chaos. Whereas, moreover, the NSL is human rights heavy, and has the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) incorporated into it (Article 4), the British national security laws say nothing whatsoever about upholding human rights, let alone protecting the ICCPR in their application.
It must be hoped that Cleverly, however keen he may be to please the bigots, realizes how shameful his criticisms of the NSL are, and that, when he leads people up the garden path like this, he diminishes his own global credibility.
No less absurdly, Cleverly also bellyaches about the amendments to the Legal Practitioners Ordinance that allow the chief executive to decide if an overseas lawyer should be allowed to appear in trials involving the NSL. As the UK itself does not allow any overseas lawyers to appear in British courts, this is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Whereas Hong Kong allows overseas lawyers to seek admission to conduct both civil and criminal cases, the UK has a blanket ban on them all, and Cleverly’s report is debased by double standards of this type.
Although Cleverly, desperate to diminish the city’s legal system, complains about the prosecution of particular individuals, including Jimmy Lai Chee-ying (who received five years nine months imprisonment for fraudulent dealings), Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun (who was fined HK$4,000 for operating an unregistered society, the “612 Humanitarian Relief Fund”), and Pastor Gerry Pang Ming-yuen (who was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for seditious activities, including vilifying judges and disrupting judicial proceedings), he fails to provide any sort of context. In Hong Kong, as in the UK, nobody is above the law, and prominent individuals cannot rely on their status to shield them if they break the law.
It must be hoped that, before he issues his next report, somebody advises Cleverly that everybody in Hong Kong is equal before the law, and those who break it will face consequences. After all, six British judges currently sit on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal as nonpermanent judges (including two former UK Supreme Court presidents, Lords (Nicholas) Phillips and (David) Neuberger), and any one of them would undoubtedly be only too happy to put him straight. In another startling omission, Cleverly has failed to thank those six judges for their sterling contributions to Hong Kong’s jurisprudence in the reporting period, and this, once again, exposes his true agenda.
Indeed, Cleverly even trotted out the astonishing claim that “Hong Kong’s common law legal system remained under pressure”, ignoring the constitutional independence that judges enjoy under the Basic Law (Article 85). Although, moreover, the World Justice Project issued its Rule of Law Index 2022 (the world’s leading source for original, independent data on the rule of law) on Oct 26 (squarely within the report’s six-month timeframe), he chose not to mention it, and it is clear why.
Hong Kong was ranked 22nd out of the 140 places surveyed, ahead, for example, of the US, at 26th, Italy, at 32nd, and Greece, at 44th, which was no mean feat. Although the Judiciary deserves great credit for this ranking, Cleverly has suppressed this development altogether. This can only have been for political reasons, and he obviously realizes that any praise for the city’s judges would upset the people he is so desperately trying to appease.
Cleverly’s report, therefore, is a shoddy piece of handiwork that reflects badly on him and the foreign office. It is crude, prejudiced and tendentious, but will delight the primitives barking at his leader’s heels. If, however, it buys Sunak a bit more time to pursue policies that are in the British national interest, then so be it, but nobody who values objectivity should give it the time of day.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.