Mr Xi, Sir Keir and Auntie Mo

Should democracy have red lines and, if so, should we defend these and at what cost? After all, is this not what we’ve been doing since the outbreak of World War II? Nowhere is this vexed question – to which needless to say there are no easy answers – starker than in our relations with China. 

Take this week. One minute Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, is telling Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator, that he wants a “durable, honest, respectful and pragmatic relationship” with the emerging superpower. Hardly groundbreaking stuff, even if it has infuriated the China hawks. 

The next (literally) Xi’s henchmen in Hong Kong are throwing 47 pro-democracy protesters into jail — for up to ten years. One of these is Claudia Mo, 67, the much-loved co-founder of the Civic Party, whose husband, the journalist and historian Philip Bowring, was the FT’s Hong Kong stringer in the 1980s. She is affectionately known as “Auntie Mo”. More on her shortly. 

China’s promise (in a solemn international treaty) of a 50-year dispensation for the former British colony to enjoy political autonomy after the handover in 1997 (the formula known as “one country, two systems”) has been binned after fewer than 30 years.  Game, set and match to Beijing. 

Chinese leaders are fond of catchy maxims. “One country, two systems” was part of the late Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy. Its aim, among other things, was to integrate Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau with sovereign China — if not exactly painlessly, then at least peacefully. Did he mean it? We don’t know. Deng was a master strategist who played his cards close to his chest. 

China has swallowed up Hong Kong and Macau. Before them, lest we forget, there was Tibet: crushed and annexed between 1949 and 1951. Barring an upheaval in China, Taiwan is next on its list. 

We need to understand that China’s sovereignty is everything to the leadership. Nothing matters more because in that supremacy lies the survival of the ruling Communist Party. It is the sine qua non , the lifeblood, of its existence. Xi, who has been slowly tightening his hold over the country, is merely an extreme example. 

I was in Beijing in the 1980s as an FT correspondent, where I interviewed a senior party official. I asked him: “When Britain hands over Hong Kong, will China run it?” The question, then, was not as daft as it sounds. 

Hong Kong’s taipans, who had amassed immense wealth thanks to its virtually boundless market freedoms, hoped (some believed) that China’s leadership would leave well-enough alone. The official, one of several Deputy Prime Ministers, looked at me as if I was slightly unhinged. “Of course,” he replied. 

Claudia Mo was Agence France Press’s bureau chief in Hong Kong in the 1980s. In June 1989 she flew to Beijing on the day of the Tiananmen massacre. The brutality she witnessed sparked a political awakening. She went home and helped found the Civic Party. She became greatly loved and admired for her courage.

 Then, just after dawn on January 6, 2021, the couple’s housekeeper heard a sharp knock at the front door. The FT takes up the story: “She opened the door a crack, leaving the safety chain in place, and saw a troop of police outside. The housekeeper rushed to wake Mo, but the officers smashed through into the living room. 

“Mo, who was then 64 years old, was arrested and taken to Aberdeen police station on the south side of Hong Kong island. Her husband Philip, now 79, a kind, gentle man, was left to sit in shock in the sudden quiet of their home.” He was subsequently denied permission to visit her in jail, where she has been denied bail for nearly four years. 

Similar scenes were playing out across the city as hundreds of police officers pulled a dragnet over Hong Kong and arrested many pro-democracy advocates — academics, activists and politicians. The “Hong Kong 47” have now been tried and convicted.

Philip tells me that having already spent four years in custody awaiting trial Claudia may be released soon  provided the authorities don’t come up with more charges.

The Coalition For Women In Journalism, an international pressure group that campaigns for journalists to be allowed to work in safety, says Auntie Mo was “coerced into pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy under Beijing’s draconian national security law passed in 2020 to suppress growing protests the previous years“. She has now been sentenced to four years and two months in prison.

The Communist Party says the national security law is needed to protect the country’s sovereignty from activists. In a sense this is true. The party which Xi now rules with an iron fist, carefully concealed in a velvet glove, cannot survive popular challenges to state power. Democracy and autocracy are incompatible. 

The price of defying Xi’s China at street level is now clearer than ever. The heart has been cut out of Hong Kong’s democracy. A new generation of political prisoners has been created by three judges, handpicked by Beijing.

How should the West respond? 

The stakes are immense. China, under Xi, has set itself the task of replacing the US as the world’s leading power. In order to achieve this, Xi has placed security and control front and centre of this strategy. 

Pluralism is not at the top of US President-elect Donald Trump’s priorities. Neither are human rights. But he does see China as a threat to America’s interests. He wants to repatriate jobs lost to China. He also knows, as does Starmer, that, however much we despise what China does to its citizens, or whatever it threatens to do to Taiwan, we can’t wish it away. 

The West can’t do without China. It was encouraged to become the world’s factory. Elon Musk employs 20,000 people to make Tesla models in Shanghai. Huawei, China’s poster child, is still the largest supplier of telecom equipment. The EU relies on China for 98% of its rare earth supplies, which are central to tech industries and therefore to the West’s economic security. 

This dependence dovetails neatly with Beijing’s desire to reshape the international order in its favour. Xi, like Putin, has no electorate to worry about. And, like Putin, he sees trade and aid as stalking horses of influence. 

The fate of the “Hong Kong 47” is a stark reminder of who and what we are dealing with. The hope that the free market would bring with it free speech and all that this entails is dust. 

We don’t have to demonise China to be wary of it. We must do business with China. But we should be aware that our dependence carries with it big economic and strategic risks. Keir Starmer must ensure that future China policies are subject to rigorous health and safety tests.        

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