China wants the UK to apologise for a meeting between Prime Minister David Cameron and the Dalai Lama last year. Business leaders say the freeze in relations between the countries in the wake of the meeting could cost the UK billions of pounds of Chinese investment. VoR’s Tom Spender reports.
China expects “concrete measures” from the UK to repair its relations with China.
That’s what a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told reporters in Beijing today – although she did not specify what those measures should be.
The Chinese leadership is angry with Prime Minister David Cameron over his meeting with the Dalai Lama in London a year ago.
Shi Yinhong is Professor of International Relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
“He could emphasise that Britain recognises China’s sovereignty and administrative control over Tibet and will not receive the Dalai Lama again, but of course maybe he doesn’t want to say this because it would cause a domestic political problem in Britain.”
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ROSS Terrill, one of Australia’s best known experts on China, who has been based at Harvard University in the US for most of the past 50 years, warns that for Canberra to align on security issues with Beijing “bristles with difficulties”.
He does not believe Australia is faced with a frightening choice between our great ally and our main trading partner. While commending Hugh White for instigating a lively debate with his book The China Choice, he says this thesis “underestimates Australia’s power to say yes or no in concrete diplomatic situations”.
Terrill, a visiting senior fellow at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute, says: “We can be economically open to China and still speak up for Australian values. I know some people think there is a contradiction there, but I think we have to do both. We should welcome the trade and investment with China but should never give the impression we are packing our values away in a trunk – China wouldn’t respect us for that.”
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For much of the two decades since the 1990s, when China moved into a high orbit of economic growth, it propounded the theory that its “rise” would be “peaceful” in nature. It was perhaps intended to reassure a wary world, which was watching a notionally Communist country of a billion-plus people move at top speed, that China would not disturb the global order overmuch even if it became the world’s largest economy (which it is on course to be, perhaps as early as the end of this decade).
That reassurance was critical to China’s securing access to international capital, becoming a magnet for Big Business, and more generally ensuring a benign geopolitical and regional climate in the early stages of its development. And particularly after the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square student protests of June 1989 rattled global faith in China’s motives, “peaceful rise” became something of a mantra.
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ONE of the great evangelical hymns starts stirringly: “Blessed assurance”
Too often, that’s what businesspeople have been fed by presenters at conferences: simple answers to complex questions.
China is no exception. In the fairly recent past, business audiences in Australia have evinced remarkable ignorance about China, passively taking in whatever the visiting expert has proclaimed.
But there has been a welcome turning of the tide. It’s no longer enough to say that China satisfies 99 per cent of global concrete gnome demand, or whatever. Every galah in every corner pet shop here knows how important China has become to our economy. Sadly, some conference organisers still churn out speakers who click on one PowerPoint slide after another that makes that point, over and over: bigger, better.
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Eric was a deeply political person. He was shaped, above all, by, in his own words, ‘the two most decisive years of my life,’ those in Berlin between 1931 and 1933, during which, as a young teenager, he witnessed the rise of Hitler and the parallel rise of the KPD. In 1932 he joined the SSB, a young communist organisation. ‘As I entered the school year 1932-3’, he wrote, ‘the sense that we were living in some kind of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering.’
His experiences in central Europe gave Eric his near-lifelong commitment to communism. He grew up in a period of volcanic change, he lived with a foreboding of catastrophe. His political co-ordinates were profoundly different from what they would have been had he spent these years in Britain. At the same time, growing up in central Europe before moving to Britain at the age of 15, imbued him with a highly cosmopolitan outlook, including a facility with so many languages, that, certainly in a British context, was most unusual and was to shape his subsequent political and intellectual development.
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Grand Hyatt Melbourne. Speakers include the Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
Keynote speech: 22 April, 3.10-4.15pm: Martin Jacques, How China Will Change Almost Everything
Martin Jacques, a leading British academic who wrote a best-selling book called When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order believes, as you can probably tell from the title, that China will be the dominant power of this century. Predictions about when China becomes the largest economy in the world range from 2030 onwards to as early as 2018.
Those in the West, he says, have no idea what that will entail for we arrogantly presume that as China gets richer its citizens will become more like us. Jacques says that won’t happen. China has 1000 years of civilisation to draw upon where the state is the paramount force and is seen by the population as an extension of the family – the ultimate patriarch. He says that Chinese citizens won’t become like westerners, with our demands for individual rights and freedoms and our reliance on rules over relationships. Instead China will maintain its uniqueness.
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10am and 2pm: Two talks on what the rise of China means
Private Event
