Forest of Dean Liberal Democrats

Democracy in China has a long way to come says Watson

Graham spoke at the Hong Kong Democratic Party Conference on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC

Speech by Graham Watson MEP to Hong Kong Democratic Party Conference on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, 26 September 2009

What should a European think when looking at the 60 years since the Chinese civil war? How has it affected Europe? How will it influence the world?

The first thing that has to be said is "Thank God - whichever one you worship - that the worst appears to be over". The early years of the People's Republic of China brought misery, indignity and unnecessary death to millions of people and scarred three generations.

The second thing to be said is "Watch out. The People's Republic of China is still far more dangerous than you think, and perhaps for reasons you have not considered".

The third is "Re-appraise your strategy."

Let me explain.

I said the worst appears to be over. While the first half of the twentieth century brought into China the tremendous stimulus of foreign thought, Mao's Thought Reform which kicked off the second half and the public persecution of intellectuals plunged China back into darkness.

With some 800,000 trials of counter-revolutionaries and 22,500 executions per month China was literally decapitated.

The increasingly savage land reforms of the following years and the nationalisation of all commerce and industry in 1955 - "the year of decision in the struggle between socialism and capitalism" as Mao called it - did not bring economic growth crashing to a halt. But it sowed the seeds of disaster.

Of course this was not immediately recognised, even by the Chinese people. Initially the Communist Party leaders worked as a team and brought governability back to a country devastated by civil war. Mao was trusted by many of his own people and even admired by some western intellectuals (including, it is said, the current President of the European Commission). Since the party had only three quarters of a million cadres, some two million KMT officials were initially kept in place. Inflation was brought under control, the streets and the drains cleaned up (along with the beggars and the prostitutes) while life expectancy and literacy rates grew impressively.

But the Great Leap Forward, transforming the political, economic and social life of 90% of the population and intended to get China walking on two legs, instead broke them both. Even Kruschev said of Mao that he was 'acting like a lunatic on a throne and turning his country upside down'. The steel industry was wrecked and 20 to 30 million people died in the famine of 1959-62. The incursions into Korea, India and Vietnam and the plan to bomb Quemoy island showed a China with aggressive intent.

Chairman Mao resembled Adolf Hitler more than Joseph Stalin. He once shocked even the Soviet Communists by saying of a prospective war "We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war." His 1966 dawn inspections of one million red guards rhythmically chanting Maoist slogans resembled Hitler's approval of the brownshirts at the Nuremberg rallies; the Little Red Book was the equivalent of Mein Kampf, with Lin Piao cast in the role of Goebbels.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, designed to show the power of the ink well and the gun barrel, turned into the greatest witch-hunt in history. The failure of Deng Xiaoping and Liu and other of Mao's colleagues to stop an increasingly megalomaniac Leader at Lu Shan sparked off a chain of horrors which culminated in the mutiny at Wuhan. 500 million people were affected by the grotesque experiment of the Cultural Revolution. In the Communist Party itself 60% of party officials were purged, 400,000 died from maltreatment, 35,000 were persecuted to death. The 1960s were ten lost years in China's development.

If China's Cultural Revolution was the moral equivalent of Europe's Catholic Inquisition, its magnitude more closely resembled Hitler's Holocaust.

Of course, since Mao, things have changed; but there is nothing in China's Communist system to prevent another Mao Ze-dong emerging. Perhaps it is mainly the fear of a repeat of the Cultural Revolution that has helped keep its more recent recipes less extreme. Nonetheless, Mao has been criticised. China has breathed a collective sigh of relief. The Open Door which allowed tens of thousands of chinese to study abroad and brought tens of thousands of dollars in tourist income, the re-opening of the ports and the decentralisation of the banking system, the reintroduction of market mechanisms into the economy, the rehabilitation of the so-called 'rightists' would have been impossible under Mao.

And indeed, in absolute terms, China has become a freer place. But our assessment must not overlook either comparison or the matter of degree. Since 1979, most Communist countries have become democracies. China has not. Both Deng Xiao-ping and Hu Jin-tao spoke of political freedom, but in each case it was remarkably short lived. As Wei Jing-sheng knows to his cost, Democracy Wall was no more going to set people free than letting 'a hundred flowers bloom together and a hundred schools of thought contend'. Nor - as Dr Jiang Yan-yong discovered, was Hu Jin-tao's commitment to freedom real. If the Tangshan earthquake was a portent of good, the rumble of the tanks into the student protests at Tiananmen thirteen years later showed that the leopard had not changed its spots.

Tiananmen showed that Chinese perestroika was not to be accompanied by glasnost. The People's Republic of China remains under authoritarian rule. We should not be surprised that Mao's successors are not democrats. The writer Bai Hua, who contended that patriotism need not mean loving the Communist Party, was vilified by Deng Xiao-ping. Totalitarian regimes, even if they are breaking down, insist on a symmetry between national interests and that of the system; country and party become ideologically interchangeable. And I am not sure China's regime is breaking down. However fashionable that belief may be in the West, it may simply underline the reason why the three wise men came from the East.

So why do I say "Watch out!" ?

Because, on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, there is a belief in the West - often reflected in government policies - that the People's Republic of China is moving inexorably towards democracy. The author Will Hutton says that the writing is on the wall. Tony Blair, visiting Beijing in 2005, spoke of an 'unstoppable momentum' towards democracy in China. Countless others argue that economic freedom will bring political freedom. It suits business interests. It allows western leaders to granstand with their exotic eastern cousins. The belief is even encouraged by the Communist Party leaders in Beijing since it suits them too. Yet in the year that Tony Blair made his prophecy China's jails continued to hold tens of thousands of political prisoners, including 500 for the crime of 'counter-revolution' although the offence had been repealed under Chinese law. At the year's dawn, Zhao Zi-yang died after fifteen years under house arrest. And at its close Chinese police shot and killed demonstrators in a village in Guangdong. The PRC still has a Leninist regime run by a Communist Party. Do we imagine it will somehow metamorphose into democracy? Bill Clinton was closer to the truth than Tony Blair when he told Jiang Ze-min eight years earlier he was 'on the wrong side of history'. Today that remains the case.

That is why I fail to understand the decision of the UK government after Tiananmen to turn down Hong Kong's demand for greater democracy through the election of half of the LegCo seats. Why did we, in one critic's words, surrender the last British Colony to the last Communist tyranny without strengthening its defences first?

The PRC remains dangerous for three reasons.

The first is the inexorable build up of its military power, which will be on display at its military parade next week. Democracies tend not to go to war with each other. The same cannot be said of autocracies.

The second is its suppression of its own people - in Tibet and in Xinjiang most evidently and most recently - and its support for autocrats elsewhere. The PRC underpins the military junta in Rangoon, President Karimov in Uzbekistan and the warlords who rule the Sudan. To say nothing of Robert Mugabe, to whom they gave an honorary doctorate!

The third is the possibility, perhaps even the probability, that in twenty five years time China will be fully integrated into the world economy while remaining entirely undemocratic. The West may believe it is binding China in to the world economy through membership of the WTO and such-like. But is not China binding the West into a new international political order where democracy is no longer seen as a condition for respectability? Chinese politics is no more open now than 25 years ago. Any ideas which surfaced then of an independent press or an autonomous National People's Congress are right back on the drawing board. Village elections give the outward appearance of democratic progress but provide no real advance, any more than discussions about the rule of law have led to independence in the judiciary. Internet chat-rooms have made a difference in letting information in to China, but the collusion of Cisco, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft - who collaborate with the Communists in censorship - means China's people can do nothing with the information they receive. So China will become richer and stronger but with no significant political opposition and no freedom of speech, assembly or the press.

The West must re-appraise its strategy towards China, and fast. If China were a democracy it would be more stable, more peaceful, a better trading and investment partner and a happier society. As we know with eastern Europe and North Africa, free societies make the best neighbours.

The best chance to bring about change involves exposing China's Communists for what they are. Not allowing a trade policy in which the PRC can play off, as Chris Patten put it, 'the uninformed greed of one country against the unprincipled avarice of another'. Not having police keep the human rights demonstrators at a more-than-safe distance when Hu Jin-tao visits London or allowing Chinese police to guard the Beijing Olympic torch on its tour around western capitals.

It involves recognising that China's economic miracle is built less on inspiration than on perspiration; that 'Asian values' are simply a cover for a command economy and officially sanctioned corruption, not a recipe for the freedom which must accompany market economics to make the market work properly. A liberal democracy cannot prevent corruption, but it exposes it.

It involves treating the PRC as we would treat any other dictatorship, tabling resolutions at the United Nations in Geneva critical of their behaviour. And includes constant watchfulness of the actions of those who seek to lift the arms embargoes imposed by the USA and Europe after the horrors of Chinese troops opening fire on their own young people just twenty years ago. I was proud when the European Parliament agreed last year, at the suggestion of Liberals, to award our Sakharov Freedom Prize to the Beijing lawyer Hu Jia. Such recognition speaks volumes. And that we receive regularly visitors from Taiwan, the Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer of Xinjiang Province, my candidate for this year's Sakharov Prize.

Our approach should seek to build India and Indonesia as bulwarks for democracy in Asia, a counter-weight to Beijing. It should encompass a massive expansion in teaching mandarin, to demystify the Middle Kingdom. It should insist on engagement with China's communists, as we engaged those of the Soviet bloc during the Helsinki process, linked with a gentle but constant exposition of the hypocrisy of their claims.

So let us re-appraise our strategy and re-commit to the values we hold, treating the People's Republic of China no differently from the way we would treat any other country with such a government.

And let us not forget that Sun Yat-sen, who could usefully be re-assessed by his compatriots, said that 4000 years of Chinese history has produced nowhere like Hong Kong. He was right. Hong Kong is unique. And the development of the curious and convoluted idea of 'one country, two systems' must serve as a bell-weather for our assessment of and our dealings with Chairman Mao's creation.