Is he just a useful idiot? (NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images)
A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by “focusing on cutting carbon emissions… China will promote green development, and continuously improve its ecology”. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.
Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.
What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.
Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.
Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.
Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.
Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.
Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.
And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.
Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination. Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that China’s leaders have repeatedly shown they are not “men of their word”.
Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?
Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its ‘useful idiots’ often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xi’s avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.
Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.
I asked Hamilton if China’s wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: “They’ve fallen for what the Party calls ‘discourse control’ — to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.”
For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting — prematurely — that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimed in a paper for the World Economic Forum that China was “emerging as a global leader in climate policy”. His co-author was He Jiankun, a ‘counsellor’ to China’s top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: “The world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.”
Has Stern been naïve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinping’s alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the People’s Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Stern’s spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry, and — of course — Xie Zhenhua.
This year, for what it’s worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this year’s CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained “keen to learn from the UK’s example of world-leading action on climate change” and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, China’s emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.
On paper, at least, you might argue there’s no harm in that. After all, the CCICED’s “mission” is to build “a more beautiful China and a green and bountiful world”. Who could possibly object?
Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICED’s Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with China’s United Front Work Department, one of the CCP’s main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of China’s late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries — which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of China’s most important foreign influence organisations.
What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to “close supervision” by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling China’s secret police. Any organisation deemed to have “harmed the national interest” risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.
Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and provoking troubles” for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, “it was no longer safe for us to work in China”. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: “They hope they can influence China’s leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise China’s policy would be suicide.”
Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its “independent adviser on climate projects”. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of China’s puppet parliament, the National People’s Congress.
To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyone’s guess. But it is striking that the CIFF — a registered UK charity — gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an £18 million grant to “help contribute to peaking China’s emissions”, £14 million to give China “evidence-based recommendations” for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, £8 million to assist China “in global climate governance”.
This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 from the CIFF. When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”
But not, apparently, to China’s role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me: “It would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.”
Yet the CIFF’s China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated £29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECF’s deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFF’s Kate Hampton.
Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK ‘grantees’ include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.
Its ‘global ambassador’, meanwhile, is the Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared “Sinophile” who said last year that China “will come over to our side”, and it was vital “not to raise the temperature” by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed “a wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassador”, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’ together, inspired by mud’s supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on China’s terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the ‘China model’ as superior to the West’s.
Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of China’s environment ministry. The meeting’s attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed “the building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destiny”. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of China’s Total State Security Outlook Research Centre — an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.
Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.
None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.
An ECF spokesperson told me: “Climate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.” A CIFF spokesperson added: “China is the world’s largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFF’s work in China aims to accelerate this transition.”
ClientEarth said: “As a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account… We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.” And a WWF campaigns chief added: “All countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had ‘given an important signal’.
Ultimately, however, the meaning of that “signal” remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?
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SubscribeI just hope one of the candidates will have the guts to talk about Covid and what it did to us (and I am not talking about the virus itself).
What is it you want to hear them say?
I think the reaction to Covid was the single biggest affront to civil liberties imaginable and fiscally we are reaping the rewards now with a trashed economy.
Neither of which are conservative policies as far as I’m concerned.
Hearing them acknowledge even half of what you just said would be good.
I would like to hear the leadership candidates acknowledging that much of what we are facing now is a result of decisions, and those decisions were not good ones, and certainly not conservative ones.
We have to understand that the deception was almost worldwide and that we were just one of many countries who fell for it mainly through fearmongering. Boris did what he did at the time but we fared a lot better than some of the countries. There is the other side to it that not many understand even now.
A lot of us now know the full truth aside from main media. The country was virtually bankrupted because of a kind of flu. Millions of us have had covid now with no great harm. The flu affected the same people that Covid did but at least they had a proper vaccination to deal with it without this mRNA contraption which wasn’t a real vax and which has caused it’s own harm if the truth be known. .
Whilst i agree with your contention about the affront to civil liberties, why use the phrase “a trashed economy”? It’s very, very far from “trashed”. Yes, of course we’re in an inflationary cycle and have a huge burden of debt, but that’s not the economy – which is the ability of a country to produce goods and services which are needed to fund public services and provide sufficient scope for private enterprise. Latest reports indicate that of the G7, the GDP of the UK is outperforming the other member states.
Give it time, and an end to the conflict in Ukraine, or at least a means by which the global economy can come to terms with it should it take some time. In the context of who should be the next PM and what that means for Conservatism, i’d contend that we’re pretty handily placed in comparison with most first world nations. Talking ourselves down with such phrases as “trashed economy” is not the way to go. We need realism of course, and to steer ourselves clear of a Labour+X others coalition. Whatever Conservatives do to prevent that, and provide a vision for future prosperity and secure defences, will be the new Toryism.
Agreed, yet there is little evidence that a day of reckoning is coming anytime soon. Regarding policies, the conservatives implemented all of the covid rules and are solely responsible for the fallout. The fact that other parties may have been even worse is immaterial, as is the excuse that they were somehow pushed along the path by the media and public opinion. Lately, I have noticed some of the keen lockdowners, maskers, compulsory testers and shielders making a very unwelcome reappearance. Looking back on Jeremy Hunts previous pronouncements on how to handle covid makes me shudder at the thought of what may come this Winter. I also recall Sunak being interviewed about furlough, when questioned about possible fraud he replied “nobody would take advantage during a time of national crisis” Javid and Gove were pushing for tighter covid restriction in December 2021, the list goes on.
If this is really what Sunak said then god help us all if he becomes PM.
The contrast with other parties’ policies is hardly ‘immaterial’! That is just an assertion. In the real world there can be better or worse policies, and we have often to choose between greater or worse evils. For all the hyperbolic comparisons with China – we were a long way from that – and even many of our European neighbours. We do actually need to give some credit to many in the Tory Party, one of the few parties in the entire western world which at least had an open, albeit often nasty debate, and even Johnson to some extent. It could have been very, very much worse. We were always allowed to go out for exercise for a start. My French friends were forbidden to use parks or markets.
Here is the Chinese approach: you are not be allowed to leave your home for ANY reason, you depend on rations from the state, you may be forced into a covid camp, and and even your children may be taken form you.
That will mean admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for them, which they will never do.
I don’t know. I think some might now be emboldened to speak the truth without Boris there. Obviously those who backed the narrative might want to save face but there are others who have nothing to lose and indeed a lot to gain by speaking the truth.
To the contrary, the world is well stocked with politicians willing to take responsibility for *someone else’s* mistakes, and a change in leadership opens up this option for all the new candidates for PM.
Quite so. Getting out of the frying pan was only half the battle. We still have to avoid falling into the fire.
Boris’ finest hour was when he said we (or they?) needed to “recalibrate”. If he’d actually done that as soon as he realised the need for it, perhaps he’d have held on to the Tory leadership.
It seems to me that both the Conservatives and Labour are struggling to define their purpose and direction.
Which is ludicrous, given that in Britain we literally put the clue in the name when it comes to politics.
Every election cycle, when the parties cast around with pointless polling and focus groups to try to come up with policy ideas I get so infuriated. JUST TURN AROUND AND LOOK AT THE SIGN YOU ARE STANDING IN FRONT OF DANG IT!!
It’s not a riddle, wrapped in an enigma. Conservatives — implement classically conservative policy, and conserve the financial and social resources of the nation. Labour — implement policies that benefit the working class… you know, the labour.
Muppets, one and all.
The Heritage party sounds good although small and encapsulates all the policies that I think are important.
Perhaps many have lost their own direction in life and can hardly lead the country.
The article lists Burke’s early interests as promoting religious toleration and self-determination, refusing to avow violence against the state, and opposing monopoly power.
It then bizarrely states that “It is hard, then, to find in Burkean principles the origins of conservatism.”
Really? The positions listed above give a decent summary of mainstream conservative thought.
In the modern world, they would be opposed by neo-feudal despots, not conservatives.
Yup. And his association with the 18th century Whigs also doesn’t undermine the ideological continuity of his thought with modern conservatism. Also, I’m pretty sure US conservatives are well aware of his sympathy for the American revolution – that’s surely part of the reason why he’s popular among US conservatives.
Richard Bourke provides evidence that undermines his own case. Maybe the reason why Bourke can’t find “conservative principles which have retained their integrity through the ages” is because he chooses not to see them.
Bourke’s book on Burke is excellent, but marred by just the problem you mention. It is impossible for a certain sort of academic (well, almost all academics) to credit conservatism with any positive qualities. Thus Burke’s admirable support for the American Revolution, opposition to the EIC’s greed, and concern for the Catholics of Ireland, are evidence that he couldn’t possibly be an inspiration to conservatives. As someone who is conservative and reveres Burke precisely because of his passionate positions on the issues above, I see no such conflict.
Thatcher was essentially hi jacked by the Orange Lodge Unionists in Ulster, and their mutual lower middle class identity, … and lower middle class dislike of Catholics also alive in Britain even then: this skewed her attitude to The Troubles, and was just ammunition to the PIRA.. and its recruitment, to heavy cost to The Army over many years.
Not so I’m afraid; By the time (Lady) Thatcher appeared, the war in Ireland had well passed its peak, with 1972 being by far the bloodiest year. By 1979 things had reached “ an acceptable level of violence” and would continue to do so until the end.
Incidentally ‘most’ of the Army rather enjoyed themselves in this novel little war, and it cannot be counted as a “heavy cost” as you would have it.
It also rather neatly solved the problem of what was the Army going to do after the withdrawal from Aden in November 1967.
Then why did secret peace talks have to be held by former Coldstreamer Whitelaw and ex Blue Channon with McG and A? without Thatcher’s knowledge?
Yeah, the influence of the left-wing caricature of conservatism, very popular in academia, may explain Bourke’s baffling characterisation of the causes Burke supported as somehow inconsistent with the conservative tradition.
Those causes appear to be based on principles which came to define the actual limited-government conservative tradition, but maybe not the caricature of conservatism popular in academia, and Bourke may be using the caricature as his comparison.
One cannot have a static policy based on some idea of conservatism. Life isn’t like that. There are no well worn tracks. Basically honesty and commitment and putting in those who have a good track record and who know the difference between good and evil will surely help us. I don’t know in these days that even a good education will work judging by what they are serving up these days.
One thing that’s perfectly clear is that whoever gets the top job now, regardless of what they say they’ll do if elected, once in office they’ll implement the same Globalist WEF policies, just like Boris Johnson, just like Theresa May and just like David Cameron. The Tories and Labour are both completely and utterly polluted with Globalist dross, and unless the British people wake up and stop voting for them, then we’re finished as a nation and a people.
I wonder how the ‘Red Wall’ views all this sanctimonious nonsense?
Johnson may well have been a feckless buffoon, but at least he had charisma. Do any of the other candidates have even a glimmer of the latter? All Johnson has to do is start acting like a real Conservative, which should not be difficult for such a naked opportunist.
Perhaps he should really call an unprecedented General Election, or are we yet again to repeat the disgrace of the Thatcher- Major putsch? And waste another five to ten years?
Heraclitus apparently believed that everything changes. From which you can argue that things eventually change into their opposites.
So Labour appear to be moving away from aligning with the working man and the Conservatives appear to be moving away from aligning with the gentry.
Boris seemed to realise this but he was (now obviously) unable to bring the conservative Conservatives along with him.
At the moment both Labour and the Conservatives appear to be contending for the middle class, with the activists pulling for the extremes. It will be a brave PM that can pull it all together.
No, Boris was unable to govern. Had he been he’d still be PM
Was Thatcher “able to govern?”..
As students of the history of ideas will recognise, the most basic lesson is that we have to do our own thinking for ourselves. While interesting and useful in many ways, the study of figures like Burke, Rousseau, and the American founders just reveals how alien their world was to our own. What, really, can the Tory party gain from orientating its politics to what Burke thought about the East India Company, or the French and American revolutions? It’s as strange as thinking that they should constantly be in thrall to Churchill and asking ‘What would Winston do?’ about things like coronavirus. It’s bizarre.
That’s what I think as well. These figures may inspire us but we need something within us as well. If we haven’t got that we shall be just copying someone else which isn’t an asset.
The nub of the economic debate seems to revolve around requests for higher cap-ex spending for the north versus the clamour for tax cuts elsewhere. .
Surely tax-breaks for all businesses are good, whether in the north or south? And wouldn’t intelligent cap-ex projects in the north further add to its economic output over time?
Can someone please enlighten me please?
The north was the birth place of the industrial revolution, the Manchester School and free trade. Perhaps we need to change the conversation with regard to the north and stop treating it as a state supplicant.
Surely we want all regions of the UK to be as powerful and self-reliant as possible. The north-south divide has been an open wound across the UK for far too long.
The south is partly made up of lots of northerners who do well (and even Scots and every other ethnic minority) so a geographical division is not always that helpful.
Dumping Boris Johnson will save Conservatism, not destroy it.
I agree, Rob. In my humble opinion, Johnson was a clever opportunist, not a conservative.
Thatcher was a transformational PM. I will never agree with her or her methods, but she had fresh ideas, and huge energy, which helped her to push through her modernization of the UK economy. In his way, Blair was a similar leader, with great energy end drive. Of course, Blair’s transformational project ended in a pile of sand in Babylon. Thatcher’s ideas and Blair’s ideas were very much of their time – tax-cuts and stamping out trade unions, or public-sector expansion funded by taxes on the City. These are now very dated ideas. The fact that the main contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party are reaching for some of these stale ideas shows just how empty the Conservatives’ intellectual cupboard is. At this rate, they are heading for a long spell in opposition.
I think the easiest dichotomy to keep hold of as being the origins of the Tory party, is the “Court” and “Country” groupings (it would be anachronistic to call them political parties) of the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries: the “Tories” were the country grouping – essentially the landed aristocracy and gentry who did not seek (or at least receive) the patronage from the Court under the control of the Whiggish Robinocracy of Walpole. Thus in origin the Tories saw themselves as standing for the old country against the centralising and legislating government, a theme which has remained fairly consistent as the grouping evolved into a political machine in the nineteenth century, notwithstanding that the Whig monopoly on power was broken by then. Burke’s position as somebody who saw that the Revolutionaries of France would quickly become a terrorising central power is a classic Tory position. Margaret Thatcher, as is often remarked, although she had some Tory traits (an affection or nostalgia for local civic action for example) was in economics a free-market liberal. Its rather difficult to judge how “Tory” the current candidates are because they are all trying to frame themselves by reference to whether they are tax cutters or tax raisers, rather than expressing any wider view of the relationship between government and society. Kemi Badenoch sounds like she is probably a Tory; I think Rishi is a Whig. No idea about the rest.
Here’s a good gauge for determining today whether a political leader, media organization, university, corporation or other high-impact person/institution has any credibility: does she/he/it take Chinese money? If the answer is yes, and it usually is, then all the Tory vs Labour, Democrat vs Republican, Left vs Right palaver is moot. Is our future going to be a Black Mirror dystopia? Are we going to suffer THE EVENT few will survive? The answer rests with our response to China’s ambitions. All this other BS – the political tribalism, the culture wars, the addiction to tech – are deliberate distractions that weaken the West, which is just how China likes it. Will they prevail? Depends on who’s cashing their checks.
I cannot but think, and perhaps believe, that a very large number of modern Conservative Party supporters and voters are actually far more ” Fox Whiggish” and ” Old Liberal” as was Churchill at one stage, than ” Tory”? I am, but perhaps the critical issue here is the sequestration of the term Liberal, in and by the ‘ Meeja’ to mean ” Freedom to stop and prevent the expression of all that we do not like”….?
Burke broke with Fox; so should the Conservative Party.
What we have here is a history lesson which doesn’t really affect our present or future. There is nothing magical about Tory. It is more about honesty and lack of deception even the deception picked up by MP’s about woke and so called zero carbon etc. I am greatly surpised that gay marriage came from the Tories. Yes it has changed drastically. We can no longer rely on what we used to concerning the Tories. We can only pray and hope that the country stays on the right road.
No mention of Peel, or did I miss it
Tory Covid conspiracists running riot here.