Usually conspicuous by its absence from such debates is China — or, more pertinently, the nature of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). It’s an omission that has become even more glaring in light of recent events in Hong Kong. The national security law recently imposed on the territory, which will inevitably have the effect of quelling protest and freedom of speech, ought to have been the prompt for the British Left to abandon its reticence and, as one, speak out in unequivocal condemnation of the CPC’s repressive methods. But much of the Left remains either silent or ambivalent. If Hong Kong is a litmus test, too many on the Left are failing it.

China has always been something of a hot potato on the Left, which — much as the Soviet Union did — creates all manner of factional and doctrinal disputes. For some, the Chinese system, if not truly socialist, resembles something approaching it and is therefore worthy of qualified support. Or at least is undeserving of explicit criticism. Their desire to see a bulwark against Donald Trump and what they see as US imperial ambitions, and the belief that only China will ultimately have the means to play that role, persuades them to look the other way when confronted with the facts about the CPC’s nefarious activities. It was probably this kind of thinking that lay behind Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to attend a state banquet given in honour of the Chinese president in 2015, while later declining an invitation to the one held for Trump.

Some diehard Stalinists, in search of a new lodestar since the collapse of Soviet communism, go further and openly wax lyrical about the wonders of the Chinese economic system. Their historical foes among the ranks of British Trotskyism, on the other hand, have traditionally felt little sympathy for the Chinese model, dismissing it variously over the years, just as they once did the Soviet Union and its satellites, as ‘state capitalist’ or a ‘deformed workers’ state’.

A certain layer on the Left, while ill-disposed towards the current regime, feels at least a residual fondness for Maoism and the cultural revolution. It’s a manifestation of the impulse felt even by more sensible elements on the Left to romanticise tyrants and revolutionaries provided they are dead. It might be said that when John McDonnell threw a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book across the despatch box to George Osborne, he was laying bare this impulse.

Meanwhile, many on the mainstream democratic Left in Britain have no time for the CPC or the Chinese system but are reluctant to voice full-throated condemnation for fear of the hornet’s nest that might be stirred up across the wider movement. So they are content to put away the whole subject in a box marked ‘too sensitive’ and refocus their attention on the easier targets in Washington and Jerusalem.

Further reading

2019: the year the West wised up to China

By John Gray

This really won’t do. There is no good reason for the Left to walk on eggshells around China. A regime that ruthlessly suppresses dissent, outlaws free trade unions, exploits workers mercilessly, and routinely uses the army against strikers is no friend of the labour movement in Britain or anywhere else. And in the context of the regime’s wider abuses, not least its persecution of Christians and Muslims, horrific birth limitation policy, repression of Tibetans and disregard for the environment, turning a blind eye becomes nothing short of inexcusable. By all means attack Trump and Netanyahu over their transgressions; the criticism is often deserved. But this type of selective outrage betrays a deep hypocrisy and lack of principle.

Today, however, it is obvious that it is no longer just the Left that is troubled by the China question; it bedevils the Right, too. Very recently, the former chancellor Philip Hammond criticised Tory colleagues for displaying ‘anti-Chinese sentiment’. In taking this stance, Hammond was emulating the approach of his predecessor, George Osborne, who, while in office, made a big push for a strategic realignment with China. A general softening among many Tories to the prospect of deepening ties with China is unsurprisingly correlated to the latter’s embrace of full-blown capitalist economics (albeit a version rigidly directed by the state) and entry into the global market. Who cares about human rights violations when there is highly-profitable commerce to be done?

The Right once knew where it stood with China. It opposed it, just as it did the Soviet Union. But today’s China is a different beast. As the towers of mammon in Shanghai and elsewhere began to be erected and opportunities in the way of investment and trade opened up, much of the Right’s hostility to China’s authoritarian regime seemed to dissipate, with only a dogged band of Atlanticists, civil libertarians and MPs of good conscience now putting up any real resistance. Whether the rapprochement will survive the fall-out from Covid-19, however, remains to be seen.

What we do know is that as China flaunts its growing prosperity and international status, trashing freedoms and liberties as it goes, it finds itself defended in Britain by a somewhat unconventional combination of free marketeers and old-fashioned communists, with each group claiming the success of the Chinese economy as the fruits of its own ideology. Premier Xi Jinping has hardly helped matters by simultaneously attributing it to both Marxist philosophy and free market economics.

In truth, the Chinese system is a deeply unappealing fusion of neoliberalism and brutal state authoritarianism. It’s the Square Mile meets the Stasi, a rapacious capitalism enforced by despots. No one, whether on the Right or Left, should look upon the CPC regime as anything other than the tyranny it is. And those on all sides of the spectrum who believe that democratic freedoms and civil liberties should always come before political expediency or the exigencies of global trade must not falter in their duty to speak out.

There is only one exception in the media coverage. The China Times – whose owners famously sympathise with Beijing – barely mentioned the Hong Kong protests at all. For most Taiwanese, such self-censorship is just another indicator of the ideological obedience expected by the Communist Party of China.

The official language of Taiwan might be Mandarin Chinese, the island may be only 100 miles across the sea from the mainland and its majority culture very similar to it, but the desire for political union is now a distinctly minority interest.

After 1949, when the nationalist Kuomintang lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan, the party acted on the basis that it was the legitimate government of the “Republic of China” and would one day reunite the whole country under its leadership. Theoretically, that is still the basis of the country’s constitution, though few believe it.

With the Democratic Progressive Party currently in power, the political options now are more often expressed as a choice between the uneasy status quo and a move towards outright independence, despite the risk that might entail invasion by the People’s Republic. The older generation generally prefers the former and younger people the latter.

More from this author

The Welsh Baptist who transformed China

By Bill Hayton

The more that Beijing gets heavy in Hong Kong, the more the mood in Taiwan turns towards the idea of independence. The idea of ‘one country, two systems’ provided the basis for Hong Kong’s reunification with the People’s Republic in 1997. In January, Xi Jinping proposed it as the model for Taiwan too. But the view here is that it is rapidly becoming a hollow lie in Hong Kong, so why would Taiwan entrust its future to the idea?

Mandy Hsiao-chuan Liao, Assistant Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University has observed a change of mood in the island’s politics:

“A person advocating the possibility of ‘one country, two systems’ is now seen as a person who will sell Taiwan to China and denigrate Taiwan’s identity and values of democracy and freedom. As a result, the Hong Kong events have encouraged more young people to support a Taiwan identity separate from China.”

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party must have known this, and yet they pressed on with moves to erode Hong Kong’s special status. Above all things, Beijing seems to fear disintegration; the ruling party is concerned that tolerating local diversity could unravel the country. According to Chi-Ting Tsai, Executive Director of the Centre for China Studies at the National Taiwan University: “One of the greatest fears among the Chinese leadership is fragmentation. There’s a concern that they can’t control what goes on in the provinces.”

But there is more to national unity than political control. President Xi also seems wedded to a vision of enforced homogeneity. In many areas of life, his leadership is enforcing policies based on the idea that there is only one way to be Chinese – that the majority culture must become the universal culture.

From the incarceration of up to a million Muslims in detention camps in Xinjiang province, to the suppression of Tibetan identity, to the imposition of policies intended to supplant the Cantonese language in Hong Kong, the aim appears to be the eradication, or at least the minimisation, of difference. Xi Jinping’s vision of national unity demands it.

Suggested reading

How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

In the past few years, members of the Politburo have repeatedly spoken of the need for ethnic minorities to follow the ‘five identifications’. They must identify with the motherland; with the Chinese nation; with Chinese culture; with the Chinese socialist road and with the Communist Party.

The same prescription applies to everyone else. In Hong Kong the battle has often focused on language. Most are proud to speak Cantonese and view it as their mother tongue, yet that is not how the national government sees it.

Ben Bland, the author of a recent book about young people in the former British colony, Generation HK, argues:

“Young Hong Kongers have put themselves on the front line of the current protests because they are fighting not just for their freedoms but for their very identity. The generation that has come of age since the handover in 1997 see themselves, first and foremost, as Hong Kongers, not Chinese citizens.”

That is anathema to the Politburo in Beijing.

In April 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced a ruling that 80% of the country’s citizens must speak the national language – Mandarin Chinese – by 2020. The Ministry’s ruling was an admission that almost a third of the population, around 400 million people, do not speak the nominally ‘national’ language. Instead, they speak regional ‘topolects’ – Cantonese, Shanghainese and others – that are mutually unintelligible. This diversity threatens the homogenisers. The campaign to impose Mandarin nationwide has been stepped up.

The reaction among the young bubble tea-drinkers in Taiwan has been to take greater pride in speaking their native tongues. Although they are taught Mandarin at school, they are increasingly proud of speaking the local topolect of Fujianese, even calling it ‘Taiwanese language’.

Enforced monoculturalism has formed a major strand of the Chinese nationalist project since its emergence at the end of the 19th century. The problem of how to define the ‘Chinese Nation’ – the ‘zhonghua minzu’ – has dogged thinkers and politicians alike for decades.

For long periods, under Soviet influence, the Communist Party was prepared to tolerate difference, delaying the creation of a single homogeneous nation into the far future. However, in the wake of the breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, some Chinese theoreticians began to argue vociferously for a new approach: a ‘melting pot’ in which differences would be eradicated in the interests of national unity.

Xi Jinping seems to have listened to them.

Suggested reading

What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Geordie Stewart

During the 1990s, as orthodox communist ideology retreated, Communist Party pronouncements increasingly featured the word ‘nation’ alongside the more traditional ‘people’. Whereas the ‘people’ only included socialists, the ‘nation’ could include anyone, so long as they followed Beijing’s definitions of what the ‘nation’ believed. Since Xi’s coming to power in late 2012, the Party has doubled-down on national uniformity.

What should we call this new political ideology – one that features a single ‘core’ leader, insistent demands for national homogeneity, intolerance of difference, rule by party not by law, corporatist economic policies, a focus on discipline and an ideology based on racial exceptionalism – all backed up by a massive surveillance state?

China’s Communist Party has long talked of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Xi Jinping now seems more interested in building “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

As the Taiwanese argue about their island’s political future, what they see across the water fills them with concern. Xi Jinping’s problem is that the more worried the Communist Party becomes about national fragmentation, and the more it tries to impose national unity, the more it generates movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Hayton’s book The Invention of China will be published next year