Keir Starmer is flying to China today with a delegation of business leaders in order to build ties with Beijing.
Already the visit is a missed opportunity. Starmer should have made his visit conditional on the release of British citizen Jimmy Lai from jail in Hong Kong. Now that the trip is going ahead regardless, he should use his visit to Beijing to demand Mr Lai’s freedom as a precondition for any trade deal.
Jimmy Lai is 78 years old and in deteriorating health. He has spent the past five years in solitary confinement, all because he campaigned for freedom and democracy. The newspaper he founded – the Apple Daily – was forcibly shut down in 2021, and he is now awaiting sentencing under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law and facing a potential life sentence. Even if the authorities are more lenient, the minimum ten-year sentence would in effect be a death sentence, given his age and poor health.
Mr Lai is officially accused of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious material. As the head of his international legal team Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC (from Starmer’s old chambers at Doughty Street) puts it, in reality Mr Lai is accused of a conspiracy to commit journalism.
His case should be the top priority for the prime minister in Beijing. But there also other political prisoners who should not be forgotten, including Hong Kong barrister Chow Hang-tung, solicitor Albert Ho and trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan, charged simply for commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
There are plenty of other cases Starmer could raise with Xi Jinping. There are the Uyghur scholars such as Ilham Tohti and Professor Rahile Dawut, who are both serving life sentences. There are Tibetan monks and activists such as entrepreneur Dorje Tashi, who is imprisoned for life, and singer Lhundrub Drakpa, jailed for a song criticising the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There are Chinese dissidents such as Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, citizen journalist Zhang Zhang, Swedish national Gui Minhai and pro-democracy activist Dr Wang Bingzhang – who has been in jail since he was abducted from Vietnam in 2002.
There is another prisoner whose connections with Britain ought to make her a priority for Starmer: the 22 year-old Chinese student Tara Zhang Yadi, who was due to begin a course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London last autumn but is instead in detention in China. She was not a political activist but had been involved with a Chinese student group working to promote understanding of Tibetan culture and inter-ethnic harmony while studying in Paris. She was arrested when she returned to China to visit her family last summer.
Beijing’s intensifying crackdown in Tibet should be on the agenda. The Prime Minister must make it clear to Xi Jinping that, when the Dalai Lama dies, no successor chosen by the CCP will be recognised by Britain. The next Dalai Lama must be picked in the traditional Tibetan way. Starmer should seek information about the whereabouts and well-being of the eleventh Panchen Lama, who is traditionally responsible for finding the next Dalai Lama. He was forcibly disappeared, along with his immediate family members, at the age of five in 1995.
China has been conducting a campaign of forced cultural assimilation in Tibet. At least one million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and placed in colonial boarding schools where they are prohibited from speaking the Tibetan language, practising Tibetan Buddhism or learning about their culture.
The crimes against the Uyghurs – recognised as genocide by parliaments around the world including our own – should also be addressed in Starmer’s talks with Xi. He must make it clear that trade with China is dependent on ending forced and prison labour in our supply chains.
There is also the problem of China’s recent crackdown on Christian churches and the arrest of dozens of pastors, including the founder of Zion Church, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri. And its forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, as documented in an independent tribunal.
On top of all this, China’s backing for the junta in Myanmar, Kim Jong-Un’s tyrannical regime in North Korea, and Vladimir Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine should be on the agenda. Starmer should press Xi to stop arming the generals in Myanmar, stop forcibly repatriating North Koreans – in total breach of international humanitarian norms – and stop supporting Putin’s war.
Last week the government greenlit China’s controversial new mega embassy in the old Royal Mint, opposite the Tower of London and on top of highly sensitive cables, despite concerns that it will be used as a spy centre. The Prime Minister must deliver a clear message to Beijing: threats to Taiwan and to Britain must stop if relations are to improve. He must speak up for human rights and defend our values and our security. He must kowtow no longer.
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