Charles Moore

Although Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, is committed to openness, it is a struggle to get information out of him about his university’s dealings with the Chinese Communist party. He has declined an interview, and when I raised questions about Jesus College’s China Centre and other China links, which he has publicly backed, he replied that ‘You cited one very specific initiative, organised by one of our 31 colleges, with a very narrow thematic focus’. I wrote back with further questions, but he says he is ‘not able to add anything to my earlier remark about Jesus College’.

The Black Lives Matter frenzy against statues may have passed its peak. The issue has been co-opted by the bureaucracies in government, Church, universities, etc. As their various committees study lists of allegedly offensive monuments, they should remember something which has hardly been mentioned: localism.  Most statues are erected not because of a general national sentiment, but because of the wishes of a particular community — a borough, parish, college, profession, business or regiment. They were not put up, like those colossal statues of Lenin in the former Eastern Bloc, by order of a remote tyranny. The reason that Edward Colston’s statue stayed up so long in Bristol was that many Bristolians admired his munificent legacy to the city.

Huawei’s 5G path is blocked. In a few months’ time, Huawei may no longer see the point of paying six-figure sums to Lord B and his attendant knights,’ I wrote in this space on 20 June. I underrated its ruthlessness. It took only a few weeks. Lord Browne, its UK chairman, is out. Sir Ken Olisa has followed.  How much longer for the arch-Remainers Sir Andrew Cahn, who thinks Huawei is ‘the John Lewis of China’, and the ex-CBI Sir Mike Rake, who joined as recently as April? All this could have been avoided if, before taking the six-figure salary, these gentlemen had asked: ‘Who ultimately controls this company’s destiny?’ The answer is the Chinese Communist party.

‘Just rejoice’, as Mrs Thatcher once said about something else. The government’s decision to debug our national security by getting rid of Huawei is the right one (although seven years is much too long). The puzzle is why it did not happen earlier. At the end of January, I interviewed the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, when he came over here. We knew by then everything we needed to know about the Chinese government’s control of Huawei and the lack of trust this must engender. The British government also heard clearly from Mr Pompeo — and from Australia — that its preference for Huawei 5G threatened the deep trust of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership. Yet it sent him away empty-handed.

‘White Lives Matter Burnley’ said the plane’s banner as it circled the club’s stadium just after the teams had ‘taken the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter. I must admit that my very first reaction on hearing the news was pleasure at the idea that the self-righteousness of Black Lives Matter was being guyed. My second, more considered response is that the banner was bad — and for precisely the same reason that BLM is bad. It takes a statement which any decent person would consider true and turns it into a weapon of race war. Of course black lives matter. Of course white lives matter. The question is: ‘Why are you saying it now?’ The answer, in both cases, is discreditable. It is to make one lot hate the other lot more.

Sonita Alleyne, the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, issued a passionate ‘personal message’ about the killing of George Floyd on her college’s website: ‘The message posted on the College Twitter account “If one man can’t breathe, we all can’t breathe” were my words,’ she revealed. ‘Be angry at this moment.’  Ms Alleyne’s message was published on 5 June — the day, in 1989, when the world watched the famous pictures of a young man confronting a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Soon 10,000 Chinese could not breathe, being dead.

The government’s promised ‘pathway to citizenship’ to Hong Kong people is wonderful, but has the Foreign Office arranged a get-out clause? Last week, Dominic Raab told parliament that ‘if China enacts the [proposed new security] law, we will change the arrangements for British National (Overseas) passport holders in Hong Kong’. He added, however, that ‘We do not oppose Hong Kong passing its own national security law’. Behind this lies the fact that the Basic Law of Hong Kong, arising from the Sino-British Agreement of 1984, prescribes that Hong Kong ‘shall enact its own laws to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition or subversion against the Central People’s Government’. So far, it has not done so.

There is something about Chinese totalitarianism which brings out the silliness of many clever people. I suspect it is to do with the fact that Chinese civilisation, being old and arcane, makes a certain type of person prize uncritically whatever privileged access he gains to the country.  A fortnight ago, I mentioned the fellow-travelling influence of Joseph Needham, Cambridge’s indisputably scholarly historian of Chinese science. Here he is writing to the Cambridge Review in 1976, the last year of Chairman Mao’s reign.

This week in 1989, the Chinese authorities massacred protestors in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. I was editing this paper. It struck me that the people of Hong Kong would suffer huge collateral damage. The Spectator should campaign for them, I thought, and draw attention to the dangers of trusting China to honour the 1984 Sino-British Agreement which Mrs Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping had made to provide for the handover to China in 1997. So we turned the leading article into a two-page affair (a thing unheard-of) and devoted the whole cover to a drawing by Nick Garland of Britannia and the British lion, both kowtowing. The headline was ‘Our Betrayal of Hong Kong’.

If China imposes its proposed new draconian security law for Hong Kong on the territory, where would that leave the independent judiciary? So far, genuine independence has been maintained, and Geoffrey Ma, the Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal (CFA), has spoken up for proper legal values. But he retires soon, and Beijing, which has not previously interfered, has the power of appointment.  The CFA has on it, at any one time, one ‘nonpermanent’ overseas judge out of an active body of ten, on a monthly annual rotation. These judges are mainly British, and always include the President of our Supreme Court (currently Lord Reed), as well as several retired Supreme Court judges. The most famous is Lady Hale, of the spider brooch.