“Hong Kong will become a bridge to a new relationship between Britain and China which is stronger and more constructive than we have enjoyed up to now,” wrote Robin Cook in 1997. This new relationship, the then Foreign Secretary suggested, “would enable Britain and China to hold a constructive dialogue on international security, on global issues such as the environment and on universal standards of human rights”.

Twenty-six years on, as the current UK Foreign Secretary travels to Beijing to discuss the atrocities in Xinjiang, the sanctioning of UK Members of Parliament, and the brutal repression of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, Cook’s words seem like a distant – and perhaps naive – fantasy. Hong Kong today is a place where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), aided and abetted by British-based firms, has slowly closed its fist around the thousands of Hong Kongers who dared to stand up for freedom and democracy.

Jimmy Lai is one such Hong Konger. But more than that: the 75-year-old entrepreneur and media mogul currently languishing in pre-trial detention is also a British citizen and UK passport holder. Mr Lai is perhaps best known as the founder of Apple Daily – a once-popular Hong Kong newspaper that was forcibly shut down by the Chinese government in June 2021 – and has long been an outspoken critic of the CCP.

After the passage of the National Security Law in 2020, the septuagenarian Mr Lai found himself subject to unrelenting waves of criminal allegations from the Chinese government, including three charges of foreign collusion, three charges of unauthorised assembly and one charge of sedition. He has now spent almost three years in prison awaiting trial under these charges, during which time he has also been sentenced to five years in a high-security prison for the crime of operating a consultancy business in an office space that had been rented for “publishing and printing”.

Yet even as the Chinese government continues to prosecute its obvious vendetta against critics like Mr Lai, the CCP has never been short of friends in boardrooms across the world, who, equipped with golden blindfolds, have shown themselves more than willing to acquiesce to its bidding to protect their profits. When the National Security Law was being passed, the Asia-Pacific chief executive of the British-based HSBC publicly backed its introduction, while Standard Chartered issued a statement stating its belief that “the National Security Law can help maintain the long-term economic and social stability of Hong Kong”. HSBC, whose website boasts of the firm’s pride in “helping to create a better world for our customers, our people, our investors, our communities and the planet we all share”, was also the first foreign bank to establish a CCP committee in its investment banking arm.

After the law was passed, and the Chinese government moved swiftly to arrest pro-democracy protestors, these banks complied with CCP requests to freeze their bank accounts. And when almost 90,000 Hong Kongers fled to Britain using special UK-issued visas, these same banks complied with CCP requests not to allow them to withdraw the pensions they had paid into their entire lives. In doing so, the US Secretary of State noted that banks like HSBC were “maintaining accounts for individuals who have been sanctioned for denying freedom for Hong Kongers, while shutting accounts for those seeking freedom”.

The CCP’s crackdown on opposition politicians and dissenting journalists is an obvious sign of its paranoia and weakness. What does that say about those who have gone along with it? In evidence given to the All-Party Group on Hong Kong, Lord Patten, former Chancellor of the University of Oxford, argued that UK-China relations have historically been seen by China as “an opportunity… through the cultivation of useful idiots, through playing on things like the ‘Golden Age’ of British-China relations, getting us by and large corralled into doing the sort of things they would like us to do”.

Throughout Xi Jinping’s long rule, he has gone from pouring pints with David Cameron to being labelled a national security threat by Liz Truss. The UK Foreign Secretary’s recent meetings with Chinese diplomats in the Great Hall of the People saw Rishi Sunak’s government perform another volte-face, making it harder to shake off the feeling that the UK is being played like a fiddle.

And so, with all of this in mind, what is to be done about China? Are we to de-couple or de-risk? What do these terms even mean? The debate around China can at times be mind-numbing and a minefield. But it’s one we cannot walk away from.

There is a growing space for forward and active debate around China policy, uniting parliamentarians around the world in the form of the Interparliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac), which I have been a member of since its early days. Its membership is made up of politicians from across the world and from all ends of the political spectrum, and I was pleased to take part in their global conference in Prague last week.

It was refreshing to meet with fellow legislators from Japan, Korea, Paraguay, Australia, Canada, Kenya and Europe to have a thoughtful discussion about how we nudge our national governments, industries and the public into a position on China fit for the modern age. It was also a privilege to hear from those who have been the victim of CCP policy, from representatives of the Uyghurs, Taiwanese legislators, pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong and those who have been mercilessly harassed for standing up against slave labour in China.

I have written in these pages before about the need for us to have a much more robust political debate on China. The recent intelligence committee report should have opened eyes in Edinburgh as much as in London. The ‘Golden Era’ is over. It’s up to us to shape what comes next.

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South

China is trashing human rights while western governments and corporations play along – Stewart McDonald

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