China: Security and Trade (IRDC Report)

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the very thoughtful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. I think the last time we were together at a public event was at the launch of the diaries of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, in which Sir Percy Cradock features quite prominently. Anyone wanting to understand the betrayal of the people of Hong Kong should most certainly read them. I declare my interests as vice-chair of the all-party groups on the Uighurs and Hong Kong. I am a patron of Hong Kong Watch and a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

Notwithstanding the disappointment that it has taken so long for the Select Committee report to be debated, I put on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, for her superb chairmanship of the committee and for navigating us through controversial issues to produce a report which moves the debate beyond the naivety of the “golden era”—which was, as the noble Lord, Lord Patten, told us, an example of “doubtless well-meaning failure”. The report tackles hugely important questions about trade and security, not least the gaping wounds of lost national resilience and our phenomenal dependency on a country which stands accused of genocide.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind told us:

“China has become much closer to a totalitarian state than at any time since the death of Mao Zedong.”


We heard what we called

“conclusive evidence that China also poses a significant threat to the UK’s interests, particularly in light of the … tilt to the Indo-Pacific region.”

We concluded that the UK has had a lack of clarity and a policy of “deliberate constructive ambiguity”, as my noble and gallant friend Lord Stirrup has reminded us, and what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, referred to as the “cake-ism” of the 2021 integrated review, which regarded China as both a “systemic competitor” and an “important partner”.

The report criticises the failure to provide any details on how the Government will balance plans for

“increased economic engagement … with the need to protect the UK’s wider interests and values.”

It calls on the Government to produce a “single, coherent China strategy” and warns of serious risks to our security and prosperity—including to our international trade and investments over the longer term.

This month’s government announcement that China is to be formally designated a “threat” to Britain rather than a “systemic competitor” is a belated but very welcome move towards a clearer strategy. It follows the recent warnings by Jeremy Fleming, the head of GCHQ, about the CCP’s efforts to exploit control and surveillance capabilities in emerging technologies, such as satellite location systems and digital currencies, which he said represent a “threat to us all”. I have eight questions for the Minister about specific threats to which I hope he can give us some answers today—if not, I hope he will agree to write to us.

First, during the passage of the telecommunications legislation, the Government said they would strip out 5G Huawei components from our telecom network. This removal of 5G was to happen in January 2023, with fines if the deadline was not met. Now we are told that there will be delays, even though a designated vendor direction has been issued identifying, in the Government’s words, that

“covert and malicious functionality could be embedded in Huawei’s equipment.”

When will the decision on Huawei be fully complied with?

Secondly, why have the Government, unlike the United States, still made no move to ban and remove Hikvision and Dahua cameras made in Xinjiang and used to collect data up and down the length and breadth of the UK? There is an opportunity in the Procurement Bill to remedy this. Will the Minister be able to tell us whether that opportunity will be taken at Report stage of that Bill?

Thirdly, on Monday—the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and others have referred to this—the Minister told us that the assault on Bob Chan, the young man at the Chinese consulate in Manchester, was “a very serious incident.” I met Bob Chan yesterday. Can the Minister tell us when the Greater Manchester Police are likely to provide a report to him and the Foreign Secretary and to spell out the consequences when the brutality for which the CCP is renowned is exported to the UK, threatening the safety of the 133,000 and more Hong Kongers who have fled to the United Kingdom under the Government’s admirable BNO resettlement scheme? I draw the Minister’s attention to a column in today’s Times, written by Jawad Iqbal, a freelance journalist, who says that what happened in Manchester was an

“affront to British democratic norms and values.”

Fourthly, the BBC reported last week that up to 30 former UK military pilots are believed to have gone to train members of China’s People’s Liberation Army, lured by the CCP with large sums of money to pass on their expertise to the Chinese military. What are we doing to address that threat?

Fifthly, with the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, we were in two of the Gulf states last week and were concerned to learn of joint military exercises between China, Russia and Iran. So imagine my consternation on return on reading a report in the Telegraph saying that:

“British academics have collaborated on thousands of research papers with Chinese military scientists, according to a government-funded report that universities sought to suppress.”


Some 13,415 collaborative partnerships with China, Russia and Iran were identified, and 11,611 were between Chinese and British academics. Why was the report suppressed, and what are we doing in partnerships on things as sensitive as rail gun design, hypersonic missiles and tracking systems for nuclear submarines? Why are we sharing expertise or developing partnerships to do those things?

Sixthly, despite our intelligence service publicly warning Parliament of the presence of CCP operatives and spies on our Parliamentary Estate, with one claiming that she had even secured amendments to legislation in your Lordships’ House, why has no action been taken to bring her here, for instance, to answer questions about these subversive activities?

Seventhly, in addition to subversion of UK institutions, we have seen the subversion of international institutions, with the votes of countries being bought and linked to belt and road indebtedness. How are we countering this? For instance, what will be included in the National Security Bill, currently in another place, to limit interference by people operating on behalf of the Chinese state?

Eighthly, the Minister is rightly regarded as one of this country’s leading champions of renewable energy and sustainability. What does he make of reports drawn to my attention by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, that BMW is to stop producing electric cars in England in 2023 and moving the production of electric Minis from Cowley to China? Last year, Cowley made around 40,000 electric Minis. Why are we ceding our aspirations to be a leader in global electric car manufacturing? What can be done about this? How can we avert it? I will have more to say about resilience and dependency.

Ken McCallum, MI5’s director-general, has said

“what is at risk from Chinese Communist Party aggression is … The world-leading expertise, technology, research and commercial advantage developed”

by technology companies and universities in the UK. We have to take that seriously.

In addition to threats to cybersecurity and technology, our report highlighted threats to maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region and to Taiwan, as we have heard, where we said conflict would be “catastrophic” and that

“managing this risk should be the Government’s top strategic priority.”

We raised serious maritime threats, the imposition of the national security law, the trashing of an international treaty and destruction of democracy in Hong Kong—all illustrative of the CCP’s contempt for international rules-based order—and what Michelle Bachelet recently described as “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang in a report commissioned by the UN.

In his evidence to the committee, Charles Parton went further and said that genocide—not just crimes against humanity but outright genocide—is under way in Xinjiang. When she was Foreign Secretary, Elizabeth Truss said the same. The appalling treatment of the mainly Muslim Uighurs, which was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has included intense surveillance, much of it manufactured by Hikvision, mass detentions, forcible sterilisation and insertion of IUDs, forced migration, and the kidnapping of Uighur children, abducted from their parents and placed in state institutions, accompanied by terrible violence, torture and killing.

Both Sir Geoffrey Nice KC’s independent tribunal and the Holocaust Museum found evidence of coercive interventions by the Chinese government to prevent sizeable numbers of Uighurs from coming into being, suggesting that the deliberate goal is

“to biologically destroy the group, in whole or in substantial part.”

Nice’s tribunal concluded that this is indeed genocide.

I ask the Minister the same question that I put to George Osborne when he appeared before the committee. It was not a question about whether we should trade with countries that commit human rights violations, because we could identify countries around the world that commit human rights violations, it was: is it licit to do business as usual with a state credibly accused of genocide, which is the crime above all crimes?

In our report, we recommend that the Government

“should incorporate an atrocity prevention lens in its overall approach to trade. Current atrocity prevention tools and strategies have fallen short.”

When will the Government do this?

Then—as I said I would return to it—there is our appalling dependency on the CCP. Compare it with the clarity of its strategy of undermining resilience and security; acquiring intellectual property and data; and destroying competitiveness through slave labour in everything from green energy to surveillance equipment. One of the CCP’s reasons for wanting to destroy the freedoms of Taiwan’s 23 million people is to control the production of the world’s semiconductors—the cornerstone of modern economies. One Taiwanese company, TSMC, makes over 80% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

Meanwhile, further illustrating our incoherent strategy, we seriously consider allowing the sale to China of Newport Wafer Fab—our biggest producer of semiconductors. As Germany has discovered, love affairs with dictatorships come at a terrible price. Where does the sale of Newport Wafer Fab now stand?

During our inquiry, I was surprised to hear witnesses tell us how fortunate we were that China had made available invaluable help during a pandemic that had its origins in Wuhan. This included a reluctant admission that the Government had bought 1 billion lateral flow tests from China. They subsequently confirmed that they bought 24.1 billion items of personal protective equipment where China is recorded as the country of origin, at a phenomenal total cost of £10.9 billion. That is about the equivalent of the entire—reduced—British overseas aid budget.

This is not philanthropy. Increasingly, developing nations are being turned into dependent vassal states. We saw in the recent vote on the Bachelet report in the Human Rights Council that votes of those who voted with China not to even debate the report have been bought via indebted dependency. A diplomat recently said it was like having a

“1,000 pound gorilla on my back.”

Note, too, that by September, in the face of the global food crisis, China had given $10 million to the World Food Programme, compared with $5 billion from the United States of America. We see the same attempted systematic appropriation and subversion of international institutions, including the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization.

Xi Jinping and the CCP have demonstrated time and again that they are unwilling to abide by international treaties, and that they are untrustworthy, cruel and unpredictable. This includes when it comes to the ongoing breach of the Sino-British joint declaration and the human rights crackdown in Hong Kong; the crimes against humanity or genocide taking place in Xinjiang; the launching of trade wars against countries such as Lithuania and Australia; the unlawful detention of Canadian diplomats; and the flouting of basic obligations under the WHO when it comes to sharing information regarding pandemics. Ministers could do well to look at the Biden Administration and recent legislation in the US Congress, including the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, to see a Government willing to invest in domestic industry, tackle climate change and reduce their dependency on authoritarian regimes.

If the West wants to protect itself, it must face up to the reality of the CCP’s history and its future intentions: executions; famine; deaths through forced labour; mass deportations; forced sterilisation and coercive abortion; purges of opponents; incarceration for dissent or unwillingness to comply with a brutal ideology—these are all the hallmarks of the CCP. With Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signing a declaration that there will be “no limits” to their friendship, it is crucial, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, reminded us, that we build our international partnerships and alliances through NATO, AUKUS and elsewhere.

To conclude, the CCP has been holding its rubber-stamp Congress. Obsessed with control—evidenced by its lockdown policy—it is veering in the direction of belligerent nationalism. But as has been demonstrated by “Tank Man” in Tiananmen Square in 1989, “Bridge Man” on the Sitong Bridge last week or Bob Chan protesting in Manchester on behalf of those who remain in Hong Kong, and by the brave people of Taiwan, Ukraine and the young women of Iran, authoritarians often overestimate their hold on power.

Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and dissident and Nobel laureate, who died in 2017 after serving four prison sentences, said,

“there is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom”.

He was right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I doubt I am qualified to get into a scrap on this issue, but my understanding is that there is nothing that the NSC was doing that is not done within the new council. But I shall seek clarity on the issue.

Regional partnerships are especially important in defence and security. We are deepening our engagement with Indo-Pacific partners bilaterally, multilaterally and with smaller groups of like-minded partners. The Five Power Defence Arrangements, where we work together with Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore, reached their 50th anniversary last year. The AUKUS defence partnership with Australia and the US also strengthens regional peace and stability, and the UK has responded positively to the requests of our partners to build their capacity in maritime security. The deployment of the UK carrier strike group to the Indo-Pacific last year, where it engaged with 40 countries, demonstrated our commitment to partnership. Two Royal Navy offshore patrol vessels, now stationed permanently in the region, are further deepening this partnership and supporting capacity-building.

The former Prime Minister—my apologies: she is the current Prime Minister—has commissioned an update of the integrated review to be completed by the end of the year. That integrated review will take account of and reflect the dramatic changes that have happened as a consequence of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but the priorities within the integrated review will remain the same: we are not looking at any dramatic shift.

I am so sorry, but I cannot read the names of who asked me certain questions; I apologise if I attribute them to the wrong noble Lords.

On Taiwan, the UK has a clear interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. As we have always said, the issue must be settled by the people on both sides of the strait through constructive dialogue, without any threat or use of force or coercion. On the issue of visits to Taiwan by western politicians—this is an example of where I cannot read the name of the noble Lord who asked the question—and specifically the visit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, it is our view that China’s military exercises were inherently destabilising. They form part of a pattern of escalatory Chinese activity over recent months which includes a growing number of military flights near Taiwan. These are not the actions of a responsible international actor. They undermine peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, which is clearly a matter of global concern. The UK’s long-standing policy on Taiwan remains exactly the same. We have no diplomatic relations with Taiwan, but we have a strong unofficial relationship based on deep and growing ties in an increasingly wide range of areas, underpinned by shared democratic values.

On the issue of academic freedom, particularly in relation to students from China here in the UK—a question raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay—academic freedom and freedom of speech are obviously fundamental values to us in the UK. They are cornerstones of the UK’s world-class higher education system and central to a student’s experience. Universities have specific legal responsibilities to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law. Academics, students and visiting speakers must therefore be empowered to challenge ideas and discuss controversial subjects. If institutions or individuals feel under pressure to compromise on those values, to compromise on academic freedom or freedom of expression, we strongly encourage them to come to the Government and provide us with that information.

It is essential to maintain the UK’s place at the heart of an unrivalled global network of economic, diplomatic and security partnerships—partnerships that deliver for British businesses and British people. That is why the Government continue to invest in China expertise and Mandarin language skills across government and our international network. This expertise, coupled with a deeper understanding of the wider Indo-Pacific region, will be even more important as China’s international assertiveness increases and our ties to the region continue to grow.

Before I come to the end, I want to address recent events in Manchester, which we discussed yesterday on the back of an Urgent Question. However, the Minister in the other place has since said more on the subject. Like other noble Lords, I have seen the consul general’s Sky News interview, which has been referenced in the debate today, in which he claimed that it was his duty to get involved in a physical altercation with a protestor. I would add, as my colleague in the other place did, that no matter how absurd those comments may appear to us, it remains important that we follow due process and await details from the police investigation before determining whatever actions we should take.

However, as the Minister for the Americas and the Overseas Territories, Jesse Norman, set out in the other place, we will take further action without any hesitation, depending on the outcome of that investigation. Our ambassador in Beijing will deliver a clear message directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and we will send a public message to the Hong Kong community in the UK. I was asked by a noble Lord—again, I sincerely apologise that I cannot read my own writing to see who it was—when that police investigation is likely to end. I am afraid I cannot give a specific date, but I will seek to extract one from the authorities and to share it if I can.

To conclude, the International Relations and Defence Committee’s report makes a valuable contribution to this hugely important topic. We welcome the committee’s scrutiny of our approach to China as we manage disagreements, defend our freedoms and co-operate where our interests align. I end by thanking my noble friend Lady Anelay once again for tabling this debate and all noble Lords for their insightful contributions.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I asked a number of questions—eight in particular—which have not been answered. I recognise that the Minister cannot answer everything in the course of the debate, but I did ask if he could give an assurance that he would write to answer those questions he was not able to deal with.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I apologise if I did not answer all eight questions. I am quite sure I did not; I will check Hansard and will certainly follow up on whatever questions remain unanswered.