China syndrome

The Chinese government is unlikely to give Theresa May a panda in the near future. This week the country’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, left no one in any doubt that President Xi Jinping takes a dim view of Mrs May’s decision to review the deal for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset — a deal through which China General Nuclear, the state nuclear-energy company, would have a one-third share. The Prime Minister was told that Anglo-Chinese relations are at a-‘critical historical juncture’. So she’d better play-nicely and approve that power station — or risk the wrath of Beijing.

This is a far cry from the prevailing atmosphere last October, when Xi Jinping shared a pint of Greene King with David Cameron and, with human rights protestors kept at bay, was treated to a banquet at Buckingham Palace. China, in the eyes of Cameron and Osborne, was the answer to many of Britain’s infrastructure shortcomings. Cameron had erred in meeting the Dalai Lama, not realising how badly this would go down in Beijing. So Osborne embarked on a penitential tour of China, and returned promising that money from the Far East would build our power stations and railways. It might even fill the hole left by austerity in Whitehall.

Osborne did have a point. There are some critics of China’s human-rights record who would not want Britain to do business with Beijing at any price: a respectable, but extreme position. If we refused to trade with any country with a less-than-perfect human rights record, our imports would be restricted to Norwegian cheese — and even that would be questioned by anti-whaling protesters. What matters is that Chinese human rights are moving in the right direction, as has the whole country since its economy opened up to the West in the 1990s.