We should never have tried cosying up to Chinese investors

I can’t read ‘China rocked by protests’ and ‘Zero Covid could be the end of Xi Jinping’s rule’ without recalling 4 May 1989, when I watched chanting students march into Tiananmen Square and overheard the British ambassador Sir Alan Donald declare: ‘There, you see how liberal China is becoming.’ I was a banker back then and had just visited the People’s Bank of China to discuss its appetite for investing in UK government debt – having flown up from Hong Kong, where business was booming under the reassurance that the British-run outpost’s way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years after the forthcoming handover to Beijing.

The consensus among sinologists, bankers and most journalists of the era was that China’s leadership was gradually moving towards businesslike accommodations with the West and with its own internal advocates for reform. A month later, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. Latterly, Hong Kong’s freedoms have been crushed by a brutal ‘national security’ law while western governments strive to exclude Chinese investors but most developing nations offer them a hero’s welcome.

Communist party rule in Beijing has only ever had two objectives: total control at home and ruthless economic imperialism abroad. Rishi Sunak was right when he said that cosying up to Chinese money in the past decade was ‘naive’. Whatever this week’s headlines, don’t hope for change.

North Sea advantage

While Sunak and his ministers were squabbling over whether to lift the embargo on onshore windfarms, I was rubbing shoulders with intrepid UK entrepreneurs in independent oil and gas exploration and production – most of them hopping mad at the 75 per cent marginal tax rate they face after Jeremy Hunt’s Budget. They’re also cross that neither politicians nor the public understand the lower-carbon advantage of North Sea gas over the imported liquefied natural gas on which we’re so heavily reliant: measured by ‘CO2 per barrel of oil equivalent’, LNG from the United States – requiring heavy processing and long-distance shipping – clocks up more than 100kg compared with a North Sea average of around 20kg.