SIMON TISDALL’S latest column in the Guardian is a remarkable document. Its complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China, but that it has not been aggressive enough.

“A debilitating fatalism has taken hold in the west about China’s behaviour,” Tisdall writes. It is “as though Xi’s China is now seen as simply too big, too economically powerful and too militarily threatening to influence, let alone contain or control.” Britain, “culpably silent on human rights”, has failed to articulate a coherent China policy.

What planet was this filed from?

Is the West insufficiently hostile towards China? There is a tariff war. There is an export ban on advanced semiconductors. There is Aukus and the Quad, and a chain of US bases running from Japan through the Philippines to Australia, with nine “Enhanced Defence Co-operation Agreement” sites in the Philippines alone. There are arms sales to Taiwan and the steady hollowing-out of the One China policy. There is RIMPAC, the largest naval exercise on earth, staged annually in China’s neighbourhood. And there is a relentless propaganda war seeking to demonise and isolate China – of which this article is itself a specimen.

Absurdly, Tisdall cites Japan’s new defence white paper and Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Pacific Command, on China’s “coercive actions” – which is to say, the encircling powers complaining about the encircled.

Ethnic unity

Tisdall opens with an attack on China’s new ethnic unity law, asking the reader to imagine a British prime minister telling the Welsh that “their language and poetry were banned and must no longer be taught in schools.”

This is a somewhat unfortunate choice of analogy. Wales is where children caught speaking their mother tongue had a wooden board – the Welsh Not – hung around their necks, with the child wearing it at the end of the day being subjected to a beating. Britain doesn’t have to “imagine” such a policy; it enforced it, which is precisely why the language question sits at the heart of Welsh national feeling to this day.

Not content with one ridiculous analogy, Tisdall asks the reader if the people of Scotland were denied their right to a national football team. Britain’s four separate teams are an accident of the game’s origins, not a principle of self-determination: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland established independent football associations between 1863 and 1880, meaning they predated Fifa (founded in 1904). If universalised, Tisdall’s standard would hand China 55 additional votes at Fifa, some of them, since he describes the minorities as “ethnic and religious,” presumably on confessional grounds. Tempting though the prospect of 55 more votes for peace and socialism might be, it is striking that his indignation stops at China’s borders. Catalonia, the Basque Country, Quebec, Hawaii, Corsica, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man have no Fifa membership either, and neither do those “integral parts of France” that happen to lie in the Caribbean – Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana.

He also overlooks the obvious. Hong Kong and Macao both field national teams and have done so for decades, as full members of Fifa. But then, we couldn’t have people thinking that one country, two systems is working.

China’s ethnic unity law, for what it’s worth, explicitly reaffirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own spoken and written languages, and prohibits discrimination against any ethnic group. Inner Mongolia runs some 1,900 minority-language schools. Xinjiang publishes newspapers and broadcasts in six languages. Minority students receive preferential university admission; the national minorities were exempt from the one-child policy throughout its existence; young people in Xizang (Tibet) and Xinjiang receive fifteen years of publicly funded education; and those two regions are the highest per-capita recipients of central government transfers in the country. Britain offers none of this to anybody.

An assertion in place of evidence

Tisdall asserts “wholesale repression in Tibet and brutal ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang,” and moves straight on. No evidence, no source, no argument.

He can do this because the story has been through the Western media laundry often enough that the Guardian now feels able to drop it in as an aside, in spite of the total absence of credibility among those making the accusations.

The two most prominent sources for the Xinjiang story are Adrian Zenz, a German-American researcher whose work has been repeatedly discredited, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think tank funded by Western governments and arms companies. Zenz is a fanatical anti-communist who says he feels “led by God” in his mission against China, and whose other published work recommends “scriptural spanking” for unruly children. ASPI is funded by the Australian government, the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.

Set against the assertions, meanwhile, is the actual record. Life expectancy in Xinjiang has risen from 30 years in 1949 to around 77 today. The Uighur population grew from 10 million to 11.6 million between 2010 and 2020 – an increase of 16 percent, against 2 per cent for the region’s Han population. And all 420 poverty-stricken counties in China’s ethnic autonomous areas were lifted out of absolute poverty by 2021. Whatever these are, they are not the demographics of genocide.

Two of the most eminent authorities to have examined the charge – the economist Jeffrey Sachs and William Schabas, among the world’s foremost scholars of genocide law – concluded in 2021 that the US determination of genocide was unjustified and should be withdrawn, the State Department having “offered no proof.” Genocide, as they observed, is the crime of crimes, and the evidentiary bar ought to be correspondingly high. Readers of a newspaper that prides itself on evidence might expect at least a footnote.

Support for the victims of a criminal war

On Iran, we learn that China is “reportedly planning” to provide air defence systems and shoulder-fired missiles. Reportedly by whom, we are not told.

But would it be such a terrifying crime if China were to provide these things to Iran? After all, the US and Israel have been engaged in a brutal and criminal war against the country for the last five months. Tisdall himself, in the same column, notes Washington’s “trashing of the post-1945 global order” and its “disdain for international law and national sovereignty (as seen in Venezuela and Greenland).” His alarm is nonetheless reserved for the possibility that someone might actually do something about it.

The coming collapse of China

On the economy, Xi is “failing to deliver” – in an article which four sentences earlier had him “winning trade and tech wars” and outmanoeuvring Trump. Both cannot be true, and only one of them is sourced.

Tisdall notes that the “US worries that it is in danger of losing the AI race,” since China has recently “agreed AI partnerships with 28 countries, mostly from the global South.” This is a reference to the World AI Co-operation Organisation, founded in Shanghai in July, whose purpose is to share open-source models and train specialists from countries many of which could not otherwise afford access. Offering a transformative technology to the global South, rather than hoarding it behind export controls, is here recast as a threat requiring an urgent response.

For the many

Then comes the verdict: “Xi is still an unelected autocrat, a thug in a suit who relies on force to stay in power.”

Unelected by what measure? China has an extensive system of people’s democracy with elections from village to national level. It’s not the “Westminster system” of capitalist democracy, which turns out not to be terribly democratic (as Joseph Stiglitz has described the state of modern governance in the West, “of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent”); however, Chinese people enjoy a far more meaningful democracy than their Western peers.

As Roland Boer sets out, that democratic system runs through five levels of people’s congress, from village and township up to the National People’s Congress and its three thousand deputies, with direct elections at the lower levels and indirect elections above them. Candidates must outnumber the seats available – by between 30 and 100 per cent in direct elections – and a poll is valid only if more than half the electorate takes part.

Running alongside the people’s congresses is an extensive apparatus of consultative democracy, in which legislation is pored over at exhaustive length before it is ever put to a vote. This is the answer to the stock jibe about rubber stamps: lopsided votes in the National People’s Congress reflect not the absence of deliberation but the fact that it has already happened, generally from the grassroots up. Western democracy, by contrast, is as Boer puts it a rather thin affair – an occasional choice between a few increasingly indistinguishable parties, after which the electorate is thanked and sent home.

And whatever one makes of China’s democratic system, citizens do not appear to experience it as tyranny. Successive surveys, including a13-year study by the Harvard Ash Center, have found satisfaction with the central government running above 90 per cent – a figure no Western government has approached in living memory. “Communist emperor” and “thug in a suit,” meanwhile, tell us rather less about Chinese governance than about the register in which it remains permissible to write about China in the West.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing

The sole purpose of the article is to call on Western governments to escalate their campaign against China, and to supply the human-rights framing that makes escalation appear principled. Trump is deplored in one paragraph and the policy he is pursuing, and then some, demanded in the next. It is quintessential wolf in sheep’s clothing liberalism – and it is if anything more dangerous than the honest belligerence of the right, because it recruits people of genuine conscience to a war they would otherwise oppose.

As Malcolm X said: “I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”