Morning:
13°c
Today's 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China sees huge celebrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the world's largest man-made space.
Tiananmen was also the scene of a massacre on the night of 3-4 June 1989, where hundreds died - and must not be mentioned in China.
When official Chinese spokesmen mention Tiananmen at all, the night of 3-4 June is called "the incident" or the "events".
President Jiang Zemin, China's last president, called it "much ado about nothing".
Here's something that would surprise even George Orwell. Go to your computer and tap in the address "Google.cn" - then search for "Tiananmen". Don't forget the cn.
You will see a stream of articles about the march and air force fly-pasts today and the weather forecast. You will see children flying kites in the square. Now tap in "Tiananmen" into the British Google site - no cn.
There is a Wikipedia article on the massacre along with the most famous picture from Tiananmen: the man standing alone in front of a couple of tanks. That man has vanished. We don't know his name. When asked, Chinese officials say: "He is where he is supposed to be."
This is the old China wrapped in the new one. Certain words and ideas are taboo and dangerous. If you tap in "Tiananmen", "Dalai Lama", "democracy" or "Taiwan" in the wrong context in China, soon there will be a knock on your door and perhaps detention.
How do the Chinese security services manage this? Why, by using the technology for screening and hacking sold to them by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, something one of Google's founders, Sergey Brin, said he was "unhappy about" but business is business.
Indeed it is. Yesterday's Daily Telegraph carried a 15-page China supplement sponsored by Beijing's embassy here in London, including two pieces by foreigners, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, congratulating China on the anniversary and looking forward to plenty of economic interchange.
Fifty words from the end of his three-column article, Lord Mandelson hopes that frank speaking can handle "frictions such as freedom of expression, the rule of law and civic freedom".
What would Lord Mandelson write about similar frictions in Iran or Myanmar?
Or if tackled about Tibet? Within a year of Mao's declaring the establishment of the new regime in 1949, Chinese soldiers began the occupation of Tibet.
This is China's most neuralgic international issue, largely because of the charisma of the Dalai Lama - which explains why "the criminal splittist Dalai" is treated as he is by Google China.
Beijing maintains that Tibet has always been a part of China. In six visits to Tibet I have never met a single Tibetan, including official guides off the record, who thinks that.
But, I hear you ask: aren't millions of Chinese better off now than they were in 1949, or when Mao died in 1976, or even as recently as 1989? Yes, indeed.
If you exclude the 400 million rural people below even China's very low poverty line, life is better. More money. More things. More freedom of travel. Some freedom of spoken speech.
But this is hardly the regime's doing. It has just moved out of the way. Just like us, the Chinese have always longed for better lives, more money, more things.
But until about 1980 this was condemned as bourgeois materialism, a bad attitude, blood-sucking.
Now money-making is good, the Party itself, up to the pinnacle of power, is riddled with corruption, as its leadership occasionally bewails.
A tiny few work in the international financial sector, drive expensive cars, go out clubbing at night and buy their way down Bond Street.
The rest sweat their guts out in fields or, during recent years, in factories making dirt-cheap clothes for Oxford Street and Westfield, crammed into firetrap factories, with no unions, no proper medical care and draconian penalties if they try to leave for another job.
These young workers, often teenage girls, do this because they have travelled great distances to south China to escape their peasant poverty.
And now that so many of those satanic mills have closed - China, too, is experiencing an economic crisis - the girls have returned to their squalid villages, where the government has almost completely stopped making any kind of investment.
Yet, although former Maoist slogans like "serve the people" have gone into history's dustbin, hundreds of thousands are still jockeying to join the Communist Party.
It is the way to economic power, to graft, squeeze, influence and real exploitation.
And what about Beijing the new presence at the top international table - does it co-operate? Not really.
What it has to offer are trillions of dollars, the "sovereign wealth funds" China has made from selling its cheap goods abroad and increasingly from investment abroad, including Britain, where the Chinese are now prowling W11 looking for posh houses to buy and sell.
It is no accident, as they say in the Party, that last November Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced that Tibet is a part of China, something that no British official had ever said before. Subtext? Please, please let us have some of your huge pile of dollars.
Hence Mr Brown in yesterday's Telegraph: "We in Britain have a deep interest in your continued stability, prosperity and success."
What a coincidence: these are the very words China's leaders invariably use to describe their own goals. In China, stability has a special meaning, regularly defined: no Westminster-style democracy, no written criticism unless vetted first, no competing political parties.
Mr Brown is not alone in his subservience. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, equally keen on those Chinese trillions, said recently that during this period of co-operation, human rights must take a back seat.
So no one complains much that China carries on helping Myanmar cow its people, ditto Iran, where China gets 15 per cent of its oil, ditto much of Africa, especially Zimbabwe, a good customer for Chinese weapons.
That is post-Cold War, post-Mao China. Go for the money?
Fine. Go for political change, freedom of speech or mention the Dalai Lama on the internet? As they say in the board game Monopoly - Go Directly to Jail. And we literally buy into it.
Jonathan Mirsky is the former East Asia editor of the Times.
Reader views (10)
This century belongs to China.
Several years ago just after China opened to the west I stood in line in the oppressive heat of a Beijing summer waiting to go in the Mausoleum. I stared down at Mao and wondered why he is revered so, this man had been the focus of the west for decades and here I was before him, though in death, nonetheless an experience I would not forget.
China was a primitive place those days. Talking to a western foreigner could be risky but many did. The naive innocence of the people has long disappeared and so has the rural character of its cities. In all aspects they are as modern or more modern than any in the west. China has awoken and developed at a frenetic pace. Didactic, corrupt, it always was. This time the people will benefit. Working conditions, law, freedoms will improve as will all things there.
I have traveled through its country many times. It offers some spectacularly beautiful scenery, but sadly much of its history is being obliterated in the name of progress.
Strangely, even in the early years, I found more freedom at grass roots level than I have ever experienced in Canada.
Britain I find very free too but here in Canada we have what could only be called a Constitutional Autocracy. I think China will surpass us in freedom some time this century too.
- W.Palmer, North Vancouver, Canada
These 60th anniversary celebrations serve a useful purpose in reminding us that, despite the huge and welcome amount of economic progress over the last two or three decades, China is still run by a group of unreconstructed despots, still worshipping the image of Mao, at whose hands millions of innocent Chinese perished.
Since a couple of correspondents seem to think this relevant, I should add that I too have a Chinese wife. However, I will not let my love of many aspects of the country's culture blind me to the corruption and injustice that remains there.
- Andrew, London
What struck me forcefully when I visited China a couple of years ago was how weak the state perceives itself to be. ...If not, why did the Powers That Be feel it necessary to black out an old man wrapped in a blanket on BBC World TV (the Dalai Lama)? That says it all, surely.
As for those here who praise China to the heavens, they aren't Chinese, are they? ...And if living in China, can get out any time by virtue of the British passport in their back pocket.
- Croyboy, Croydon
I second absolutely the comments made by Mr. Sullivan in that the West are in no position to lecture China in light of their own history (of violence). Every industrialised nation has had a bloody past.
I, of course, have no governance tips for China but I think the following is fair to say: no nation has the know-how to lecture China over its governance and regimes as no other nation has had ever governed nations the size (in population and land mass, etc) of present day China.
In the 18 century, China was subject to relentless bullying from all directions and was known to the West and Japan as "The Sick Men of the Far East". You only need to imagine the mindset of a child that had been bullied by bigger kids during childhood because he was slow to reach puberty. China is reaching its puberty now and they only want to be stronger and able apparently and in fact so that history will not repeat itself on Her.
Commenting as an overseas Chinese, even if i'm not a chinese national; I welcome Her progress into the 21st century.
- Julius Kong, London, UK
You are so right...in particular the brutal suppression of Tibet goes on un abatted...the chinese people who live here...why?? are absolutely brainwashed zombies..I have yet to meet one who criticises the Communist party and leadership...God help us all!!
- Jean, London England
An excellent article in a world kowtowing to the Chinese simply for economic reasons.
Even the Beijing Olymics was a travesty in terms of allowing freedom of expression and protest. Rural China is dirt poor and has seen little if no benefit from the modernisation.
As for Tibet, this a is a blot on the free world's conscience that refuses to go away. The gentle and brave Tibetan people, despite years of cultural destruction, horrendous torture, repression and murder have still maintained a non-violent stance as has their Nobel Peace prize winning leader, the Dalai Lama. They deserve to be commemmorated today for enduring 60 years of sheer bloody repression, not the Chinese Communists.
- Adele, London
I like another corresspondent have a chinese wife but I live in China.This imperialistict attitude that still lives within the English is a shame to the ideals of the UK.
For gods sake China is growing up leave it be,see how it develops.
As for human rights who are we to tell the Chinese,Look at America from the 1960's to Guantanama bay.As for the English well Ireland is documented in history what you did tothem.from the potatoe famine to bloody sunday.
Get of your high hourse and appreciate that China will not make the same mistakes historicaly as we have because they are more intellegent and let them evolve on the path they have chosen and not the one outsiders want to choose for them.
- Denis Regan, harbin,china
I visit China regularly, have a Chinese wife, and, would like to assure the writer that the Chinese are very proud of their Country, its, Government, and, their achievements, and, rightfully so! Even during the Tianenman Square disaster, the people were never calling for the overthrow of the communist party, but reform of it, which subsequently came to pass! The West is in no position to lecture China, it after all brought the worlds pre eminent economic power in the 18th Century to its knees, causing untold misery, and, suffering during 200 years, introducing drugs, rape, and, pillage. That is the disgraceful legacy of the west, not limited to China, and, of course something we never hear of in our media, or acknowledged by our governments! Chinese communities flourish, throughout the world, Chinese entrepreneurs are among the most successful business people anywhere, they always have been even during the communist era, so why should we be surprised at China's success? China is only now reclaiming her rightful place in the global community at the top table, a source, rightfully, of great pride to the Chinese people, and, an inspiration to countries that experienced similiar fates around the world, if only begrudedly by those in the West!
- Kevin Sullivan, Roehampton, London
This chap seems to forget when there was no such thing as one man one vote in Northern Ireland when Protesters were shot dead on the street by British Soldiers (bloody sunday). We still have no answers or prosecutions how do we vary from China?
- Des Egan, london. UK
Yawn-ski. Western countries deal with nefarious regimes. Western countries had an impoverished peasantry before and during industrialisation. Western elites did nasty things to their urban working populations during industrialisation.
The rise of China is inevitable. I welcome it. They have an ancient and deep culture which includes the establishment of the first professional civil service bureaucracy, a necessary facet of a long-lasting and continuous civilisation. Not all countries or spheres can claim this. The Western Greco-Roman/Judaeo-Christian sphere can. The Islamic sphere can. Japan can. China can. Sub-Saharan Africa can't.
- John Doe, London UK
