Last week the Government pulled off a remarkable feat by bringing Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Britain and keeping it a secret until the day itself. His address to Parliament was inspiring, courageous and historic. The Government deserves credit for its leadership on Ukraine.
That makes this week’s visitor to London even more inappropriate. Erkin Tuniyaz, the governor of China’s Xinjiang region, was sanctioned by the United States in 2021 for complicity with the genocide of the Uyghurs. Yet the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) plans to meet him.
The FCDO claims the meeting will not take place in government buildings, and will be with officials, not ministers – as if that makes it acceptable.
Not surprisingly, this has caused uproar. Last Thursday Sir Iain Duncan Smith, co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), secured an Urgent Question in the House of Commons. Alicia Kearns, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and several Conservative MPs piled in, along with Catherine West, Labour’s Shadow Asia Minister, Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat co-chair of the Uyghur All Party Parliamentary Group, and others.
Leo Docherty, the Minister responding, tried to defend the Government by arguing that a meeting provided an opportunity “to send extremely robust and strong messages of condemnation.” Kearns, quite rightly, said this was “not good enough”.
Tuniyaz is a very senior official in a regime that is credibly accused of genocide.
That accusation comes not only from activists but from Antony Blinken, the current US Secretary of State, and his predecessor, Mike Pompeo; at least seven parliaments, including our House of Commons; and an independent tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, who had prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights describes the atrocities in Xinjiang as crimes against humanity.
Tuniyaz’s regime is responsible for incarcerating at least a million Uyghurs in prison camps and unleashing a campaign of forced sterilisation, forced abortions, forced labour, forced removal of human organs from prisoners, systematic rape, torture, and religious persecution, including the destruction of mosques and the imprisonment of Muslims for praying, fasting, reading the Koran, wearing headscarves or a long beards or abstaining from pork or alcohol.
It has forcibly separated Uyghur children from parents in order to indoctrinate them into abandoning their religion, culture, language and identity in state-run orphanages. Evidence of Uyghurs being transported around China on trains to work as slaves in factories that are part of the supply chains of multinational corporations has been well-documented.
Xinjiang is the epitome of an Orwellian surveillance state. The regime deploys surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence, together with old-fashioned monitoring, on every street corner. It operates a system of so-called home stays, where Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials move in, uninvited, to live with Uyghur families, monitoring their every move.
This is the system in which Tuniyaz plays a leading role. So what is the government doing issuing him with a visa, let alone meeting him?
This episode is an alarming illustration of a more systemic problem, encapsulated by the Government’s meaningless phrase “robust pragmatism”. Don’t misunderstand me – I want foreign policy to be both robust and pragmatic, in the sense of being practical and delivering results. But the Government’s approach is neither.
Does the FCDO seriously think that, as Duncan Smith put it, a British official telling the Xinjiang governor “Now, now, you’ve got to stop this” over a cup of tea in an undisclosed location in London is going to have an impact?
On the contrary, China’s brutal, criminal regime will celebrate it as a propaganda coup that he has been allowed to visit London and meet officials and will use this to legitimise their crimes back home.
The reality is, the CCP is not a regime one can reason with. That does not mean we should not communicate with them. We should. Even at the height of the Cold War we talked to Moscow, and I have been involved in efforts to engage Pyongyang, so I am not against engagement.
The question is not whether to engage, but how, in what way, with what messages, on what terms and with what objectives. We can deliver robust messages without welcoming the governor to London.
The only language the CCP understands is pressure. Xi Jinping’s regime is a bully, and the best way to handle bullies is to stand up to them and hold them to account.
The right approach would be to sanction Tuniyaz – as the US has done – and ban him from the UK. We have sanctioned around 1200 individuals and 120 entities in response to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, and rightly so. Yet so far we have only sanctioned four mid-ranking officials and one state entity responsible for what Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary recognised as “torture on an industrial scale” in Xinjiang.
It makes no sense to sanction Tuniyaz’s subordinates but not the governor himself, or the architect of the atrocities, Chen Quanguo, former Xinjiang Party Secretary. The top culprits should be held to account.
If we do not sanction him, we should arrest and put him on trial. Last week a barrister, Michael Polak, representing a Kazakh survivor of the prison camps, now living in the UK, sought permission from the Attorney-General to bring a case against Tuniyaz in London. Seven MPs have written to the Attorney-General in support, noting that “evidence has been submitted” to the Metropolitan Police’s War Crimes Team.
The only justifiable reason for allowing Tuniyaz here would be for him to appear in court. Today, from 10am-5pm, Uyghur activists, including the prominent singer and campaigner Rahima Mahmut, will protest outside the FCDO, demanding a meeting with James Cleverly.
I encourage him to agree to meet them urgently, and to instruct his officials to cancel their appointment with the Xinjiang governor. Uyghurs have been requesting a meeting with ministers for years. It would be an insult to them if the FCDO met Tuniyaz and not them. The Foreign Secretary would send Beijing a much more robust message if he met Rahima and her colleagues and sent Tuniyaz packing.
The FCDO must learn from past mistakes. Ministers and officials should reflect on this week’s question posed by The Cultural Tutor: Is it ever possible to justify compliance with an immoral regime?
For too long there has been a naïve belief that we can influence China by trade and dialogue. That has failed. We need to be robust in our actions, not just our words.