Graham's blog entry Friday 23 November

Published on Fri 23rd Nov 2007

Parliament's committees were in session in Brussels this week: our foreign affairs ministers met Monday and Tuesday and our economic and finance ministers yesterday and today. As the leader of a large Group of MEPs I no longer sit on a committee, so I felt able to slip away to the Far East for four days with a few colleagues.

Prior to my election to Parliament in 1994 I worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and had the opportunity to travel widely in Asia, mainly where there were chinese communities to be found. The rapid economic growth there opened my eyes to developments of global significance and during my time in Parliament I have sought to introduce colleagues to the region. I hold the democratisation of the People's Republic of China to be the most urgent task of the first quarter of this century: without it we will be unable to tackle big challenges like climate change and internationally organised crime effectively. Part of the purpose of this visit to the Far East was to show support for democracy activists in the region.

So it was that I took MEP colleagues Karen Restarits of Austria, Sarunas Birutis of Lithuania and Vladko Panajotov of Bulgaria to Taiwan and Hong Kong. We found Taiwan thriving, its 23 million citizens having developed their society into a successful modern democracy since the lifting of martial law 20 years ago. Its people now see themselves first and foremost as Taiwanese, though since most are ethnically Chinese they feel a strong kinship with the mainlanders. Current debate centres around whether they might one day be admitted to the UN under the name 'Taiwan' or whether pressure from the Communist mainland will keep them an international pariah. The claim of the People's Republic over the sovereignty of Taiwan is weak: before the Qing dynasty annexed the island in 1683 they had paid little, if any, attention to it. And had Chiang Kai-shek's retreating nationalists not fled there in 1949 it might still be under the Japanese occupation it had known since 1895. It is only since the defeat of the Kuomintang (nationalist) party in the Presidential election in 2000 that national Taiwanese consciousness has flowered on the island. And it is largely thanks to President Chen Shui-bian of our Liberal International sister party the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) - who presented me with an honour during the visit to mark my contribution to the building of EU-Taiwan relations - that people have been enabled and empowered to develop aspirations to nationhood. They live precariously, under constant threat from a massive arsenal of missiles aimed at them from across the Straits, but they are among the few Chinese who enjoy freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

While I was in Taiwan I also discussed with the Minister for Education progress with my scheme to introduce Mandarin into secondary schools in the South West using Taiwanese assistants.

In the twenty years since I lived and worked in Hong Kong and the ten years since the UK transferred sovereignty to China - and despite the challenges of the late 90s' Asian financial crisis and the recent SARS outbreak - the place has prospered. It is not a democracy, China having not yet fulfilled its pledge to allow direct election of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage, but its 5 million people are reasonably free. The convoluted system of government we bequeathed it has managed to retain the rule of law, though a barrister friend of mine trying to use a legal loophole to bring former PRC President Jiang Ze-min to trial for complicity in the torture of Falun Gong practitioners has come up against all manner of delays and obfuscation. The main challenge facing Hong Kong is self-censorship out of fear of how Beijing might react. This is pernicious and means that mainland Chinese, under authoritarian rule, are sometimes more ready publicly to criticise their leaders than the 'free' people of Hong Kong. We met legislators from the Democratic camp, including my old friend Lee Chu-ming (Martin Lee QC), government representatives and organisations of civil society. They fear gradual asphyxiation of their freedoms by Beijing. All will depend on the policy direction and the fate of China's ruling Communists.

Tonight I'll be in Yeovil at the AGM of the Somerset and Dorset branch of the European Movement. Tomorrow afternoon I address the United Nations Association in Bath, tomorrow evening a Bristol South Lib Dem supper, and on Sunday I travel to Rome for meetings there that evening and on Monday. I'll report next Friday on developments in Brussels once I've caught up with them all.