When did we stop wanting a democratic China?

Taiwan spent a decade from the mid-1980s transitioning from an authoritarian one-party state to a liberal democracy. Driven by pressure from its middle class, a reform programme was promised and delivered step by step: an end to martial law, permitting opposition parties, permitting a free press, scrapping lifetime political offices, holding the first parliamentary elections, permitting private broadcasters and in 1996 – the culmination of the process – holding the first presidential election. The United States provided encouragement throughout, believing Taiwan would be an example to China. Attempts to normalise relations with China were an important part of the project.

Developments were followed intently in Hong Kong, as it prepared for the end of British rule in 1997. The city's population saw a complex three-sided future, where Beijing would permit them democracy to show Taiwan could safely reunite with China. Hong Kong and Taiwan would then drag China towards reform.

I lived in Hong Kong in the early 1990s and remember the consensus that while none of this would be painless, it was inevitable, like a historical mechanism. China had come close to a democratic revolution in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and was opening its economy in response, meaning it was about to acquire a huge middle class.

Now all these hopes feel like the naivety of a bygone age.

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Weary acceptance

This week the UK government published its much-anticipated “integrated review” of security, defence, development and foreign policy, entitled Global Britain in a Competitive Age.

The review is a weary acceptance of a multi-polar world in which “China is a systemic competitor”, trying to spread its model of prosperous authoritarianism.

The UK will work with allies to hold the line, defending existing and developing democracies, but there is no suggestion of strategising to bring democracy to China itself, or of anticipating reform driven by internal or external means. The People’s Republic is seen as simply too powerful and its dictatorship too entrenched. Mid-ranking countries such as the UK “will need to engage with China and remain open to Chinese trade and investment, but they must also protect themselves against practices that have an adverse effect on prosperity and security”.

Publication of the review sparked an immediate row within the Conservative Party.

Hoping for a democratic China does not have to mean demands for western meddling

Influential backbenchers on Westminster's intelligence and defence committees complained of the "grasping naivety" of thinking the UK can have an economic partnership with a hostile geopolitical rival. Prime minister Boris Johnson was told to "call out" China as a threat and an abuser of human rights. Johnson replied: "Those who call for a new cold war on China or for us to sequester our economy entirely from China are, I think, mistaken. We have a balance to strike, we needed to have a clear-eyed relationship".

Missing from this argument of standing up or bowing down was any hope of change within China. To “call out” Beijing’s conduct in Xinjiang, for example, is pathetic on its own – posturing with the risk of a price tag, should there be consequences for trade. Is that the limit of British ambition? During the Cold War, we were led to hope the peoples behind the iron curtain would one day be free and that our defence and intelligence services were striving for that goal.

A free China

Perhaps a public policy document is not the place to muse on subverting a foreign power, but the argument for a free China is missing everywhere. Even the United States no longer makes it. The West has tacitly accepted Beijing's stance that its system is as legitimate as any other. The Communist Party portrays Western criticism as arrogance and hypocrisy, given histories of racism and imperialism. This makes little sense from the vantage point of China's neighbours but a West losing its self-confidence has internalised the notion regardless.

Hoping for a democratic China does not have to mean demands for western meddling. It can be as little as a hope that one-fifth of humanity will find its own way to a better form of government. That thought should not be controversial, let alone so rarely heard.

There is no guarantee a reforming China would be a benign presence. It could be even more nationalist and expansionist, as is feared of post-Putin Russia. It could be unstable, as Chinese people tend to fear, despite their enduring civilisation. But we must still allow ourselves to dream of a world where China took Taiwan as a model instead of a warning. Had it done so, it might today be three times richer – based on Taiwan's income per head – making it by far the largest economy on earth, bound tightly into international norms. The culture and energy of its people would be unleashed as a tremendous soft power force, with an influence perhaps comparable to Japan's, only 10 times larger.

I would like to live in that world. It is a tragedy we are all denied it.