CHINA has imposed sanctions on nine UK citizens – including five MPs for spreading ‘lies and disinformation’ about the country.
This is China’s very minor response to the UK imposing its first-ever sanctions on Chinese officials earlier in the week. The retaliation measures by China are the first sanctions imposed by Beijing on the UK.
Four groups have also been sanctioned, the China Research Group, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, the Uighur Tribunal and Essex Court Chambers.
The five MPs facing sanctions are: Tory MPs Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Nusrat Ghani and Tim Loughton, who are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, and Tom Tugendhat and Neil O’Brien, who lead the China Research Group. Sanctioned peers are Baroness Kennedy and Lord Alton, of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
We repeat, these Chinese sanctions are minimal. British capitalism is being given a chance to repent. The truth is that the UK ruling class needs China. China does not need a bankrupt UK.
However, the UK ruling class also needs the support of the US, and a future trade deal with it even more. So the UK ruling class is on a tightrope, balancing between the devil and the deep blue sea, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
What is being exposed is bankrupt UK capitalism … it can’t survive on its own. The British ruling class is fighting for its survival. The UK rulers cannot even build their own power stations. They are completely and utterly reliant on foreign states to build their infrastructure for them.
Transport union RMT confirmed that 70% of UK rail routes are now wholly or partly owned by foreign states, mainly Italy, Germany, France and Holland. Hinkley Point C nuclear power station (HPC) will be built by French state-owned EDF and Chinese state-owned CGN, who will pay £6bn for one third of it.
The UK relied on China to build its 5G network. Chinese company Huawei had already begun installing its masts when the US intervened. The US gave the Tory government its marching orders: to ban Huawei and begin disabling the telecommunications equipment.
China has also become the largest operator in the North Sea through the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), which boasts on its website that it accounts for ‘more than 25 per cent of the UK’s oil production, and 10 per cent of the country’s energy needs’. Chinese firm Jingye bought British Steel in November 2019 for the paltry sum of £50m.
It is not generally known just how close the love-in was between China, a deformed workers’ state, and a desperate British imperialism. In September 2015, during his ministerial visit to China, George Osborne, Tory Chancellor when Cameron was in power, tweeted: ‘China and Britain stand on the brink of golden decade of cooperation. No economy in world is as open to Chinese investment as UK. #UKChina.’
Such was the ‘love-in’ between China and the Cameron government that Labour’s shadow chancellor of the time, John McDonnell, brandished a copy of the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book in Parliament to make a point about Osborne’s attempts to sell off state assets to the Chinese. He read out a passage and then threw it across the table of the Parliament towards Osborne ‘to assist comrade Osborne about dealing with his newfound comrades, I have brought him along Mao’s Little Red Book.’
Now, however, the UK must replace trade with the EU with a desperate attempt to get a trade deal with the US. The British ruling class have prostrated themselves before US President Biden and are vying to win his affections.
In fact, the British ruling class is on the verge of extinction and is just awaiting the British workers revolution that will overthrow it.
It was the Chinese revolution of 1949 led by Mao Zedong that propelled China from the era of the Opium Wars and ‘no dogs or Chinese allowed’ into the modern age, where as a deformed workers’ state it is now the greatest economic power on the planet.
Even those sanctioned by China, like Tory MP Nusrat Ghani could not say that they would cut off trade. She said yesterday when challenged: ‘No, we can’t cut off our trade relations with China. Do not underestimate what a big industrial nation it is.’
The only way that the UK can catch up with China is through the British workers putting an end to British capitalism with a socialist revolution.
