Chinese tell Cameron: return the treasures Britain looted from China!

 

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron (L) listens to China's Premier Li Keqiang as the two leaders deliver statements following a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Dec. 2, 2013 Reuters

BEIJING: British Prime Minister David Cameron faced demands for the return of priceless artefacts looted from Beijing in the 19th century on Wednesday, the last day of his visit to China.

Cameron travelled to the southwestern city of Chengdu on the third day of what embassy officials said was the largest ever British trade mission to the country.

British officials say £5.6 billion-worth of deals have been signed so far on the trip, but Cameron has been derided by both Chinese state-run media and the country’s sharp-tongued Internet users.

The prime minister last Friday set up his own microblogging page on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, attracting more than 230,000 followers by Wednesday. He invited netizens to ask questions, saying that he would aim to reply during the visit.

One of the most popular questions was posted by a prominent Chinese think-tank, the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, which is headed by former vice-premier Zeng Peiyan and includes as its members many top government officials and leading economists.

“When will Britain return the illegally plundered artefacts?” the organisation asked, referring to 23,000 items in the British Museum which it says were looted by the British Army, part of the Eight-Nation Alliance that put down the Boxer Rebellion at the end of the 19th century, a popular uprising against the incursion of European imperial powers in China.

To the Chinese, the ransacking of the Forbidden City, and the earlier destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 about which one British officer wrote: “You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them” – remain key symbols of how the country was once dominated by foreign powers.

Even now the ruling Communist party appeals to nationalism to bolster its popularity.

Beijing was outraged by Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama – who it condemns as a dangerous separatist – last year, which led to a diplomatic deep-freeze between the two nations.

Despite the trip being billed as a trade mission, it has widely been seen as an attempt to repair some of the damage caused to China-British relations.

But a leading state newspaper launched an attack on Cameron Tuesday, saying Britain should recognise it is not a major power but “just an old European country apt for travel and study” in an editorial under the headline “China won’t fall for Cameron’s ‘sincerity’”.

The prime minister has taken more than 100 businesspeople with him to China, including the heads of Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls Royce and Royal Dutch Shell and the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange. - By AFP

China won’t fall for Cameron’s ‘sincerity

The UK Prime Minister David Cameron arrived in China Monday, starting his three-day tour in the country. The once halted Sino-British relations, due to Cameron's meeting with the Dalai Lama last year, may see an ice-breaking. This year, China has been actively engaged in relations with Germany and France, which propels the urgency of the Cameron administration to end the chilliness of bilateral relations.

Some analysts say that the UK, France and Germany have reached an unwritten understanding on the issue of the Dalai Lama to provoke China. When the leadership of one country meets with the Dalai Lama, the other two countries develop ties with China.

Such an argument does echo the real situation of China's relations with Europe, especially when yesterday, the British Royal Navy's Chief of Staff, Admiral George Zambellas met with Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera and supported Japan's stance toward China's recently declared Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea. This has added doubts over Cameron's sincerity in improving ties with China.

Perhaps there is no need to talk about "sincerity" in terms of Sino-British relations. What Cameron does is out of his own political interest and the UK's national interest. His visit this time can hardly be the end of the conflict between China and the UK.

Beijing needs to speed up the pace of turning its strength into diplomatic resources and make London pay the price for when it intrudes into the interests of China.

China has gained some achievement in countering European leaders' moves of meeting with the Dalai Lama. China's strategic initiatives in its relations with Europe have been increasing. The UK, France and Germany dare not make joint provocations toward China over the Dalai Lama issue.

The Chinese government will surely show courtesy to Cameron. But the public does not forget his stance on certain issues. We know that the British government has been making carping comments on Hong Kong implementing universal suffrage for the chief executive's election in 2017. It also gives ulterior support for those who advocate opposition between Hong Kong and the central government. This has added to the negative impression the Chinese public holds toward the UK. Chinese people believe that if London interferes in Hong Kong's transition process of implementing universal suffrage, Sino-British ties can be halted again.

The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese. It is just an old European country apt for travel and study. This has gradually become the habitual thought of the Chinese people.

China has believed in "diplomacy is no small matter," while after years of ups and downs, we have acquired the strategic confidence that "diplomacy is no big matter." China will act accordingly given how it is treated.

Finally, let us show courtesy to Cameron and wish him a pleasant trip. - By Global Time 

Olympics and business

The economic benefits of hosting the Olympic Games have been rather dubious at best

IF you were a hard-core sports fan, you would have woken up at 4am to watch the opening ceremony for the London Olympics this morning. In which case you probably won’t read this until afternoon as you regain some sleep.

Yes, the long-awaited games are upon us and we wait again to see if someone will bring a gold medal home finally. I think our only chance is Lee Chong Wei in badminton who lost the last Olympics final to Lin Dan of China in 2008 and returned with a silver.

What continues to boggle the mind is the cost of the games and how it keeps on going up and up. For Britain, the injection of money into the economy as well as a slew of business opportunities the games must have thrown up must offer some welcome respite from the bad times and even a chance to stem the downturn in the economy.

As former British Prime Tony Blair put it at an event publicising the Olympics: “If you were to pose the question to (fellow bidders) Paris or Madrid or New York ... ‘Would you prefer to be putting on the Olympics right now?’ I’m sure they would say ‘Yes’.”

Well that’s his take on it. The cost of hosting the games is £9.3bil or a massive RM46.5bil. But what is telling is that the original estimated cost was just £2.4bil (RM12bil).

Blair helped to deliver the Olympics to London for 2012 in 2005 over other competitors which included Paris and New York, with Paris being the hot favourite. Given the traditional rivalry between the French and the British, the unexpected victory must have been sweet.

But not so the near quadrupling of the costs in hosting the Olympic games. This has been heavily criticised with people questioning loudly whether London would benefit from hosting the games with costs having increased so much.

Besides, London through its mayor Ken Livingstone, signed off considerable rights to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which requires cities bidding for the games to sign the contract ahead of the awarding of the games to a particular city.

A lengthy article in Vanity Fair gives a glimpse of such requirements revealed by activist groups. Below is an extract:

“To comply with its terms, London must designate 250 miles of dedicated traffic lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and ‘the Olympic Family,’ including IOC members, honorary members, and ‘such other persons as may be designated by the IOC.’ (These traffic lanes are sometimes called ‘Zil lanes,’ alluding to the Soviet-era express lanes in Moscow reserved for the politburo’s favourite limousines.)

“Members of the Olympic Family must also have at their disposal at least 500 air-conditioned limousines with chauffeurs wearing uniforms and caps. London must set aside and pay for 40,000 hotel rooms, including 1,800 four- and five-star rooms for the IOC and its associates, for the entire period of the games. London must cede to the IOC the rights to all intellectual property relating to the games, including the international trademark on the phrase ‘London 2012.’ Although mail service and the issuance of currency are among any nation’s sovereign rights, the contract requires the British government to obtain the IOC’s ‘prior written approval’ for virtually any symbolic commemoration of the games, including Olympic-themed postage stamps, coins, and banknotes.”

One would be forgiven for thinking that London has surrendered its sovereign rights to the IOC for the period of the games!

Back to business. Lloyds Banking Group chief economist Patrick Foley meantime estimates that the Olympic Games will give a boost of £16.5bil (RM82.5bil), mostly through construction, to the UK economy although how he arrives at that is not clear.

That’s not a lot simply because the direct spend on the Olympics is already £9.3bil and unless such spending has the recurrent ability to reproduce income over many years, it is not justifiable.

Foley points that the bigger impact will be the regeneration of a neglected area of East London which became the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. However, it is naïve to think that the area would continue to be as lively after the Olympics and there would be the question of what to do with all that excessive infrastructure post the games.

At best, the benefits of the Olympics for the host city is dubious. At worst, one can argue quite cogently that all that money could have been put for better use in infrastructure and regeneration that would have been more sustainable than for providing facilities for a large and temporary influx of athletes, even if they were world-class, and others.

Meantime, Britain is making the best out of the Olympics. Prime Minister David Cameron just two days before the opening ceremony for the Olympics launched a high-powered attempt to woo global business at a conference to showcase Britain to the world.

Among those for whom the red carpet will be rolled out is a 30-strong delegation from China. Britain is wooing foreign investors in a real big way and using the Olympics to the hilt to do that.

And read what Cameron’s predecessor Blair said to Vanity Fair earlier: “If you said to David Cameron, or anyone involved with this, ‘If you could click your fingers, and the Olympics would be held in Paris instead of London, what would you feel: (a) relieved, or (b) Oh, my God, what did we give that up for?’ it would be b. What you make of the Olympics is in a way up to you. For a country like Britain, it’s a great thing for us to have the Olympics here. We can afford to do the Olympics. We’re Britain. We’re not some Third World country.”

Really? That’s almost a desperate attempt to try and get foreign investments in to help soothe the troubled waters that is the British economy smacks of what many Third World countries would have done to boost their own economies.

A Question of Business by P.GUNASEGARAM

 l Independent consultant and writer P Gunasegaram (t.tp.guna@gmail.com) does not love the Olympics so much as to stay awake until 4am to watch the opening ceremony.

British rivate banks have failed - need a public solution

Private banks have failed – we need a public solution

The Barclays scandal has underlined the City's unmuzzled power. But it also offers a chance to take democratic control

Bob Diamond, who resigned as chief executive of Barclys on Tuesday, is fighting for a payoff of over £20m. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/REUTERS

The greatest danger of the rate-fixing scandal now engulfing the City of London is that it will be managed and defused in the usual way, and nothing will really change. Tuesday's forced resignation of Bob Diamond, the Barclays chief executive, follows well-worn procedures for dealing with crises that potentially threaten those in power: denounce the worst offenders, let a few symbolic heads roll, set up an inquiry under a safe pair of hands, and tweak the regulations to prevent a repetition of the most egregious misdemeanours.

That's been the pattern of the past few years as Britain's establishment has lurched from the disaster of the Iraq war to the disgrace of parliamentary expense fiddling and media phone-hacking (though in the case of Iraq, the only heads to roll were BBC executives and an army corporal). As for the banks that triggered the greatest economic crisis for 80 years, they have been bailed out and featherbedded, with only the loss of the odd sacrificial City baron to show for their reckless mayhem.

But we can't afford to allow such political dereliction again. The racket revealed around the rigging of the crucial Libor inter-bank interest rate – affecting $500tn worth of contracts, financial instruments, mortgages and loans – has underlined the scale of corruption at the heart of the financial system. It follows the exposure of the mis-selling of dodgy derivatives and payment protection insurance, voracious tax avoidance and last month's breakdown of the RBS-NatWest basic payments system.

It's already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. Not only that, but the rigging has been public for years – it was first reported in 2008 – and no action has been taken until now.

That echoes the phone-hacking scandal, which erupted eight years after Rebekah Brooks told parliament News International was bribing the police and her admission was entirely ignored. On Tuesday Barclays sought to implicate Whitehall officials in its rate-rigging in 2008, and an angry Diamond, fighting for a payoff of over £20m, can be expected to go further when he appears before the Commons on Wednesday.

As they did with the Murdoch press, politicians who have abased themselves before the financial elite are now denouncing corrupt bankers and each other for failing to bring them to heel. David Cameron, whose party relies on City donors for more than half its income, wants a narrowly Libor-focused parliamentary inquiry to avoid the bigger picture and focus blame on New Labour's enthusiasm for "light touch regulation" in the runup to the crash.

Ed Miliband is rightly pressing for a much broader, Leveson-style public inquiry into the entire banking system. But the reality is that the whole political class embraced deregulated finance in the boom years. While Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pampered the banks, George Osborne and the Conservatives were demanding still less regulation, and even the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, now the bankers' scourge, endorsed a financial "light touch".

This is yet another disgrace for the country's governing elites. The new revelation of corruption comes after the exposure of the deception of the Iraq war, fraud in parliament and the police, the criminality of a media mafia and the devastating failure of the banks four years ago. It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

Political and business powerbrokers insist it's all a problem of leadership, bad apples and a culture that has gone awry. But such cultures are generated by structures and systems – and in the case of the City, deregulated short-term profit maximisation has as good as required them. It's certainly necessary to have a clearout of City bosses, prosecutions and wide-ranging inquiries, but only far-reaching change will clear this cesspit.

The financial system has already failed at huge economic and social cost. It has been shown to be corrupt, incompetent, rapacious and economically destructive. The City's claims to be an indispensable jobs and tax engine for the British economy are nonsense: the bailout costs of 2008-9 dwarfed the financial tax revenues of the boom years, which were below those of manufacturing even at their peak.

In fact, the banks are pumped up with state subsidies and liquidity that they are still failing to pass on in productive lending five years into the crisis. A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City: its colonisation of Whitehall and public life, effective grip on its own regulation, revolving-door pull on politicians and civil servants, and purchase of political parties. Finance has usurped democracy.

The crash of 2008 offered a huge opportunity to break that grip and reform the financial system. It was lost. The system was left as good as intact, and even the part-nationalised banks, RBS and Lloyds, have since been run at arm's length to fatten them up as quickly as possible for re-privatisation (savage RBS cost-cutting lies behind its humiliating performance last month), instead of as motors of investment and recovery.

The rate-rigging scandal now offers a second opportunity to build the pressure for fundamental change. That's hard to imagine being carried out by a coalition dominated by the City-funded Tories, but Labour has also yet to break fully with its pre-crisis economic model.

Tougher regulation or even a full separation of retail from investment banking will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment, or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks. As a report by Manchester University's Cresc research team argues this week, the size and complexity of the modern banking system makes it "near ungovernable".

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.

• This article was amended on 4 July 2012. The original misspelled Rebekah Brooks's name as Rebecca. This has been corrected.

• • Seumas Milne  guardian.co.uk,
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