Rudd stymied as the barbarians shut the gate

WHEN it comes to trade and diplomacy, China plays with a two-headed penny and has done so for centuries.

The chances of Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd or Foreign Minister Stephen Smith being capable of convincing Beijing to release Rio Tinto executive and Australian citizen Stern Hu soon are slim to non-existent. The last Chinese-born Australian to run afoul of the Chinese legal system was James Peng. He languished in a Chinese prison for about six years before the Howard government applied the diplomatic equivalent of the blow-torch and secured his release. Peng, who had been in a business arrangement which soured with the niece of the then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, was held in prison despite being cleared of wrongdoing by a Hong Kong court. The old joke about "Hu you know being more important than Hu Yaobang" which circulated when the former Chinese Community Party general secretary was dumped in 1987, tells it all. The Chinese take offence very easily. And while foreign governments complain about their commercial and judicial methods they are not going to change anything any time soon. Or at least until it suits their interests. In a 2006 speech at the University of NSW, state Chief Justice Jim Spigelman placed this in a historical context when describing the first contact the Shanghai mandarins had with Westerners on June 20, 1832. The Chinese wanted all trade to flow through Canton, now known as Guangzhou, where European traders had established a beachhead. The British wanted to open other Chinese ports to trade. The leading official in Shanghai, the Daotai, had issued a statement two days earlier when news of the approach of the British East India Company vessel The Lord Amherst reached him. It was straightforward enough: "All commercial intercourse with the barbarian ship is strictly forbidden." History tells us the British East India Company's commander Hugh Hamilton Lindsay had the Daotai's measure. He sent two tough sailors ashore to deliver a petition to the Daotai requesting he rethink his order. After knocking on the locked entrance gates of the principal public building in Shanghai and receiving no joy, the worthies applied their shoulders to the barriers and shook them open. Lindsay then stood up to the Daotai, refusing to take back his petition once it had been read and copied, refusing to accept a reply which used terminology of rejection not just refusal, and rejecting the use of the word translated as "barbarian". According to Spigelman, later folklore on the China coast claimed Lindsay was the first to reject the use of "barbarian" which the Chinese had previously regularly used to describe Europeans. Lindsay simply refused to leave until his requests were met, rejecting offers to make gifts of the things he wanted. What he was after was a precedent that would permit other traders to follow. Before the 2007 election and for a brief period subsequently, Rudd went out of his way to impress upon Australians and members of the international political class that he was a person whose understanding of China entitled him to an elevated position in global matters. He even suggested that he could act as some sort of liaison between the US and China. Nothing has so far come of his grandstanding. The Chinese have stiffed him and Australia in much the same way the doughty Daotai attempted to thwart Lindsay in 1832. Then, as Spigelman says, the Daotai told the British commander: "It is an unheard of thing for any ship to come to Shanghai", and what was without precedent was plainly impermissible. "Conform to the established laws of the Celestial Empire," he continued, "and don't trouble us with your presence." As Peng discovered and Hu is now learning, after 177 years the Chinese are still adhering to the established laws of the Celestial Empire and ignoring international covenants which apply in the more civilised modern nations. Not withstanding the muscular actions of the seafaring door openers of the British East India Company, it is the Chinese who could now best be described as barbarians in the matter of both Peng and Hu. It is Chinese enterprises which enjoy the support of the weight of the state, despite the best efforts of publicists to claim the state ensures businesses in which it holds an interest (all mainland Chinese businesses) operate at arm's length from the political wing. For all the nastiness of the opium trade, the merchants from Britain and the other European nations which opened China to the world did mightily assist in the modernisation of a feudal state. China's treatment of Peng and Hu shows the world that it still has a long way to go before it's legal and political systems can be considered to be truly separated. Today the barbarians are on China's side of the gate.