It’s wrong to ban China from the lying-in-state

Unlike some Americans, China’s communists have no problem getting their heads around hereditary monarchy. Last week, President Xi sent his condolences to the United Kingdom. Now, he’s sending one of his most trusted deputies to pay respects at the Queen’s funeral. China has called off its wolf warriors, its diplomatic ideologues known for berating the West. Beijing is on best behaviour. Instead, the bellicose rhetoric is coming from a few British MPs, indignant that Chinese officials have been invited to the funeral.

Vice-president Wang Qishan, the man tasked with representing China, is one of Xi’s most reliable lieutenants, having led the President’s flagship anti-corruption drive. But the two men go even further back, first meeting in the poverty-stricken Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution, both twenty-somethings condemned to manual labour as a result of Mao Zedong’s madness. That gruelling experience seems to have created a bond for life. In 2016, Wang was caught patting Xi’s back as they left the Great Hall of the People – a rare moment of tenderness in China’s frigid elite politics. Sending Wang is a demonstration of deep respect for the late Queen.

Some CCP-sceptics may be surprised, but when it comes to the royal family, Beijing behaves itself. When, in 1986, the Queen became the first British monarch to step foot in China, Deng Xiaoping shook her hand keenly and said: ‘Please accept a warm welcome from an old Chinese man’.

That is the power of Britain’s constitutional monarchy and it is why the invitation to the funeral for her late Majesty has gone out to almost all world leaders, with the exception of a few rogue states. In her life, she shook hands with authoritarians and dictators, overcoming political divisions around the world. In her death, the commemoration should reflect that magnanimity.

So it’s particularly undignified for four parliamentarians to be carrying out a backbench campaign to disinvite the Chinese, or at least bar them from Westminster Hall. Led by Iain Duncan Smith, the petition reads:

“We are greatly concerned to hear that the Government of China has been invited to attend the State Funeral next week, despite other countries Russia, Belarus and Myanmar being excluded. Given that the United Kingdom Parliament has voted to recognise the genocide committed by the Chinese government against the Uyghur people it is extraordinary that the architects of that genocide should be treated in any more favourable way than those countries who have been barred.

All four MPs were placed under sanction by Beijing last year, as they have been calling for China to be sanctioned over its increasingly authoritarian behaviour. They say that to host the Chinese delegation on the parliamentary estate, where part of the funeral ceremony takes place, would be an affront to the fact that they and their families have been barred from China. Reports this morning say that Speaker of the House Lindsay Hoyle has bent and will ban Wang Qishan’s delegation from the parliamentary estate.

Yet the row is clearly about more than just Westminster Hall and whether CCP officials get to walk through it with other dignitaries. Earlier in the week, Iain Duncan Smith called the invitation ‘project kowtow’, asking: ‘How can they ban Belarus, Russia and Myanmar and not say no to China?’ From the wording of their petition, it’s clear that these MPs want a full reappraisal of the Sino-British relationship altogether.

Of course, they’re right that China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang. As one of them, Tim Loughton, said on GB News last night, ‘I wish China would change’. Me too, Tim.

But snubbing the Chinese is not going to achieve policy change. On Xinjiang, the CCP is deeply worried about what it sees as a toxic triumvirate of Islamism, separatism and extremism. On Hong Kong, it’s concerned with making sure future generations of Hong Kongers consider themselves more aligned with Beijing than the West. You can dispute Xi’s analysis and methods – I certainly do – but the importance of these issues to Beijing means that they won’t change track just because of a cancelled funeral invitation.

Of course, if the UK treated China as a rogue state, cutting it off in the way that Russia has been, then the calculus in Beijing would be different. And if the goal of these hawks is to revisit the Sino-British relationship and possibly end diplomatic relations, then they should say so. But that would be a decision for government. The Queen’s funeral is not the time or place, and a tantrum from the backbenches is unseemly at best.

It is such a remarkably simple principle – not to politicise the Queen – that even the Chinese Communist party gets it. It’s tragic that this maxim hasn’t been realised by a handful of Britain’s own wolf warriors.