P Kharel

Buy or bury issues as per individual interest in the big international theatre of diplomacy. Invoking free speech and right to religious beliefs constitute two fundamental characteristics of democratic governance in modern times. Failure to live up to the declared tenets of democracy is a political perfidy neither the present nor the future will forgive or forget. There is a third type that makes lofty sounds but baulks when the acid test of practice confronts it.
Religious minorities attract special interest from foreign governments whose majority population hails from the same faith. Rarely do governments come out with strong statements if other religious faiths face problems as a consequence.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is being taunted by non-Muslim government for not speaking in support of an estimated one million Turkic Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region whereas the government in Ankara goes an extra mile to promote Islamic values. One scribe wrote: “The rest of the world has been noticeably quiet about Xinjiang.” The article worried about efforts at assimilation of the Xinjiang Muslims into the mainstream Chinese.

Taunts won’t work
Many groups take religion as a political weapon to be applied differently to different circumstances, exhibiting their inconsistency. Once the table begins to turn on them, their tone takes the course for a conspicuous change. Nepal cannot forget the manner in which more than 120,000 Bhutanese refugees of Nepali descent flocked to this country in the 1990s. Virtually all of them Hindu, the refugees were victims of ethnic cleansing by the Druk regime dominated by an absolute monarch.
The international community huffed and puffed but of the so-called liberal democracies was short on condemning Thimpu and exerting enough pressure on the regime that has extraordinarily close ties with India, bound by a treaty that is very much a copy of what colonial British had imposed on that landlocked kingdom. Walking on someone’s else’s toes is as bad as someone does on yours. Some governments might find expedient not to become consistent but it could prove costly for especially countries aiming big, such as joining the exclusive club of permanent member at the United Nations Security Council.
Within a span of but three days, two British ambassadors in two of the world’s most-populous and major powers, China and India, were summoned by the host governments to express their deep displeasure either with the diplomatic representative or the government concerned. Beijing took (March 10) Ambassador Caroline Wilson’s WeChat post as “inappropriate” containing “lecturer arrogance and ideological prejudice”.
Following a week after Britain’s media regulator Ofcom barred China’s state broadcaster CGTN from airing in the United Kingdom on the ground that the Chinese Communist Party controlled the channel, Beijing banned government-funded BBC World News from television networks for serious violation of Chinese rules and attempts at undermining national unity.
Three days before Beijing summoned Wilson, Indian government on March 7 summoned British High Commissioner Alexander Ellis for a dressing down over “unwarranted and tendentious discussion” of agricultural reforms in British parliament. BBC had also carried extensive reportage on its interpretation of human rights violations against Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang region. Its similarly functioning peers in the West show disproportionately greater concern of human rights violations in China while overlooking or ignoring far worse conditions of minorities in many Islamic and authoritarian regimes with whom London and its first cousins maintain good rapport.

Shifting stance
Britain is seen as the most anti-China country in Europe joined by small states like Estonia and Latvia. After Brexit, the European Union leaders appear to be more practical than earlier. Italy, Germany and France are sending signals of adjustments in trade and overall relationships with China and its close ally Russia. In Germany, Armin Laschet is likely to succeed the ruling Christian Democratic Union’s Angela Merkel as chancellor. The new leader is seen by many as more sympathetic to China and Russia than does the United States President Joe Biden toward these two powers. For all his setbacks within the EU these past some months, French President Emmanuel Macron describes Russia as a part of Europe and attaches importance to positive dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Several Italian political parties want ties with Russia to progress at a meaningfully positive level. EU’s biggest economy, Germany is also keen on completion and operation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a 1,200-kilometre natural gas artery that links northern Russia with Germany. Unhappy with the Russian presence, the US Congress imposed more sanctions on the project arguing that Russian could use the leverage to manipulate Europe’s oil supply. Enraged, leaders from German political spectrum discussed options of retaliatory trade response to American “blackmail” and “neo-imperialism”.
Australia and Japan, with New Zealand in the background, might be Washington’s loyal allies. But much of the Asia-Pacific region leaves a wide enough opening for normal ties with the next No. 1 economy - China, which showed what stays in store after the manner in which it coped with COVID-19 and recorded a highly enviable growth compared with all other major powers. Beijing’s swift and effective measures - at first criticised but later emulated in good measure by the same critics - in coping with COVID-19 signals many meanings to much of the world.
The Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte made regular visits to China averaging ever six months until the outbreak of the pandemic. He gave zero-tolerance to corruption, coinciding with the Chinese drive for checking corruption with tough measures, including capital punishment. His popularity rate remains high - higher than most, if not all, leaders in Western democracies.

Wheel of change
Duterte declared that the dispute over South China Sea islands should be resolved through quiet diplomacy drew Beijing’s warm appreciation. As a gesture, in 2018, 1.25 million Chinese visited the Philippines, enabling Manila to record its second largest source of foreign tourists. Even as the US President Joe Biden speaks of strengthening trans-Atlantic cooperation, European leaders have aired a new thinking after the Trump trauma when Washington went for “America first”. They want a bigger role instead of being reduced to just sitting at the receiving end. The wheel of power and fortune is clearly revolving. The tide of change in international trade and power equation is round the corner, drip by drip at first it gathers dramatic momentum.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)