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Exposing the China threat, with SIr Iain Duncan Smith
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According to former leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, China's rise mirrors the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. He is one of the few MPs willing to confront the China threat. Note this episode was cut short as Sir Iain had to attend to Parliamentary business. He will be back on the show!
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Transcript
Welcome and Sanctions Discussion
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. Up until about a week ago, my guest today wore badges of honour from the Chinese government, a travel ban and individual sanctions.
00:00:30
Speaker
The individual sanctions have been lifted, although I doubt former Conservatives leader Sir Ian Duncan Smith cares that much. Sir Ian, welcome to the show. ah Thank you very much indeed. Looking forward Great privilege to have you
Comparing China and 1930s Germany
00:00:43
Speaker
on. There aren't many sitting members of the yeah UK Parliament who have the guts to call out the growing threat from China.
00:00:52
Speaker
Why do you do it? Because I believe that we are repeating every mistake that we made in the 1930s with the growth of totalitarian states, fascist or otherwise, they're all the same really, and the rise of Germany at the time.
00:01:09
Speaker
and all of that everything was ignored everybody talked about doing business with this resurgent germany you know all the way through and every single time that something happened everybody found an excuse for it you know when they walked into the rhineland we ah as well you know it's theirs isn't it and it was a bit harsh you know when they do angeles with another german-speaking country austria We found reasons why this was probably only okay, because it was, after all, a fake line in the sand, as it were, that they were too united by the same language. And so it went on endlessly, invidiously, ending with Chamberlain's terrible statement about the Czechoslovak Republic and the Sudetenland, which is, you know, they are distant country about which we know little.
00:02:00
Speaker
and found a reason why they were German speakers in that area, so it seemed all right. so So bit by bit by bit, the peace at any price and and trade became dominant, and no recognition of the abuses and appalling behavior of Germany internally, which should have shed a light on what would happen subsequently.
China's Human Rights Violations
00:02:18
Speaker
And we're doing the same with China. China is a country riddled with ghastly forced labor, slave labor, depots where they are put into camps. They manufacture, undercut the global markets, particularly in solar arrays where in Xinjiang, where we believe a genocide has been taking place for an attempt to eradicate a whole ethnic group.
00:02:37
Speaker
Millions are now either incarceration or being forcibly sterilized. Children are in re-education camps. You just look at that and then realize Tibet, the same quarter of million men, I think, are now in slave labor camps.
00:02:50
Speaker
And then if you just go through what they're doing now in in Inner Mongolia, sorry, out of Mongolia, up in the north, the same pattern of behavior is beginning where they're trying to eradicate the language, the teachings, and eventually the ethnicity of that particular group.
00:03:05
Speaker
China believes that it should be populated by Han Chinese. And then they threaten their borders. yeah They've invaded the South China Seas illegally. They've taken possession. They're militarizing it. They've threatened Taiwan on a regular basis and determined to take control of it.
00:03:20
Speaker
They've seized Hong Kong completely and trashed the Sino-British agreement. So you saw poor Jimmy Lai under the national security law, having had already one sentence of five years trumped up, and now this final sentence, 20 years, which is basically a death sentence for him.
00:03:35
Speaker
All of this, and yet we do so very little. That
UK's Diplomatic Stance on China
00:03:38
Speaker
is the point. At every turn when China has flaunted us, has lectured us, has threatened us, we just quietly go away and say, well, you know, you've got to be in the room. That's the latest word.
00:03:49
Speaker
There's no point being in a room where in actual fact you have nothing, nothing at all ah to be able to transact that position in the room, which is where we are now. And the last terrible thing was the visit by the prime minister to China.
00:04:02
Speaker
where I've never seen a man treated so badly by a foreign government. He was ridiculed. He was almost publicly, he was shoved around literally physically. And he was corrected by President Xi on his attempt, I think, to use Chinese to introduce himself, as it were, to say hello.
00:04:20
Speaker
And the President Xi, and I'm set up IPAC in the Parliament of China, if I come to, I'm sure, later, But the many Chinese speakers there were horrified at the way that Xi had basically instructed him to address him as a supplicant, which, you know, was just appalling.
00:04:38
Speaker
And yet we gave them the embassy, we gave them everything away in this pathetic, weak negotiating stance that says, as you give them what they want, they will be nice to you. Really?
00:04:49
Speaker
Yes, believe me, we will get to the shortcomings of the Stammer government on China policy in a bit. But I want to drill down into this comparison with the rise of Nazi Germany, because I think it's a comparison that some people will be taken aback by.
Western Economic Dependencies on China
00:05:04
Speaker
There are two elements to it from what I've just heard. There is the geopolitical threat from China and the various human rights abuses that they have committed both within China and within Asia.
00:05:16
Speaker
Let's cover over the human rights abuses first. We are living in an age where every single aspect of, say, Israel's approach to the war in Gaza has been ah treated as a war crime or as a human rights atrocity by many on the left. They haven't shut up about it.
00:05:34
Speaker
you never hear really any sorts of outrage about what China is doing within their country or further afield. Why the silence from the kind and compassionate leftist class about the undoubted atrocities that the Chinese conduct on a regular basis?
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't just go to the leftists. It goes to governments across the Western world because of trade. The thing that government ah that China has realized and cleverly understood is that by and large the West is pretty greedy about trying to constantly boost its fortunes economically. Now that's a normal practice in a free market.
00:06:12
Speaker
But if you therefore enter the free market but control it, then you control the countries that come to it. And so the more indebted they come become to you, the more they need your manufacture for cheap labor, the more they want your goods produced, sold back to them to keep the product cheap in the markets, then what actually happens is you have them.
00:06:32
Speaker
ah You have them controlled because the threat to stop that, pull away from that, not no longer allow you in, that sort of thing frightens the living daylights out of Western governments. because they realize now that they cannot now live without China, and they don't want to make any attempt to do so either. So the result of that is that we...
00:06:52
Speaker
This, by the way, is coupled with a net zero drive in the West, particularly, for example, in countries like the UK, which makes it even more difficult to break away from China because we've made the cost of our energy so high in these markets that nothing that we once produced can be produced here anymore because no company in manufacturing important items cannot ah operate here because the cost of running companies that make things is so...
00:07:21
Speaker
appalling that they've all gone and therefore of choice they were encouraged to in the original firm but later on they've had to go to places like china other countries too but it's it's china that's understood the pattern of this best what you're pointing to is this i would say bizarre contradiction at the heart of many Western governments, which is that they have an economic policy which is reliant upon increasing dependence with China, and a foreign policy which is based around defending themselves from the looming threat of China.
00:07:57
Speaker
Surely that's a catastrophic failure of grand strategy. It's a catastrophic failure of grand strategy. It's also, however, slightly misleading in a way because it's true, but the worst bit about it is the preparation to defend is minuscule.
00:08:13
Speaker
And the reality, therefore, is that, you know, governments still want to believe that somehow this isn't going to happen. So you just take the UK government with its FIRS scheme, the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, what you get is a government that should have put China in the upper tier ah You get a government that has suppressed the China audit, which they promised to publish. Why?
00:08:35
Speaker
Because it doesn't fit their plan. and Their plan is to maximize their arrangements with China when the evidence now in front of them tells them that this is a strategic disaster.
00:08:47
Speaker
and then at the same time keeping spending incredibly low on defense means that whilst you're being told by people behind closed doors that this is now becoming what we're doing all the west has succeeded in doing is developing this incredibly powerful nation which will rival the greatest of the nations in the world and as we look at things like the navy they'll overtake the us in about two years in capacity all of that's been brought about because of our determination to essentially do business with them.
China's Global Strategy and Economic Dominance
00:09:19
Speaker
And that has given them the right to be at where they are. But secondly, they've done it as well as I said earlier on, forced labor, undercutting markets, ah disobeying the WTO rules on subsidies from banks.
00:09:31
Speaker
National Bank, the state bank, subsidizes business bids around the world so they can capture markets. They nearly destroyed the whole of the telecoms. business because they subsidize people like huawei to outbid everybody and in a market of a free market any distortion like that puts others out of business we're down to i think the last three providers of national telecom structures like 5g etc one is in korea then the other two are in Scandinavia and nothing in America or Britain that used to lead the world on these things. So there's a very good example of two-pronged attack. One is to disable the capacity of the West to to create things any longer without reliance on China.
00:10:15
Speaker
And the second is for themselves to use that incredible influx of money ah to bring themselves up to a level that is then capable of following through on threats.
00:10:26
Speaker
And that is where we face now. As we look at it, everyone's going, oh my God, what's going on? Well, we've been warning about this for a long time. And that's what the comparison with the 30s is, is that those who warned about it were right.
00:10:39
Speaker
And we ended up, as a result of that, in a brutal, ghastly conflict. But the trouble is right now, we are still sleepwalking towards a terrible position where, when China will be in such a strong position that we'll dare not do anything about it.
00:10:54
Speaker
ah And that is the key. And so there's beginnings of a sort of people beginning to recognize that there is a problem here. But still, you know, you take the UK government goes running over to China, desperate on that bended knee for them to invest in the UK. I mean, it's astonishing, really.
00:11:10
Speaker
They've already got investments in here, which means they could shut down most of our utilities tomorrow. If they wanted to, they've got product which they sold to full of kill switches and IOTs. all over the country, buses, you name it, cars. and then the The thing, if you sat down and wrote 20 years ago, this is where you'll be in 20 years' time, people would have laughed at you. They're not laughing now.
00:11:33
Speaker
Yeah, we will get to the infiltration of the United Kingdom by China today, but I just want to cover off that second element of the comparison with the rise of Germany, which is the geopolitical threat that China poses.
00:11:46
Speaker
Some people will argue that China doesn't have imperial ambitions. They are purely looking inwards. They'll point to the historical argument that, well, they haven't invaded anyone in many, many years. Unlike Western powers, is China a geopolitical threat and should it be treated as such?
Geopolitical Maneuvers and Legal Manipulation
00:12:03
Speaker
Yes, of course it is, because this idea that somehow they don't invade anywhere, they don't have to. Right now, what they're doing is they're taking control of so many countries through things like the Melbourne Road Project.
00:12:15
Speaker
I mean, they pretty much have a lock on much of Africa. Now, many of the states that we talk about the Belt and Road project is for people who might not be more... They've a project to make money available to invest in countries around the world and different projects.
00:12:28
Speaker
However, what most the public don't realize is that, first of all, you have to buy their stuff. So it's there. Secondly, they require their people to install their stuff and to work there to keep it running.
00:12:41
Speaker
And finally, if you if you fail on the debt program and you don't repay your debts, they have the right to seize what they've built or taken. And the best example of that is the port in in Sri Lanka, which they basically run now. And you see Chinese naval vessels there facing out onto the Indian Ocean for the first time.
00:13:02
Speaker
because Sri Lanka wasn't able to meet their debts. So, you know, the brutality of the way they behave, the actual sheer racism of some of the stuff that goes on in these countries is astonishing. And the stories about equipment coming alive at night, sending stuff back to China on data, details, etc. they have a rapacious requirement for data.
00:13:22
Speaker
So things like a lot of the little websites that lots of people use, some of the apps, et cetera. TikTok is a good example of that. That's a data harvester. It's owned by, well, by dance. I know America's coming to some arrangement with it, but basically it harvests this data, and they have a rapacious desire to read data, to see data, to look at people, and to figure out who they are, where they are, what they're doing.
00:13:44
Speaker
And somebody said, well, why would a 20-year-old or a 19-year-old be interesting to them? They're interesting to them only in the sense of where they may be later on. to understand who they are and they do this very very carefully so any company in china has to report all their data ah handed over where required to do so and this. And so there you have stupid Western politicians using TikTok in the hope they're going to reach younger people. What they don't realize is the reach is in the opposite direction.
00:14:12
Speaker
And it's just astonishing how stupid people are about this. At risk of asking the obvious question, why may the Chinese government be interested in knowing where a 20-year-old American citizen may be later on?
00:14:24
Speaker
Because you never know where they're going to be, who they'll be, and what they'll be doing, how influential they'll be. um It's a way of paving the way to understand the predilections, the interests, all that sort of stuff. there They're rapacious on data because they believe that at some point somebody is important who wasn't before, and that's important to them, and they need to know about this. So that is how they work.
00:14:47
Speaker
Potentially they could then have leverage over them. but Yeah, that's the idea, and ultimately, or at least and understand them better. I mean, you know, they they never stopped taking data. If you take the COVID saga, they produced most of the COVID detection kits.
00:14:59
Speaker
And the problem with that was that um they were allowed by Western governments, it's ah bg BGT, I think it is, the big genomics company. They were allowed to hold 15% of the data, the genomics that they got from those tests.
00:15:16
Speaker
and look at what what In what world were we just allowing them to take data back to China? Now I understand BGT and the other tech companies are coming together to try and find ways to sift out and resolve what the what the difficulties and weaknesses are of certain genetic groups.
00:15:35
Speaker
And that's really a huge program which may allow them to in due course control those groups or to harm them. The foreign policy picture that you painted just before that was effectively the creation of vassal states. It's almost ah it's ah it's a throwback in some respects.
00:15:53
Speaker
And that has been suggested in the case of the Chagos Islands surrender when it comes to Mauritius. How does China play into the Chagos Islands story?
00:16:04
Speaker
Well, the missions are very close to China already. That's become very evident. China has a desire to have control over the areas around it. So, for example, one of the key views that they take is that the reason they took the South China Seas is to control their access and routes.
00:16:22
Speaker
as through that area in near China. The second thing is that, of course, they have a ah very keen a plan to ah control the east-west trade flows that run through south Asia, as it were, across around the sea, so through Parsi Indian Ocean, etc., to the Pacific.
00:16:39
Speaker
Tregos sits right on top of that trade route. One of the ways, perhaps, to bring Taiwan to here, as they believe, is not to invade it, but to blockade it. and to make life very difficult for it in terms of trade. It's an island, it needs therefore to import vast amounts of goods and materials to be able to ah operate. So that is one possibility that they will use and to control, to have any control in that area would be devastating and pose a significant threat to east-west trade, which is enormous, you know, both in and out imports and exports.
00:17:16
Speaker
The other element of Chinese influence which infuriated me when i became aware of it was the non-binding ICJ judgment that was delivered against the UK, basically saying that the island should be handed over to Mauritius. Again, I stress non-binding judgment.
00:17:33
Speaker
Part of that judgment was delivered by, or one of the judges was a Chinese judge who was a former CCP official, How effectively have China infiltrated, I guess, international legal institutions?
00:17:48
Speaker
You know, the international, how they used international law as a tool effectively to promote their particular foreign policy ends. brilliantly. ah They've done it brilliantly. What they've done they've used their excessive money to buy up whole areas of support.
00:18:04
Speaker
So using the Belt and Road and other projects, they've now become the so-called leader of the non-aligned states in the United Nations. As you pause for a second, you can see why the West gets outvoted time and time and time again, because these states themselves are beholden and worried about loans and money, etc. So they use it as a tool, and particularly keenly in Africa, they're hoping to try and move into South America. That may have some slightly greater problems. But it's interesting, when we talk, we set up IPAC, the Interparliamentary Lance on China, we now have 44 countries involved in it. That's politicians on the left and the right coming together to recognize the threat.
00:18:44
Speaker
the so China hates it, because we were the ones who produced the report on genocide. All that sort of thing goes on. And the The Chinese now lean on countries where politicians are members. They're not in government, but they're politicians.
00:18:59
Speaker
and threaten those governments with an app you know to take their money away and auto to enforce their requirements, et cetera. So unless, of course, these individuals are stopped, and of course, this is where the pressure is coming now. We see they're targeting countries ah like the South Sea Islanders, who have real concerns about the takeover threat that they propose to China poses to them, and to particularly countries in Africa, where they have deep significance and concerns.
00:19:29
Speaker
And that's really where the problem rises. So they, you know, we've had a few bail as a result of that. and sort i'm amazed at the foresight and strength of many of the other countries that have resisted this. But there notwithstanding that, there have been a few that have felt themselves under pressure from their governments now as politicians because their governments are being threatened about withdrawal of money. So you can see how the pattern works, this threat and the bullying.
00:19:53
Speaker
It's very much par to the nature of this totalitarian state. Of course, the allowing China to have greater influence is only one of the reasons why this Chagos deal is so imbecilic.
00:20:06
Speaker
you know you don't You can also add to that list the insane amounts of money that are being thrown away to give away territory. It's a bizarre inversion of how a deal usually works. What is the, as far as you can see, what is the rationale for why the Starmer governments are doing this? And I guess the follow-up question, is there any hope that the deal can be scuppered?
00:20:27
Speaker
Well, let me ask the last one first. The answer is yes. It's quite tentative now at the moment. U.S. doesn't like it. But so far, they were led to believe that it is the only option. It's not.
00:20:38
Speaker
There's another option. I don't want to go into details of it right now because that's something which is being discussed. But There is a, ah to go to the first point, is that I think inherently in some people, some of these lawyers on the left or human rights, not everyone because lots of them are more realistic than than others, but there are some, and I think this little group of lawyers that we're talking about here, Philippe Sands, who advised the the government there, and Herma, who's now the attorney general, and even Starmer, who was part of that little group,
00:21:09
Speaker
They don't have a great track record in terms of persecuting people that serve, for example, in the army in Afghanistan and Iraq. So if you just take that for one moment, and then you ask yourself the question, what's the problem? And the answer is, I think, deep in the bowels of some of these groups who are either in the foreign office or elsewhere, is a real sense of of um embarrassment over our past, you know, the so-called colonial past they talk about.
00:21:35
Speaker
ah and their belief that somehow we must shred shed ourselves of all of this, regardless of the consequences, which I don't agree with. i think ah I think most of the Commonwealth doesn't agree with either.
00:21:46
Speaker
But it's a reality nonetheless that that is that their stated position. And that that that means that they would do almost anything to make that happen. And this is a classic example of an enormously bad deal.
00:21:59
Speaker
ah Even if you believed in that, this is a bad deal where you end up giving 34.7 billion, according to government actuaries, to the country that you're just handing it all back to. And in fact, the thing about this, which is absurd, is that Mauritius was never connected to Chagos at any stage in history, except when the British seized Mauritius from the French in 1813, I think it was. Later on that century, they decided to make it the administrative center for them to run all the islands, including Chagos.
00:22:30
Speaker
And Chagos about over a thousand miles away, and it was not possible for them to run it from Chagos at the time, and and they had been running it from other areas in Africa, but this looked like a better position. So for the rest of the time, up until quite recently when they got their independence, that's how it was administered. And the reality here is that we then kept control of Chagos for military reasons, but also made common sense that Chagos is nothing like Mauritius. It has literally no real particular connection with Mauritius.
00:23:02
Speaker
The Chagossians are themselves ethnically African, and the Mauritians are ethnically Indian. And They've never had a very good relationship, particularly because the Mauritians have tended to look you know down their nose at them and not being at all even-handed.
00:23:18
Speaker
Lots and lots of cases of that, but Chagossians will tell you that. um so So the real problem arises that that they want Mauritius to take this and it's completely the wrong thing to do.
00:23:29
Speaker
And it should never have been allowed. And by the way, the judgment was advisory, as you say. It was never enforceable because the British had got an opt-out on all elements to do with and the Commonwealth.
00:23:40
Speaker
And that included this. So they lied about the court cases that will fall on them well and they were of them were opted out of everything. So there's no there's no threat or challenge. if this is stopped and an alternative found and there is an alternative.
00:23:55
Speaker
But even even if you know even if, for example, there was to be a further judgment handed down by you know some international court, whether it be the ICJ or someone else, which was, you know in inverted commas, binding, one thing I don't fully understand about international law is Sure, you could say, well, we're going to leave that international legal institution or we're going to tell that international legal institution to stick that ruling up their backside. And we're going to say that this is our land and we're keeping it.
00:24:27
Speaker
But the the problem for with international law for me is that there doesn't appear to be any enforcement mechanism that can compel a country to do something. And some countries understand that, which is why they cherry pick international law when useful and ignore it at other times.
00:24:41
Speaker
but it feels like at the moment the UK is just beholden to this vague, nebulous set of concepts at the expense of the national interest. Yeah, if all of life was lived in high principle and everybody obeyed these high principles instinctively, then you might have an argument for the existence of this ICC project. But the problem right now is that it's it's it's only enough for them to opine on something and then everybody runs like this to a cover. And my answer is no, it's not correct.
00:25:17
Speaker
And we have already preserved our position of saying no to it because we are not going to use it in areas that are involved with Commonwealth nations as a fact accepted by the Commonwealth and accepted by the UK.
00:25:31
Speaker
So it's But you look at the one group that really abuses this dramatically, China and his allies, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
00:25:42
Speaker
And you suddenly realize that this is a, that they laugh at the idea that the the likes of Stalin, Philip Sands, and i by the way, earning an awful lot of money from advising these nations.
00:25:54
Speaker
but not always, and they laugh because they realize that this is our weakness. Our weakness is we created a legal system which we believe the whole world will obey. In fact, most of it doesn't.
00:26:07
Speaker
And that means those that do get hammered every time.
UK's Vulnerability to China's Strategies
00:26:10
Speaker
So, you know, the idea that a Chinese judge who's a member of the Communist Party of China is somehow independent in a judgment is astonishing.
00:26:20
Speaker
And yet, you know, they hardly ever mention this. By the way, there is a committee in the UN on racial discrimination and racial prejudice. And that is opined on this agreement and said it's it's awful and it should stop because it has help for the Chilossians, which I agree with.
00:26:38
Speaker
So my point is, you know, that their own committee, ah has said that the idea of this deal is nonsense. and so So you can see straight away that the irony is that the people most who now want to obey it are in the UK.
00:26:52
Speaker
And it's sprung a huge ah wealth of lawyers who then, shall sort of accident chasers or ambulance chasers. This is treaty change chasers now who chase these judgments to earn a lot of money.
00:27:06
Speaker
And I have to say they earn a lot of money doing it. It's become an industry in its own right of negativity. And sadly, some of them are in government. At this point in the interview, Ian was called away on parliamentary business, but I thought it was still important to get this part of what is a searing expose on the threat from China out to you.
00:27:29
Speaker
We will make sure to get Sir Ian back on the podcast to talk about how the Chinese state has infiltrated the administrative and political layers of Britain, as well as the looming conflict over Taiwan.
00:27:43
Speaker
In the meantime, thank you very much to Sir Ian Duncan-Smith for coming on and sharing what are very bracing comments about the greatest geopolitical risk the world faces today.