Examination of witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 15 DECEMBER 1999
THE RT
HON CLARE
SHORT and MS
SUE UNSWORTH
Mr Worthington
1. Secretary of State, may I welcome you. As
I explained to you, the reason I am in the Chair—I hope
briefly—is because our Chair, Mr Bowen Wells, has to present
a Private Member's Bill in the Chamber at this time, as does Mrs
Clwyd, though they will reappear after they do. I see they are
now presenting their Bills. We are here today to look at DFID's
policy towards China and Pakistan and you are very welcome and
you have with you Ms Unsworth I see, and I understand you would
like to make a brief opening statement and I invite you to do
that.
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Thank you, Chair, and for anyone
who does not know, Sue Unsworth is our Director, Asia, so she
is supervising, from London, our programme in China and Pakistan.
In fact, she has recently been in China with John Vereker so recently
returned. My understanding of what we were to discuss here is
our programme in China in relation to the question of human rights
in China in particular and in relation to Pakistan where I know
the Committee has been on a visit, but I have not. I have been
cancelled a number of times, most recently for the obvious reason
of the coup. I wanted to just say a word about our attitude to
the coup and what we are trying to achieve, so just very briefly.
The first thing to say on China is obviously on the big human
rights, political issues; we are not the lead department as you
know. So on some of the sort of big, individual named cases I
am not the lead Minister, we are not the lead Ministry and I probably
do not even have the information beyond being hopefully an intelligent
newspaper reader. But as you also know, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, includes political, civil and social and economic
rights and the particular focus and responsibility of my Department
is trying to secure the social and economic rights of the poor—the
right to work, to health care, to proper education—and their
civil and political rights, their right to be listened to, to
have their voices heard and that development should take place
in a way that respects them and their opinions and is not just
done to them. So that is very much where we come into the picture
and there are both Ministers and officials in the Foreign Office
who lead on the other questions. If the Committee has a major
interest in those questions, it would not be that I . . . . even
in preparing for this meeting there was some suggestion that I
should be briefed on some of these questions and I said I thought
that was inappropriate because if I read papers about things that
someone else is responsible for in order to answer your questions,
it would be better that the individuals who are responsible for
those areas and policy came before you if that was what you wished.
So in relation to our programmes in China, as you will see from
the papers and the memorandum, I inherited a large aid and trade
provision programme, with quite a lot of money going from the
Department to China, but for a whole series of infrastructure
projects, including a ship, which I think is quite extraordinary
myself. So the question for me, we decided to get rid of the aid
and trade provision because it leads to a distortion of development
spending in the way we have already discussed and I think the
Committee agrees with the Department. So it was open to us to
decide where we went in China and there was no question of any
kind of political pressure on us to have a programme of any particular
type or shape. I mean, there was some pressure from the Chinese
Government to go on with the aid and trade provision, but I made
it very clear that for broader policy reasons we had decided that
was out of the question. We then decided and I decided that China's
opening up is of enormous importance to the people of China and
the world—1.2 billion people, more than one sixth of humanity,
that in the past have been turned away from the rest of the world—and
the people of China have suffered enormous oppression of their
human rights and lack of development through their history and
the prospect of them opening up and improving the performance
of their economy and lifting their people out of poverty and becoming
part of the international community is of enormous importance
to humanity, to the people of China and to the wider world. And
that was an objective we should all wish to support. Secondly,
the Government of China had committed itself very seriously and
very strongly to a systematic reduction of poverty and that is
of course a human right, that people should be able to live without
poverty and that we ought to do what we could to assist them in
that. As you will know, the sort of economic growth that has come
to China and a very big speed up in the reduction of poverty since
they liberalised agriculture and so on, has been uneven and much
more benefited the people in the eastern seaboard. When you get
into central China and more towards the north, there is still
very considerable poverty. So we wanted to focus our programme
around ensuring that the poor were not left behind—quite
a lot of those communities are ethnic minorities with different
languages—that their languages were respected, the way in
which education was delivered to them was properly respected and
also some technical support for the process of reform, I mean
the reform of the state-owned enterprises maybe half of which
are inefficient and highly subsidised. Obviously the process of
changing them and closing them down will lead to a massive increase
in people being laid off their jobs in the urban areas and this
is a phenomenal transition that could go wrong for China and the
Chinese Government is worried. I mean it is committed to it but
it is worried by the possibility of growing inequality and instability.
So we thought it was right to try and assist the process for the
reasons that are intrinsic to the values of our Department. We
have been, over the last two years, reforming our programme and
putting in place a different kind of programme which is again
described in the papers, and we think we have done that with some
success, but obviously China is such a massive country that a
small programme like ours is but a pinprick unless it can be of
such quality that it brings ideas that are influential and can
in turn be replicated and scaled up. So it is in that kind of
spirit that we are trying to operate. Then on Pakistan we have
been extremely worried by the bad economic management, the very
terrible levels of corruption, the failure of development in Pakistan
before the coup and I have been talking with the Department about
reviewing and how effective it was being anyway. Then along comes
the coup; I took the view that one could not possibly just go
on as though nothing had happened and indeed continue to try and
assist with improvements in the effectiveness of government systems
when you had just had a coup, but it was more complicated than
saying "back to democracy" because the status quo actually
was pretty poor and we had various meetings and had a lot of discussions
and obviously other governments and other government departments
are engaged in these judgments because it is the whole question
of how the IMF proceeds. Our view, as a department, was very strongly
that although of course a coup is unwelcome, an opportunity comes
out of a crisis and if we could get the international community,
including the IMF to stand together and to say to the new Government
in Pakistan: "Look, we will only engage with you if you absolutely
commit to a process of reform", that means going for a process
of democracy in a proper structured way that is a better quality
democracy that was there previously with much better economic
management, focus on reducing poverty and action on corruption,
then some good would come out of that. It had been our view in
the past that there was no single IMF programme in Pakistan that
had been adhered to, and the most recently agreed IMF programme
we abstained on because we thought it should have been more staged,
with more conditionality in order to encourage reform in Pakistan.
So we have been taking a view of our own programme and the general
international engagement with Pakistan, given that the coup has
happened, that there should be a willingness to re-engage but
with a very structured and tied down commitment to reforms over
time that have to be accomplished in order to get support from
the international community to carry through those reforms. We
have been working for that kind of decision from the IMF, and
I think there is an IMF mission there now.
(Ms Unsworth) They have just returned.
(Rt Hon Clare Short) I have written to the Finance
Minister—it was the Finance Minister was it not?—from
the new regime, a couple of letters saying that this is our position
and saying that I was willing to send a mission from our Department
to talk about the kind of commitments to reform that would be
necessary for us to be willing to re-engage the parts of the programme
which seek to get reforms out of government structures. So that
is our broad view on Pakistan and obviously there is some delicacy
in that, but I do think again that that is the right position.
The people of Pakistan have suffered very bad government, terrible
corruption, real deterioration in life for the poor, terrible
pressure for the rights of women, as you know. I suppose I will
say this finally; quite often when there is a crisis like that,
as happened with the nuclear testing and India and Pakistan, there
is a cry to do something and the easy thing the international
community can do is call for the cut-off of aid. People want to
trade as usual; they want some political engagement and often
aid is the painless thing for the international community to do
and our general view, and mine very strongly, is to resist that.
For, example in the case of the nuclear test it was not the poor
of India and Pakistan who organised the nuclear tests and we fought
to preserve all forms of assistance that benefited the poor, but
said everything should would enable them to mis-spend resources
in that kind of way. So my general view is not that the first
instinct should be to pull away; you should stay engaged if you
can protect the poor and bring about the kind of reform that is
needed. But in the case of Pakistan, we could not carry on trying
to improve the effectiveness of government when we had just had
a military coup, but we needed to take action, but we were hopeful
that the international community could leverage a tied-down commitment
to a series of reforms that are needed, including democracy, but
other reforms that were not in place under the previous Government,
or indeed the one before that.
Chairman: Thank you very much, Secretary
of State. I do apologise for not being here at the start. I hope
you understand that both myself and Ann Clwyd had Private Member's
Bills to present to the Chair exactly at the same time as we were
starting here, so I would like to thank Tony Worthington for standing
in and I would like to ask him to lead us on the first question.
Mr Worthington
2. I am interested in what you said about poverty
in China, that you believe there was a serious attempt to eradicate
poverty by the Chinese. It is very important to us because of
your Department's commitment to the abolition of poverty. Could
you give a few more examples or illustrations of how their policy
is targeted towards elimination of poverty?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) The achievements that are measured
by the international community since the—Ms Unsworth will
help me with the dates—late 1970s?
(Ms Unsworth) Yes.
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Something like 350 million people
have been lifted out of extreme poverty, measured by the World
Bank's dollar a day purchasing power; what a dollar would purchase
in the United States, not in China. It leaves, I think, 42 million
people on China's definition of extreme poverty, which is a much
lower threshold, but still leaves something like another 220 million
on the World Bank dollar a day measure. But that is very considerable
progress—that is as many people as are living in poverty
in sub-Saharan Africa, having been lifted out of that condition
since the late 1970s—and a very strong united commitment
in the Government to make further progress on poverty and a real
engagement and commitment to that objective. This is not a perfect
Government, but we think that in that part of their commitment
there is a sincere and determined commitment to make progress.
3. Do you think this commitment is to all sections
of China, which it is to the whole population, that there are
no exclusions from this anti-poverty drive?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) I cannot speak with authority
about every single part of China, but when I went, which is, what,
18 months or so ago, to Gansu which is in the West, in a very
poor part of China. It is a Muslim community which speaks its
own language. There is no doubt that since the development of
the economy and it being much stronger in the East there is more
inequality in China, but of course the growth of inequality is
not necessarily a growth of poverty in the sense that you can
lift people out of abject poverty and then have others getting
better off, not something we might desire. But there has been
a growth of inequality and a reduction of poverty and there seems
to be a real commitment to try to ensure that the minorities that
tend to live in the more far-flung places are included, not for
success, but a kind of policy determination to try to achieve
that objective that we wanted to work alongside.
4. You mentioned, Secretary of State, just how
small our own contribution can be, given the scale of the country.
This obviously leads to the thought: "Well, why do not all
the donors get together"? Why is there not more collaboration,
or is there a lot of collaboration between donors to see whether
more leverage could be exerted by the European Union and other
donors acting together? Have you given any thought to that?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) We have indeed, and I will bring
Ms Unsworth in on it. I think China has always been a very difficult
place to work and I think nobody was in until the World Bank engaged,
again in the late 1970s, early 1980s, so there is not a long history
of involvement as there is in other parts of the world where we
work and the World Bank was certainly early, and it just reached
the point where China is no longer IDA eligible and we have been
talking with the World Bank about maybe if we could work in partnership
one could get to a larger scale with the health programme that
they are planning. We have been, as a department, trying to look
at who else is there and how we can work in a collaborative way.
I think we have not made a lot of progress, but we are trying.
May I hand over to Ms Unsworth?
(Ms Unsworth) I would say that there are two main
ways in which as a small donor we are trying to have an impact.
One is, as you suggest, working with other people. In fact, one
of the four big projects that we have put in place over the last
18 months is a health project working directly in support of the
World Bank which in turn is supporting Chinese government policies.
When I was in China last week, we had a meeting with donors so
there is increasing collaboration on things like HIV/AIDS, on
the environment where we are planning to work with the Asian Development
Bank, so that is one way of leveraging our effort. The other is
that in China ideas are very important and are undoubtedly one
of the things they value about our programmes. So, putting together
pilot schemes which test innovative approaches to social problems
in one area, with a view to scaling them up somewhere else, is
something that really happens in China. We talk about doing it
in other places, but I think there is a greater chance of it working
in China than elsewhere and all our projects have that element
in them.
Mr Robathan
5. Secretary of State, as you said we particularly
want to talk about human rights and I appreciate you are not responsible
entirely for government policy towards China, but I think it is
a very worrying thing and if I could put it this way—and
it is not just that Amnesty International and others have written
to us, and I am not a member of Amnesty International incidentally,
unlike many members of the Committee—but I feel as a British
citizen, when one hears about some of the things happening in
China, I feel rather embarrassed that the British Government and
your Department is there with the connivance indeed obviously
not their impressive policies, but I note that Ms Unsworth said
`supporting Chinese government policies'. Now if I were a Chinese
personally I would be rather unhappy. Now I use that as preamble,
so what I want to ask you is, what is the response of your Department
to those who criticise your engagement with China on human rights
grounds?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Well, I have to say I have never
met anyone who has said we should not be assisting the efforts
in China to reduce poverty and secure the human rights of poorer
people in China. I mean there might be people who take that view,
but I have not in the course of my life ever met them.
6. Well I think you may get some letters quite
soon asking for meetings.
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Well, if I do I will inform you
about that. People make these sweeping remarks, but actually to
say that we should not engage with some of the poorest people
in China in improving their human rights, because the right not
to be poor, the right to be educated, the right to have health
care, these are human rights. I have had the conversation with—Amnesty
International deals only with political and civil rights and its
judgments on the level of human rights in countries do not take
account of social and economic rights and do not focus on the
rights of the poor, and I have had that conversation when I have
bumped into the, do they call him Secretary General?
7. Yes?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) In, I think it was Senegal and
he said that was somebody else's job. He fully recognises that
they are human rights, but does not consider that to be part of
Amnesty's job. So we are working on human rights in China in trying
to secure improvements in the rights of the poor. I think there
is probably no poor developing country in the world where we are
working where human rights are fully secured for everyone. If
we look for a position for countries where human rights were properly
protected we would not be working anywhere; that is the reality.
The third thing I would say is, of course there is a worrying
question of human rights in China, but it used to be worse and
I think there is no doubt about that. A closed off China that
goes through The Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution
and all this terrible repression and suffering that went with
that saw more abuse of human rights than a China that is beginning
to open up with a commitment to reduce poverty in its country
and has signed up to the Convention on Human Rights and allowed
Mary Robinson to visit. That does not mean that there has been
progress on all fronts and indeed there has been a deterioration
recently, but there has been historical progress and I think that
is very important for the people of China and the world.
8. I happen to agree that it is important and,
you know, it is not much good being a democrat or living in a
democratic society and starving to death, but Amnesty International—again,
I am not one who usually quotes them—but I think the situation
in China is very grave. For instance, the last 12 months have
witnessed a great leap backwards in human rights, rather than
things getting better as you suggest. Now, we have heard that
the aid we provide is actually pretty small compared to the size
of the country; I think that is almost inevitable given the size
of our country. So if it is not actually making a great deal of
difference, I wonder really why we are doing it? What would have
to happen in China in terms of human rights for aid to be suspended?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Firstly, let me say Amnesty International
does not report at all—let me repeat—on social and
economic rights or the rights of the poor to have their voices
heard in the governance of their country and it is quite clear
about that, that its reports are on civil, political rights. Very
important. But it is very important also I think to be clear about
that in one's own mind. For example, I do not know if you noticed
just reading the newspaper recently the Amnesty Report came out
and put Rwanda as the second worst country in the world and I
think that is very distorting in that Rwanda is trying to recover
from genocide and has people in prison and trials which have not
proceeded because the people who used to conduct trials, a lot
of them are dead. So no-one is arguing that all human rights are
not respected in Rwanda, but it can be misleading to just have
tables like that and say well therefore one should have nothing
to do with Rwanda, for example, which I do not think is the view
of this Committee and certainly is not the view of the Government
or my Department. So, none of the countries we work in respect
human rights for all. We seek to engage everywhere where we can
help to advance the human rights, particularly of the poor, which
is the responsibility we lead in the government effort and I am
confident that the work that we are doing is both helping to improve
the lives of some poor and marginalised people and is done in
a way that insists that the human rights opinions and views of
those people are respected in the way in which the services we
support are provided for them. So the effect of our work is to
improve human rights in China, but not to end all oppression of
all human rights in China which, any more than anywhere else where
we are working, we are not able to achieve that in the way that
we want.
9. I think that is a very fair answer, if I
may say so, except that I think where we are engaged—and
you say we try to improve human rights—are these matters
raised? Are the matters of political and civil rights, are the
matter of Panchen Lama for instance, are these matters raised?
The matter of Tibetans that are being suppressed? Because when
Jiang Zemin came to this country not so long ago, you will know
that peaceful protest was suppressed in ways it has never been
before, or not in my lifetime anyway? 15 people were arrested
in the Metropolitan Police area alone just for waving banners.
Now I am sure that you were just as distressed as I am by that
and I really do think that this Government and you, as its representative,
should be raising this matter. For instance, when you went to
China did you raise the question of human rights, political and
civil human rights, with the government Ministers you met?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) I raised the political, civil,
social and economic rights of all the groups of people and in
the areas with which we were working. The full question of treatment
of minorities is a very important question in China and I discussed
that at great length with a whole number of officials, but please
let me repeat—I am not trying to duck anything—on
the responsibility for Britain's relationship with China and the
whole of the European Union's relationship with China on these
questions of political and civil rights and the whole situation
of Tibet, I am not the lead Minister and we are not the lead Department.
Of course I support the policy of the Government, but I am not
able, I do not have all the detailed information to tell you about
each particular incident and when representations were made. As
I said, when preparing for this meeting it was suggested maybe
I should be briefed about all these matters and I said: "This
is ludicrous. If the Committee wants to go into those matters,
surely they ought to have the briefers here, the officials and
the Ministers who are responsible for that policy, to answer your
perfectly legitimate questions".
Chairman
10. I do think there was one legitimate question
which Mr Robathan was trying to ask on our behalf is exactly at
what point would you suspend your assistance, the Department's
assistance, to China? Would it take a Tianeman Square? If the
civil rights were being denied or social rights being denied,
when would you stop?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) As I have said already, we do
not go round the world looking for places to suspend our engagement.
We try to stay engaged. No, I am trying to answer you honestly
rather than rhetorically. So, for example, in Nigeria in the very
oppressive years of the previous regime most countries in the
end left. We disengaged from the central Government, but we stayed
working on health and water, in particular in areas of local government
where we thought we could still work, but it is our view that
if we can secure some advance, some protection for poor people
in a country that is badly governed it is worth doing. I have
never asked myself the question: "In what conditions would
we depart from China?". I am sure there are some conditions
which I hope will never historically arise where that would be
the case, but the general view we take is that while we can engage
and make progress with integrity, we stay engaged and we think
we are making progress in China and that progress is being made
in general in China and it is a fantastically important prize
for the people of China and the world and I have no doubt that
we are right to retain our involvement in China and work in the
way we do. I do not have any doubt in my own mind that that is
the right thing to do for anyone who is dedicated to the advance
of human rights.
11. Well, if I can—
(Rt Hon Clare Short) But I cannot answer your question.
I cannot answer about Rwanda, about Nigeria, about anywhere in
the world.
12. I think you have answered it, because if
I heard you correctly you said you would continue where you could
still work with integrity and be able to help the social, civil
and economic rights of poor people in that country? Would that
be the right place that you would go as far as that?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Yes, that is right.
13. I think that is very helpful to the Committee.
May I just ask one other question? Secretary of State, you yourself
said that China is coming out of IDA, is that because—
(Rt Hon Clare Short) That is the most concessional
form of World Bank lending, yes.
14. Yes, that is right. What I was wondering
is on what basis they are coming out? Is it because their GDP
per head has risen above the limit or is it because the total
amount of money allocated to China under IDA has been absorbed?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) I think it is the GDP per head,
but may I ask Ms Unsworth?
(Ms Unsworth) Yes. It was a decision that was made
in the lead up to the last replenishment of IDA. It is essentially
that China is graduating from IDA.
15. On the GDP per head basis?
(Ms Unsworth) Yes, but it was also a consideration
of the total volume of resources available and how it should be
allocated to other people.
16. Yes, I knew there was a double dip?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) It is not an absolutely objective
graduation, the way the system works, but China's GDP per head
had improved and people in the World Bank are worried about the
size of China and its possible call on IDA resources.
17. So it is a sort of pragmatic approach, is
it?
(Ms Unsworth) Yes, it is.
Chairman: Mr Grant, could you continue
the questioning for us?
Mr Grant
18. Secretary of State, you mentioned today
within the DFID's country strategy paper on China that China had
signed up to a number of Conventions, including the Convention
on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights and the Convention on
the Rights of the Child, but they have only signed up to one of
the Conventions in terms of the ILO, International Labour Organisation,
and that is the one relating to equal pay. Could you tell me what
initiatives DFID are involved in to assist the Government of China
in implementing its commitments to various human rights conventions?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) As I have said already, Chair,
our particular responsibility is advancing the human rights of
the poor, both their social, economic, political and civil, their
opinions as well as their life condition and their right to education
and health care and a livelihood. That is the part of the work
that we engage in. The actual answerability to the United Nations,
the Human Rights Conventions and the Mary Robinson Process in
Vienna we do not lead on. But we are assisting China to advance
the rights of the poor in the way that have been described to
you. On the ILO I have to say I do not know. I believe what you
said, but I do not know about that. Again, we are not the lead
department; that is the Department for Education and Employment,
but we engage with the ILO in a big way on child labour in trying
to kind of get the ILO better, not just the Convention on Child
Labour which we, as a Government, have signed up to but them putting
in place in country after country programmes that will actually
lift children out of work and into school. That is our engagement
with the ILO. I am not the lead Department for the rest of the
ILO's work.
19. It is just that it was mentioned in the
strategy paper so I assumed that you had some involvement in it.
Who deals with that? Is that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?
(Rt Hon Clare Short) Absolutely, but let me be clear.
A lot of people, I think, do not realise—I am sure you do,
Mr Grant—that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
includes some very important social and economic rights for the
poor. The right to a livelihood, the right to health care, the
right to education and even says it should be free at primary
level even in that Convention signed in 1949 and I think in all
the battles over human rights, especially in the Cold War years,
what are called the Red Rights have been slightly written out
of the picture. Our work is human rights for the poor, but we
are on that social and economic, but when we say `a human rights
based approach to development', we mean that that includes the
opinions of the poor not just doing development to them, but respecting
them and taking their view and then giving their opinions about
what their priorities are. We lead there, but on the human rights
machinery of the United Nations and Mary Robinson's responsibilities
and the hearings that take place in Vienna, that is a matter for
a Foreign Office lead.
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