Examination of Witnesses (Questions 207-219)
MR JOHN
ASHTON
26 APRIL 2006
Q207 Chairman: Can I welcome you, Mr
Ashton? We have asked you to come at very short notice and we
are very grateful that you have been able to help us. As I have
just said, the focus of our discussion is on China. You have been
listening to a discussion about Korea, but we are trying to fit
in a lot in this inquiry. Can I ask you to introduce yourself
and then to say a little about how you perceive the situation
in terms of the energy requirements and the environmental impact
of this growing Chinese economy?
Mr Ashton: First of all, it is
a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. One thing
that I should perhaps say by way of preface is that I think the
Committee may know I am on leave of absence from the Foreign Office.
I run a small, independent organisation and what I say in response
to your questions will be very much a reflection of my personal
views. They do not reflect the views of the British Government.
Q208 Chairman: It will be more interesting
for us if it is!
Mr Ashton: They may reflect in
some cases British Government views but that will be, as it were,
coincidence. A couple of points in response to your invitation.
I think that how the UK engages China on environmental and resource
questions goes to the heart of one of the key foreign policy issues
facing the world. That is, whether China chooses a hard power
route or a soft power route for the next stage of its emergence,
regionally and globally. At the moment I think that you could
say, if you look at Chinese foreign policy, that it is keeping
both options open. We need a soft-power China. That means a China
which is successful and stable but, above all, a China that is
achieving a transition to a much more efficient use of energy
and other resources, and thereby accelerating the same transition
for everybody else. China's current pattern of economic development
is undermining its own stability. That is why Chinese leaders
increasingly, and with an increasing sense of urgency, are stressing
the environmental and also the social equity aspects of development.
If you like, they are stressing quality as well as quantity of
growth. At the same time—and the same pressures for the
same reasons—there is a growing Chinese footprint globally
and that is contributing to a scramble for oil and other primary
resources, driving up commodity prices. China's need for timber
was the main source of finance for the warlords in Liberia. Of
course, the biggest question of all is that we will not succeed
in stabilising the climate unless China finds a low-emission pathway
towards meeting its own needs for energy. Against that background,
the questions for UK policy seem to me to be these. What can we
do to help China grapple with its own resource dilemmas, which
are increasingly our resource dilemmas as well? How can we help
China manage its emergence, to create the global conditions that
we both need? How can we give China confidence that it can better
meet its needs through soft power and co-operation—on the
basis of agreed rules, the rule of law, multilateralism and all
of that—than it can by resorting to hard-power solutions,
which in the end will be illusory? We can only do any of that
by operating at a European level. The UK should, in my view, catalyse
a coherent engagement between the EU and China for mutual resource
security. China wants to have that conversation. In some ways,
if you go to Beijing nowadays you sense that China has more belief
in the EU than the EU does itself, partly for geopolitical reasons
on the Chinese side because China is uneasy about the prospect
of living in a world shaped by what it sees as US hard power.
On the European side there are signs that some of those conversations
are beginning, but I think that at the same time the necessary
level of coherence and ambition is lacking. It is not about one
side demanding that the other side changes track; it is about
pursuing a shared interest together. I do not think that we can
tell China, any more than we could tell the US for example, how
to manage its own economy. Furthermore, because China's growth
at the moment is largely export-led, it is in any case our investment
and our consumption which is helping to shape the way China's
economy is developing. All of this goes to the heart of, if you
like, the new foreign policy in an age of interdependence. It
is about recognising that we will increasingly be unable to secure
our separate national interests unless we secure our shared global
interests; for example, our interest in a stable climate. Therefore,
it is about the effective use of the much-talked-about soft power,
of which Europe is an embodiment. It is also about our strategic
economic interests. We will not, for example, be able to pay for
the pensions of an ageing European population unless we can secure
the returns available from a stable and reasonably rapidly growing
China. We stand to gain also from the increase, not that much
noticed but quite significant, in China's capacity to innovate.
China's research and development expenditure, its registration
of patents and, above all, the rate of deployment of capital in
China make it the cheapest and fastest place to bring new technologies
to maturity. We have an interest in accelerating that process
as much as China does. How can we therefore harness the world's
biggest single market to its fastest-growing economy in our mutual
interest? I would say that that is the key question.
Q209 Mr Horam: I am very interested
in what you have to say about Europe. Do you think that China's
view of the European Union is primarily motivated by convenience,
as it were, to try and deal with one particular entity rather
than lots of different entities, or lots of different nation states?
Or is it because it actually sees Europe as, as you said yourself,
a proponent of soft power, and therefore wants, in its soft-power
mode, wants to engage with that and encourage that? Or is it simply
because it does see Europe as a kind of counterpart to the hard
power of the United States? Which of those motivations are there,
do you think?
Mr Ashton: It is a combination.
I think that there has been an evolution. Until fairly recently,
the famous Henry Kissinger question, "Who do I phone if I
want to talk to Europe?", applied in China, but—
Q210 Mr Horam: But they do see their
difficulty, do they?
Mr Ashton: I think increasingly
they do. They increasingly appreciate that that is not really
the key question about Europe. You miss some of the essence of
Europe. Increasingly there are people in China who are coming
to realise that there is something about the European experience;
that Europe is an example of managed interdependence in everybody's
interest; a sense that somehow—for all of its faults and
failed experiments in some area—Europe has shown some things
about how you can pool sovereignty while maintaining diversity,
and thereby in effect expand mutual sovereignty. That interests
China, because I think that the phenomenon of interdependence
is beginning to be quite well understood in China. China has opened
its economy to the global economy much faster than most commentators
were expecting 20 or 10 years ago. It is a very open economy and
therefore very exposed to conditions in the global economy, and
that has concentrated their mind.
Q211 Mr Horam: Coming on to environmental
degradation, 10 years ago I went myself to China and spent about
six weeks ago and I saw some of the worst examples of environmental
degradation. There are some appalling stories. How bad do you
see it, in a global context—the environmental degradation
they have—and to what extent are they able, through the
SEPA programme and so forth, to improve it?
Mr Ashton: You have to say it
is pretty bad. I came across a Chinese Government figure recently
that said that there had been 51,000 episodes of unrest in China
in 2005: 51,000 arising from environmental stresses and degradation.
One of the most powerful political forces in China is and has
for a very long time been a fear of instability. I think there
is a growing realisation that these increasingly stressful examples
of environmental degradation—the case of the river pollution
in Harbin was just one very public example of that, but there
are many, many more happening all the time—are seen increasingly
as threats to Chinese stability. That is why I think that Chinese
leaders increasingly are talking the language of having to get
much more serious about dealing with them. I would make one other
point about that. It is dangerous to see the internal environmental
stresses as in any way separate from the external consequences,
the external stresses, which are being catalysed by the way in
which China's economy is growing. They are really two sides of
the same coin and that underlines this mutuality that I was talking
about. If we find a way of engaging China that will help deal
with the external stresses, we will also be helping them deal
with the internal stresses—if they are using energy and
water much more efficiently, for example.
Q212 Mr Horam: You are saying they
are trying to deal with this environmental degradation which is
pretty bad. How far are they succeeding?
Mr Ashton: You have to spend a
lot of time at the grassroots in China really to know, and I do
not do that; I visit from time to time. I would suspect that at
the moment the problem is getting bigger faster than the solutions
are catching up with it.
Q213 Mr Horam: Because of the economic
growth?
Mr Ashton: Because of economic
growth, yes.
Q214 Mr Horam: To what extent is
the environmental degradation, apart from this question of stability
which is a separate question, a constraint on economic growth
as such?
Mr Ashton: It is a substantial
constraint. Estimates of the cost to China's GDP vary enormously
and each one must be taken with a pinch of salt, but I have seen
figures up to 15%. I think the World Bank has estimated something
like 8%.
Q215 Mr Horam: What do you mean by
that? I cannot quite grasp that.
Mr Ashton: That China would be
growing twice as fast if it had its environmental stresses under
control.
Q216 Mr Horam: That is an astonishing
figure, is it not? Twice as fast?
Mr Ashton: One of the things that
the World Bank looked at was the public health costs of the very
widespread respiratory problems that you get in Chinese cities
as a result of air pollution, and they are massive costs. The
trouble is that there are no very easily accessible buttons that
Chinese leaders can push that will solve those problems with a
sweep of a wand. There are a lot of countervailing pressures.
There are a lot of people who are trying to grow their bit of
the economy as rapidly as possible without wanting to pay any
attention to the environmental consequence. It is a complex situation.
Q217 Chairman: How important are
non-governmental organisations in China in terms of highlighting
environmental issues and campaigning for change, or is it very
much controlled and within a state structure?
Mr Ashton: I think that one of
the most remarkable features of China in the last 10 to 15 years
has been the rapid growth of, if you like, a genuine civil society,
not a government-controlled civil society, in the environmental
area: in contrast to some of the other areas, where you might
be looking to see NGOs developing. I think that is partly a reflection
of the fact that these stresses are very real stresses. Mothers
get very upset when their children are spending a lot of time
in hospital with respiratory problems, for example; so the motivation
is there. At the same time, the Chinese Government recognises
that it is necessary to be tolerant of this kind of outlet for
those frustrations and pressures; and indeed that that can also
create a force that can be helpful. In other words, they start
less from a kind of instinct of intolerance towards non-governmental
activism in this area than they do in some others. One other point
I would make about that, however, is that I think this is a dynamic
which is driven largely by Chinese internal factors. I think that
there is not much that can be done from the outside to influence
the way in which the NGO world developed in China. Of course,
the more that that is part of an international conversation the
better, and there are very close and growing links between Chinese
NGOs and NGOs outside China. That, on the whole, is a welcome
thing. But I think the dynamic, as I said, is largely China-driven
and will remain China-driven.
Q218 Ms Stuart: Your posting was
in China. When were you in China?
Mr Ashton: I was in the British
Embassy in Beijing from 1981 to 1984 as the science attaché
and then I served as a political adviser to Chris Patten when
he was Governor of Hong Kong. I was there from 1993 to 1997.
Q219 Ms Stuart: I wish you to disabuse
me of a slight sense of unease I have been getting over the last
minutes. The picture of China which is so driven from a Western
point of view, where I do not recognise some things—like
which bits are the Chinese thinking. I will give you one example.
I went to the London Metal Exchange recently to look at the copper
prices. Then you look at the front page of the FT, which
carried a wonderful map where it said, "Chinese foreign policy
is determined by energy demands. Just look where the President
goes". On the Metal Exchange they were saying that the Chinese,
when they drive up the prices, are not risk-takers; they are gamblers.
That is actually a very different driving force. There is rationality
amongst the risk-takers. Esso poaches energy, and that is something
the Japanese are terribly worried about. They drive up prices
quite unnecessarily, because they say that they are not getting
their best price. Am I misunderstanding you, or are there some
things where you say we are looking at NGOs; we are looking at
these kinds of things but, actually, the Chinese operate quite
differently and we must not make the mistake that they are just
coming our way?
Mr Ashton: I am not sure I fully
understand the question.
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