UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 860-iv

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

EAST ASIA

 

 

Wednesday 26 April 2006

MR AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER and DR JIM HOARE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 191 - 231

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 26 April 2006

Members present

Mike Gapes, in the Chair

Mr Fabian Hamilton

Mr David Heathcote-Amory

Mr John Horam

Andrew Mackinlay

Mr John Maples

Mr Greg Pope

Mr Ken Purchase

Sir John Stanley

Ms Gisela Stuart

________________

Witnesses: Mr Aidan Foster-Carter, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea, Leeds University, writer and consultant on Korea, and Dr Jim Hoare, former member of the Research Cadre of HM Diplomatic Service, writer and former President of British Association of Korean Studies, gave evidence.

Q191 Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for coming. We are very pleased you have been able to come and help us out with our inquiry on East Asia, specifically focusing, in this session, on Korea and the Korean Peninsular. Perhaps you could introduce yourselves and then say a few words about how you feel the relations between North and South Korea have developed and are developing at the moment, and particularly the impact of the Sunshine Policy towards the North by the South?

Dr Hoare: Thank you very much for the invitation to take part. I am Jim Hoare. I was for 33 years a member of the research analysts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office working mainly on China, Japan and Korea, and I served in Seoul in the early 1980s, in Beijing in 1988 to 1981, and my last job was opening the embassy in Pyongyang in 2001/2002. I currently write and do a little bit of broadcasting, mainly on Korea but bits of Japan as well. I apologise that I did not put in anything in writing, but I have brought a copy of a book my wife and I wrote entitled North Korea in the 21st Century, which I would be very pleased to leave with you.

Mr Foster-Carter: I am Aidan Foster-Carter. I am afraid my experience is nothing like so hands-on as my distinguished colleague. I was an academic teaching sociology for many years, but through that I was interested in Third World development and through that in both Koreas. For the last ten years or so, to my great surprise, I have made a modest living writing about Korea and current events, North and South, on politics, business, etcetera, for the likes of the Economist Intelligence Unit. I am a freelance Korea analyst. I would have won on Watch My Line, would I not!

Q192 Chairman: How do you see the current situation?

Dr Hoare: I think one has to start by saying that all South Korean Presidents since 1971/1972, since Park Chung-hee, have wanted to get away from the confrontational attitude towards each other that the two Koreas had from before the Korean War. Park Chung-hee began to make overtures to North Korea, there was a response and, for a short time, it looked as though things might improve. It did not happen. Neither side was really prepared to make proposals that the other side would be able to accept. It did not happen again under Chun Doo-hwan, although Chun Doo-hwan was partly successful. Chun tried to engage with the North without any success. It began to look more hopeful under Roh Tae-woo, who became President in 1988, in that the two Koreas did reach a series of agreements, but these were more honoured in the breached than the observance. The next President, Kim Yong Sam, also argued that there should be better relations, but Kim Yong Sam, I suppose, was noted for rapid switches in policy for overreacting to hostile comments from the press in particular, and, again, the initiative did not get very far. The difference with President Kim Dae-jung was that he too faced difficulties. The Sunshine Policy introduced by Kim Dae-jung had no easy run, but, unlike his predecessors, Kim Dae-jung stuck to it, and although the North Koreans tested him, and it was a question sometimes of three steps forward and two steps back, all the way through Kim Dae-jung stuck with the policy of engagement, and I think it began to pay off, and although his successor has called it something slightly different, it is essentially the same policy, not to confront North Korea unless there is a military challenge but to engage North Korea, to bring it in out of the cold. I think that has been successful in the sense that when I lived in South Korea in 1981 to 1985 people really did fear that there was going to be another war. They feared that the North was going to attack. There was very little understanding of North Korea. In those days, even if you were studying in North Korea, in the Government's own think-tanks you had to get special permission to read any book published in North Korea or any book published about North Korea. All that has changed. There is now much more understanding in South Korea of the North, there is much more freely available information, and I think, in general, South Koreans are sleeping better of nights because of the policies pursued over the last nearly ten years now, and I think that we, the West, should encourage that policy. I think that the argument for a long time, by the United States in particular, was that Korean matters were for the Koreans to deal with and that all attempts by North Korea to talk to the United States or other Western countries should be avoided and that the two Koreas should talk. Now the two Koreas are talking, and, as you know, the United States is not always very happy with that, I do it is positive, I think it is a good thing and I think our decision in 2000 to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea was a sensible one. It helped the South Koreans. I feel sometimes that we have not been as imaginative in how we implemented that decision as we might have been, but I do think it was a sensible thing and I think we can help this process between the two Koreas by encouraging more engagement.

Mr Foster-Carter: I agree with much of that, but it would be rather dull for you if I agreed with all of it, would it not? I will try and add one or two things. I follow the North/South relationship particularly closely, just because I have to write a quarterly review of it for a thing called Comparative Connections, which includes a chronology. I do not say that as an advert, but when you have to do that you realise just how much is going on between the two Koreas, more than you ever get in the papers, because we tend to just focus on the nuclear issue and things like that. There are now, over the last seven or eight years, under the Sunshine Policy (now renamed for, no particular reason, the Policy of Peace and Prosperity) very wide ranging things. The meeting they have just had in Pyongyang at the ministerial level is the eighteenth since 2000, so very regular. The North Koreans have just postponed the last one by a month because they were cross with the South Koreans for having one of their routine military exercises with the Americans, which of course they do, but in the past you had things like the team spirit, and the North Koreans would take their bat home and take their bat home for a year. So the North Koreans are now adopting a more calibrated approach. I still do not think they are entirely reliable or entirely trustworthy, and, although it is true that South Koreans subjectively sleep easier in their beds at night than in the past, and who could begrudge them that, I sometimes wonder if it has not gone too far towards a kind of complacency; but it is their country, they are our ally and in a sense we have to be bound by them. A very important thing to mention on the key question of whether this change, this very new phase of close contact between the two, is reversible: South Korea is a democracy and democracies have elections. We have already seen how US policy changed with the election of President Bush. In fact, a decade ago - Dr Hoare will remember this - the present position was almost reversed: it was the South Korean Government that was very worried about North Korea, and when the Clinton administration began engaging it, having decided not to bomb it, from about 1996 onwards, the South Koreans were very doubtful. Now we are completely the other way round, and so that should remind us, we should not assume that any given change is permanent. The Conservative opposition party, the Grand National Party, might well win the next South Korean Presidential election in about a year and a half's time. I do not think we would ever go back to the old Cold War complete no contact, but if you read some of the things the North Koreans routinely say about the Grand National Party, and the North Korean rhetoric, as you know, is in a class of its own - traitors, sycophants, vipers, etcetera - then there might be at least a bit of a hiatus, and we should not assume, so to speak, that there is a complete 'love-fest' between the two Korean governments and it will go on forever the way it is at the moment.

Q193 Sir John Stanley: Could you both tell us what you believe should be the British Government and particularly the Foreign Office's priorities now in policy terms, excluding the nuclear issue which we are going to come to separately? What do you think should be the Foreign Office's policy priorities both in relation to North Korea and separately in relation to South Korea?

Dr Hoare: I think that the British role is always going to be a relatively small one. We do not have a long historical interest in Korea, we have never played a major role on the peninsular, at least for the last 60 years or so, but, I think, going back to 2000 and 2001 when we established relations with the North Koreans, we were there helping to support South Korean policy. I think that is still a sensible way to approach what we do with North Korea; and I think the South Koreans want us to help them, in the sense of bringing out the North Koreans. I think we started off in the right way. We offered scholarships, we offered training, for all sort of reasons, but mainly because there was a nuclear issue. Those things have been put on hold. I think that was a mistake. I think that the willingness of the North Koreans to engage was a new development. Their willingness to send people abroad to study was a new development. It has not been easy, for a variety of reasons, including the lack of language ability in North Korea, and so I think we did the right thing by establishing English language training, but for a short time we were doing other things as well. We brought out some people for human rights training at the University of Essex. The North Koreans came, they not only had two people studying there, they went back with 250 books; and I know they used some of those books because they began quoting them back at me. They were very selective in what they quoted, but at least these things did not go into a black-hole. The other thing that was remarkable was that North Koreans who came to Britain did not disappear when they went back. They were not sent off to camps for re-education or anything. They carried on doing their jobs; they would meet. The first group who came to study English took my wife and I out to dinner. In a country with a civil society as you and I know it, clubs and associations do not exist. They said, "We call ourselves 'The Eastbourne Boys'", because they had all studied in Eastbourne at a language school, and that was quite something. There were other examples too of where the North Koreans proved willing to come to Britain or to be involved with Britain for training purposes, and I think that was a sensible approach and I think, if it was me, I would reintroduce that. I would go back to trying to get North Koreans here, sending people there to train them. They are very isolated. Not everybody. The top leadership, I think, is not isolated, and those who need to know can read foreign newspapers, can listen to foreign broadcasts, but the majority of people, even in Pyongyang in the ministries, are not very well aware of the outside world. The training they have had, the Juche philosophy, the self-reliant philosophy, does not actually equip them to handle great changes in economic matters that they need, and we could have helped that, and in doing that we would help, I think, South Korea in its policy. I disagree slightly with Aidan about the likelihood of a reversal under a Conservative South Korean Government, partly because all South Korean governments, by our standards, are pretty conservative, even the current one, but I also think that too much has gone into it now in terms of linkages, investment and so on, for there to be any wholesale pulling back by South Korea. On our policy towards South Korea, I think it is one of those countries where you can legitimately say we have no real problems. We may have occasional ups and downs over trade matters and so on, but I think in general the relationship with South Korea is good and I can see no clouds on that particular horizon. The one area, I think, where there is concern in South Korea, as there is in Japan, is over the issue of East Asian studies in Britain. We know that a number of universities have closed courses. That sends very mixed signals. I was at a conference last autumn where the main Japanese speaker from the Japan Foundation noted that this was the Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies. He also noted that the first Conference for the European Association of Japanese Studies had been at the University of Durham, but then he went on to notice that, despite the money that the Japan Foundation and the Korean Foundation had put into the University of Durham, Durham was closing its East Asian programme. I think that sends the wrong sort of signal to these countries.

Mr Foster-Carter: There is not a lot of water between us on these issues I think at all. With North Korea, I do agree very much that, given that one of the many problems with the place is that they are isolated and benighted, and so on, you want to draw them out, but we are, of course, I suppose stuck in a catch-22, are we not, because of the nuclear issue? I happened to be at a meeting in Brussels on 14 October 2002, the day before the news broke in Washington about what allegedly happened when James Kelly went to Pyongyang and did they or did they not deny, when the present, the second, nuclear crisis, if one calls it that, which we will come on to, I gather, started. So the bonhomie of the whole day with the North Koreans before all that broke, they had a shopping list, as they always do, and it was a bit unrealistic. I think they sometimes think we are made of money and that our job is to give them things. Then, again, they wanted to send lots of students and, if our system allowed that to happen, that would be good, but, as I understand it, at national level and at EU level, now we are back to just humanitarian aid because of the nuclear issue. One understands why that is so - governments have to have ways of showing their displeasure - but I think Jim and I would agree that in the present context this is counter-productive. We want to get as many North Koreans out there as we can. I also think we should have a human rights dialogue with them. There are lots of issues one wants to raise with them. I was not directly involved with this, as Dr Hoare was, but I think we should raise those issues. With South Korea, again, on the whole, I think we have a pretty good relationship. I do not have a keen sense of an area where there is a particular gap or priorities, and so on. I suppose it will almost be, first and foremost, a business relationship. One hopes it will be wider than that as well. I understand The Times is going to mark the World Cup with a supplement that is going to stay off politics and economics, somewhat to my displeasure, because it probably means I cannot write for it, and will focus on Korean culture and so on. The Koreans still have this sense that, other than your good selves, the public over here does not really know where they are and who they are and they do not get enough attention, and so on, but I do not quite know how one addresses that at policy level. I entirely agree about the unfortunate closure of places like Durham.

Q194 Chairman: Can I ask you about China and its attitudes. Is there a competition between South Korea and China as regards influencing North Korea?

Dr Hoare: In a sense, I suppose, yes. There is not competition in the sense that neither China nor South Korea wants chaos on the Korean peninsular. In other words, anything that would lead to the implosion of North Korea and the expulsion of numbers of people would worry both China and South Korea. It also worries Japan. I think they have a common objective in trying to keep North Korea stable. I think both China and South Korea would like to see changes in North Korea: economic changes, possibly political changes, possibly social changes. I think for the Chinese the economic changes would be more important than the other two. For the South Koreans maybe all three are equally important. I think you have to go back to the historical links between China and the Korean peninsular. The Koreans are a tough people. If they were not tough they would all be speaking Chinese now. They have resisted Chinese attempts to dominate, they have had different ways of accommodating that over the centuries and, by and large, the Chinese have gone along with it. The Chinese, I do not think, want to take over either North Korea or the North Korean Peninsular, but they do not want a hostile Korea either. I think, since the late 1980s the Chinese have become much less of a worry to the South Koreans and, equally, the South Koreans are much less of a worry to the Chinese. The Chinese now have diplomatic relations; they have trade relations; they have cultural relations with South Korea. South Korea is not as hostile as it once seemed to be to China, and so the Chinese, I think, could live with a unified peninsular brought about by South Korea. They can live with the present arrangement. What they do not want is trouble in the Korean Peninsular, because they will then be involved, because they have always been involved when there has been political trouble on the Korean peninsular, they cannot avoid it. They have a long border, they have ethnic Koreans who are Chinese citizens living on their side of the border and they have family links across the border. If there is trouble in Korea, the Chinese will get involved, and so I do not really see it as a competition between the two. There are times when it may appear like that, but I think, in fact, the two, South Korea and China, can work together, as they have been doing in a sense in the six-party talks over the nuclear issue.

Mr Foster-Carter: I think that there is both co-operation and competition. I think it is fascinating and very important how the whole post Cold War tectonic plates have shifted in the last 15 years in the region and have continued to shift. The Russians, practically out of it, have thrown away a very good position that they had in Pyongyang, the Chinese playing a very long game with both Koreas. The position they have now ten or 15 years ago might have seemed impossible, managing to open relations with South Korea and not annoying or infuriating the North Koreans the way that they were angry when the Russians did. Certainly, yes, in the context of the six-party talks and very importantly, more broadly, I have coined a cliché to say that North Korea is surrounded by an axis of carrot: you have not only its old protectors, China and Russia, but you have South Korea as well basically engaging at almost any price, and that is a very important fact of real politique. That alone should stay the hand of anybody in Washington and elsewhere that might want to do something silly. In that sense they agree, and that is a very important fact of the new real politique, but, economically, on the question who is going to have influence, I think we are re-running some parts of Korean history, of which Dr Hoare knows much better than I, admittedly, of the century before last, the late nineteenth century, particularly on the economic front. North Korea's economy is in a terrible state but it does have a lot of minerals. You know what is happening to mineral prices currently. China is on the doorstep, South Korea is on the doorstep. There is quite direct competition now, and so, even as the Chinese and South Koreans are, if you like, at one, the South Koreans are having to be a little bit careful, because of their US allies, on the importance of keeping the peace, for quite understandable reasons - it is on their doorstep - and there is the question of exactly who will keep that peace. If you look at the trade figures, it looked as if South Korean trade with the North was going to overtake China and become the North's main partner, but that certainly has not happened yet. In the recent meetings the South Koreans have been terribly interested in mining ventures, and so on. I have likened it in things I have written recently, from a North Korean viewpoint, just as the late Kim Il-sung was able to use the sino-Soviet dispute, and used it very carefully, more cleverly than any other small communist country, and basically stayed friends of a sort with both and collected the cheques from both. I would not push the argument too far, but I think Kim Jong-il is, surprisingly, in a rather more enviable position, all things considered, that he can rely upon both diplomatic and economic support, to a degree, from both China and South Korea.

Q195 Mr Horam: Can we come to the United States policy in the area, which is rather more relevant even than the UK policy. Obviously we are interested in that. You said, I think, Mr Foster-Carter, that even after five years the administration of President George W Bush, beset by internal in-fighting, has yet to devise a clear, consistent or effective policy on North Korea. Let us focus on North Korea first. How do you see that? What are the strange 'in-fests' within the US on this issue?

Mr Foster-Carter: It is scandalous really. Bush bashing is terribly easy. I say that not from an ideological perspective at all, but we now have it in black and white with the interview which Richard Armitage, who was the Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush administration, gave to the Oriental Economist. They have not got a policy. They have not made up their minds. There are some of them who would engage. Secretary Powell certainly would have engaged, as would Armitage, and so on, possibly Christopher Hill, who is the person, when he is allowed to, who leads their delegation to the six-party talks but was recently sent to Japan for a track two meeting and told not to have a bilateral to his North Korean opposite number, and all the other six - this was a shadow six-party talks in effect track two meeting - everybody else met in every conceivable combination except the Americans - it was only they who looked back - and it is always identified with the Vice-President's office and the Department of Defence. I do not know enough about the personalities and so forth, but what has been said, if you like, at the gossip and anecdotal level is, in that sense, confirmed by a key player and, because of that, they have blown hot and cold. I agree with what Dr Hoare said about Kim Dae-jung. It is important. The North Koreans need to know where they are. God knows, it is a dreadful regime and so forth, but they need to know where they are. If you are put on an axis of evil by somebody, the head of the world's most powerful state, who then goes and invades the number one on that list, Kim Jong-il could be forgiven for wondering if he might be there as well. If, on the other hand, they want to engage, let them engage. I, simply as an analyst with, I hope, no particular axe to grind, am just baffled. Were I Kim Jong-il I would not know what the American Government wants of me.

Q196 Mr Horam: You do not see any change since Condoleezza Rice took over?

Mr Foster-Carter: Sadly not. I was very hopeful when the six-party talks were re-galvanised, poor old James Kelly, although none of this was his fault, lost his job and the new team came in, but clearly Hill, at first, in the meetings last year, was authorised. He met with Kim Dae-jung on his North Korean visit, I think, eight times in bilaterals, and so forth. He is an experienced negotiator in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, I believe. He was clearly trying to negotiate, and I do not know the exact mechanisms at all in Washington, but just judging by the outcomes, we have a meeting in Japan, as I say, and he is not allowed to do it. North Korea is a horrible state and it does many bad things. We are cross with all of them, but in the real world you have to prioritise. Are we going after them for the nuclear issue, are we going after them for human rights, are we going after them for the fact that they counterfeit American dollars? I will add the word "allegedly" if you insist. They do all these things, but you cannot go after all of them at once. If you are focusing on the nuclear issue, what are our American friends doing going after the counterfeiting issue? The North Korean have been doing this for years, and suddenly, as of about last September, whether coincidentally or not, their investigation happened to come up at that time. They have been going after that. Now the North Koreans have been handed another excuse to have their bank accounts frozen and so on, and the North Koreans have been handed another excuse not to come back to the six-party talks. It must be satisfying at a certain childish level that they have found something with which they can squeeze the North Koreans and the North Koreans are hurting. In the playground one understands that feeling, but in serious diplomacy, you are hurting them for what reason? The Japanese do it much better. The Japanese have sanctions too but the North Koreans know exactly why, and when the North Koreans finally tell the truth about all the kidnappings, the full truth, then the sanctions will stop and they will probably get lots and lots of aid. It is perfectly clear what the deal is. It is not at all clear, I think, to me or, more importantly, to the North Koreans, what the Americans want of them.

Dr Hoare: I would phrase it rather differently, but I tend to agree.

Mr Foster-Carter: I was never a diplomat.

Dr Hoare: I think in all my time in the Foreign Office, one of the things that research analysts did was have very close links with the American intelligence side of the House. I must say, I have left the Foreign Office for several years now, and so I am not in current touch with what is going on currently, but even by 2003 I had never come across an American Government that was so apparently at sixes and sevens on the policy towards Korea as the Bush one was, and it has got worse since then. There are clearly conflicting voices, there are conflicting strains. Aidan is right that the Vice President's office seems to have a hold over North Korean policy in the sense that any initiative from other parts of the administration is quickly stamped upon. If you go back to 2002 and the Kelly visit, I think the North Koreans were then expecting proper negotiations: they wanted to talk to the Americans on a range of issues. They had issues too as well as the Americans. Instead of this happening, when they sat down, Kelly took up one issue only and, instead of staying in negotiating when the North Koreans apparently admitted that they were at fault - after all, Kelly was saying, "We know you are doing something", and they said, after a bit, "Maybe we are doing it, maybe we can do it, or perhaps we are entitled to do it." That was the time, surely, to actually say, "Right, you bastards, now sit down and talk on this issue", and the North Koreans had issues they wanted to talk about - Kelly goes home, just like that, walks out, and they have never really had serious discussions ever since. To be honest, I think that was nothing to do with the possibility that the North Koreans were engaging in an enriched uranium policy. I think it was a determined effort within parts of the administration to scrap the existing agreement with the North Koreans, the agreed framework, for ideological reasons, not for sensible reasons.

Q197 Mr Horam: You think the influence of the Vice-President in this respect is regrettable?

Dr Hoare: I think it is not very productive.

Q198 Mr Horam: And ideologically motivated?

Dr Hoare: I would agree with that, yes. The United States is an extremely powerful country. I think the United States could solve the North Korean nuclear issue if it wanted to very quickly. The North Koreans are willing to be bought out on this issue. They know, as well as I know, that they could not use a nuclear weapon with any hope of survival. It is a bargaining chip. Unfortunately the other partner will not come to the bargaining table. That actually worries the South Koreans quite a lot, because the United States posturing back in 1994, or the possibility of going to war, of actually attacking North Korea, I think set a lot of alarm bells ringing in Seoul, and I think it is another of the factors behind the engagement policy. I think Dae-jung wanted to engage with North Korea, but the experience of 1993, 1994 convinced a lot of South Koreans that they had to engage with the North because the United States was unreliable on the issue in the sense that the United States appeared - I only say appeared - ready to attack North Korea without consulting South Korea, or so it seemed at the time, which could only lead to retaliation, not against the United States - the North Koreans could not do anything against the United States, except possibly against troops in Japan, but could certainly lead to retaliation against Seoul. Seoul is 40 minutes from the demilitarised zone, you can attack Seoul without any warning whatsoever, and that worried the South Koreans, that the Americans were apparently willing to go off on this track. That changed. Mr Clinton, for whatever reason, began a policy, which I think personally was a much more sensible one, of engaging with the North Koreans and they got out of it the agreed framework. It was flawed, but all agreements are flawed, you never get a perfect agreement, but at least it put a cap on what was regarded as the most dangerous aspect of North Korea's nuclear programme, and when the United States had got that it did not bother with the rest of the agreement. It did not lift sanctions, although it said it would. Eventually it did, in 2000, a few sanctions, but not most of them. The United States did not move to diplomatic relations or liaison office. That was not entirely the American's fault, it was also North Korea's fault, but the Americans put up conditions that they knew the North Koreans would not find acceptable, exactly as the two Koreas used to do in the past. You put forward a proposition and you say: "Here is my view", and the other side puts forward a proposition and each knows the other cannot accept it, so you get nowhere, and that is what happened over diplomatic relations or liaison officers between the United States and North Korea. We now have an administration that, as Aidan has indicated, does not seem to be able to agree on a policy, that the people you would have thought might be making the policy, the State Department and the NSC, seem to be overridden by the Vice-President's office and by the Department of Defence, there is little American support for the South Koreans and that all of this seems to me a waste of effort and a waste of time.

Q199 Mr Horam: Could you say a word about South Korea, because it does seem, from what you say, that South Korean interests are diverging from US interests?

Dr Hoare: I think in the very broad picture, no. The South Koreans, I think, still value the alliance with the United States, but there are certainly disagreements on the tactics to be pursued towards North Korea. I think you can exaggerate the degree of anti-Americanism in South Korea. In a way it is much more at the lower levels, it is much more anti-basism than it is anti-Americanism as a whole. I think most South Koreans still think that they need the United States as a guarantee just in case something were to go wrong with the North, but I think, as time goes by, they are increasingly thinking, "We can deal with the North Koreans. After all, we are brothers and we have said all along we can deal with each other and it is working for us now." There is, I think, a divergence there, but I do not think the South Koreans have got to the stage where they will say: "Americans out."

Q200 Mr Hamilton: Can I bring us back to Japan for a minute. I know that, Mr Foster-Carter, you have written about the issue of the prisoners held in North Korea and the fact that in 2006 the Japanese Parliament threatened to introduce a bill, in fact, I think, did introduce a bill, to impose sanctions on North Korea for its failure to improve human rights, but do you not think that more important than both the issue of human rights, which is very important, and the Japanese prisoners held in North Korea - the people who were abducted - the issue of nuclear weapons, albeit I accept what Dr Hoare said about the use of those weapons, but when I was in Japan three years ago and we met with the Japanese Foreign Minister and the Foreign Office people there, the one issue they talked most about was the threat that they felt from Yong-Jang pointing nuclear weapons at Tokyo and other Japanese cities. That seemed to be much more important to them then. It may have moved a lot since then in the last three years, but I wonder what your take on this is now.

Mr Foster-Carter: I am not primarily a Japan specialist, but my sense is that the priority has shifted, again partly because Japan is a democracy. I think that if it had been left to the political class - not that they necessarily agree with each other - then for a long time the abduction issue was not much heard about. Even the facts were unclear, and the North Koreans were denying it; and, of course, the Japanese Government prioritised, as governments do, the security threat. I suppose there are the missile and the nuclear issues, if you are sat where Japan is sat just across the Sea of No-Agreed-Name - as you know, you must not call it the Sea of Japan or you will offend all Koreans, or the East Sea - but, either way, it is not a very wide sea and you are within range. Particularly in 1998, when the North Koreans - in circumstances still, I think, to be explained - fired their largest rocket yet, allegedly to launch a satellite, which went over Japan and it is not quite clear how far some of the bits went. That, I would have thought, had a very real negative - from Pyongyang's viewpoint, but that is another question - galvanising effect. It transformed the security debate, and so on. What I understand has happened meanwhile, though, is that the abduction case got taken up, as it happened somewhat unfortunately, by the political right. The same people who want to whitewash all the textbooks, and who tell you that the Japanese just went on a nice little liberating walk into China and Korea before 1945, are the same people, as it happens, who are thumping the tub for these genuine victims. So that issue came up as a top priority. Then Mr Koizumi, with his political flair, shall we say, thought that he could do what no top Japanese leader had ever done and actually go to Pyongyang, wave a wand and solve it. He is still the only person who has ever got Kim Jong-il to say sorry for anything, as far as I know, but of course it was a sort of a half-sorry, and he is unconvinced. He got some people back, but there were these deeply unconvincing stories about "How come all the rest were dead?" - and it backfired. As far as I can see, they - certainly most politicians, Foreign Office people and so forth, I do not really know about the security people - would rather be concentrating on the real military, longer-term threat. Meanwhile, the abduction issue has in a way become a token of good faith. "If they keep lying to us about this, how will they ever tell us the truth about where their nuclear weapons are?" and so on. But I do not know enough about the nuances of the internal debates in Japan on all that, I am afraid.

Chairman: I think that we can move on to the nuclear issue now.

Q201 Sir John Stanley: Could I ask you both, do you take the view that North Korea is currently a nuclear weapon state or a nuclear weapon state in the making?

Dr Hoare: I honestly do not know. If you go back to the early 1990s when, for the first time, there began to be international concern expressed about North Korea, we were told by 1994 that North Korea had one, four, two, three, five nuclear weapons. Then the agreed framework came and there was less talk about what North Korea had or did not have, although it was still sometimes mentioned that they had nuclear weapons. In recent years, again figures have been thrown out that they have X, Y, Z numbers of nuclear warheads. I do not know. I have never seen any convincing proof that they have, or that they have not for that matter. I certainly believe that they tried to develop nuclear weapons from at least the 1970s onwards. After the Nixon-Mao Tse-tung summit, both Koreas, North and South, began to be a bit worried about their allies and I think that both looked at the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. The South Korean effort was firmly stopped by the Americans. Whether the North Koreans carried on - it seems likely they did - but how far they got, I do not know. What is certainly the case is that they have never tested anything that appears to be a nuclear weapon. I know that nowadays you can simulate a test with computer programmes but, to be frank, I find it very hard to believe that the North Koreans have quite such sophisticated computer programmes that they can do so. So I do not know. I said this recently at a conference in Paris, and the South Koreans - some of whom came from the defence, university side - all protested at this and said that they now believed that the North Koreans did have nuclear weapons. That begs a number of other questions. If they have them, how could they deliver them? I suppose you could drive a lorry across the demilitarised zone with a nuclear weapon on board. That surely would be sheer suicide? If you sent a nuclear warhead against Japan, that would be suicide. If you tried to launch something against the United States or, nearer to home, the United States Forces in Japan or South Korea, that would be suicide. Of all the traits of the North Korean regime, suicide does not actually seem to me to be a very strong one. They are desperate to survive, not to go out in a blaze of glory.

Mr Foster-Carter: For that very reason, that might be a reason to have it. I do not know either. I have never been privy to any security clearance, so I probably have had less of a chance to read things than some of the rest of you, and Dr Hoare. But I think that it would be very unsafe not to assume that they had it, although we do not know about whether they could deliver it, and so on. If you think that they have been trying for a long time - and I have great respect for their scientific and technical abilities - it makes a great deal of sense, both in terms of their mindset - they feel very threatened - and also the fact that otherwise they are subject to the overwhelming presence of United States Forces, and so forth. You would try to get some sort of counteracting force of this kind. So I think that one has to work on the assumption that they may. One cannot entirely rule out that it might be - I do not know if the comparison with Iraq is appropriate at all - when people think people have something, and then it turns out that they did not any more, even though they were once trying for it. I think that it would be safe to assume that they probably do. On the testing front, I always think that our good friends and allies in Pakistan, or some people there, may know a little more than they sometimes let on. I am not sure whether the CIA - I do not suppose we would be involved - has yet got to talk directly to Dr AQ Khan, but there were certainly reports in among the various dealings that went between North Korea and Pakistan on the HEU front; though I have seen the suggestion that some testing was done on the North Koreans' behalf, but I have no idea of the status of that rumour.

Dr Hoare: I must confess that, having travelled on North Korean roads and on North Korean railways, having seen the nature of the military vehicles that the army - the most favoured group in society - drive around in, I do find it very hard to reconcile that with, somewhere, a white-hot modern technology, producing sophisticated weapons. I know you can produce dirty weapons and all the rest of it, but the whole of North Korea is decrepit. You can drive round Pyongyang - which we were allowed to do - and round Nampo, and you see factory after factory with trees growing out of the roofs. You go along the east coast, and all the industrial heart of the country is dead. The first time I went, in 1998, most of the vehicles that I saw broken down were military vehicles and a fair percentage of those military vehicles were actually being run on wood-burning furnaces because they had no fuel. I find it very hard to reconcile the picture presented sometimes, of a highly sophisticated military machine working away on these things, with the realities of most of what I have seen of North Korea.

Mr Foster-Carter: Could I briefly come in on that? Could that not have been said of the former Soviet Union? I sometimes think that in the Korean field we do not avail ourselves sufficiently of the prior debates about communism, Stalinism, and of course there are lots of questions as to how far North Korea is unique. I forget who coined the unkind phrase, "Upper Volta with rockets" for the Soviet Union, but was it not intended to convey precisely this? That you looked around and most of it was a complete mess; but that could be because most of the resources were being put to make sure that, somewhere else where you could not see, was as good as it could possibly get.

Q202 Sir John Stanley: Mr Foster-Carter, I could answer your question, but I am only allowed to ask questions in these sessions.

Mr Foster-Carter: Does that mean I have to answer them?

Q203 Sir John Stanley: Could I ask two more? British Government policy - could you give us your views as to, first, what position you think the British Government should be taking towards the Six Party negotiations, recognising of course that we are not a party to those negotiations, but it is an important policy issue? Could you give us your views on that? Secondly, the one disturbing area on which I believe there is no controversy at all is that North Korea has been a serious proliferator potentially of delivery systems both of conventional weapons, and conceivably of weapons of mass destruction - particularly with this access to former Chinese, and indeed in some cases going back even to Soviet missile technology? Could you give us your view as to what the British Government should be doing to stop North Korea being one of the most serious proliferators in the world?

Dr Hoare: On the first point, the Six Party Talks, my own feeling is that the Six Party Talks are unlikely to succeed. The difficulties that have been shown so far in trying to get them to function are not going to go away. The North Koreans want to talk to the United States. Until you get direct talks with the United States, I do not think that you will make a great deal of progress. The United States does not want to talk to the North Koreans and has, over the years, proposed a number of multilateral fora to avoid talking directly to the North Koreans. There were Four Party Talks; now there are Six Party Talks. Again, I think that it is an example of the two sides putting forward positions that they know the other cannot accept. On proliferation of missiles, there has been some degree of restraint since 1998. The North Koreans have stuck by undertakings they gave not to proliferate missiles. In the past, I think you have to look rather carefully at why they were able to do so, particularly to the Middle East. I think the fact that North Korean missiles went to the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War indicates that perhaps they were being subsidised by somebody who wanted the Iran-Iraq War to continue. I have heard it alleged that a certain other Middle Eastern country was actually funding North Korean rocket supplies to Iran. So if there is somebody there to pay, then the North Koreans - who have very little else to sell now, for a variety of reasons, whose economic outlets are very limited, who are not actually bound by any international agreements about selling missiles - will sell missiles. They have also said very clearly, however, that if you want them to stop, pay them. There are those who say, "You will never get rid of the Danes if you pay the Danegeld", but in practice I think that you could easily buy out North Korea on this particular issue.

Mr Foster-Carter: On the Six Party Talks, I too wonder whether this forum is going anywhere. It would be a shame, in a way, if it faded away as others have before, not only because the nuclear issue remains unresolved but because I thought that sextet was actually correct. I know that some people would like us or the Europeans to be there; but, unless one thinks that everybody has got to be everywhere, these are the two Koreas and the four powers intimately involved with them by history and geography. So one should continue to try and breathe life into them, if we have any power at all to try and get "the West", "our side" - if these terms have meaning, as I hope they do - to present a united front. However, even as I say that, and given the issues we have discussed before, it is extraordinarily difficult. If we can bring any influence to bear on our United States ally, to plead with them - in private no doubt - for a consistency of approach, I think that it should not be given up on just yet. At the same time, I think that one has to be flexible and also imaginative. As Dr Hoare says, the North Koreans all along have wanted to be one-on-one with the United States in certain contexts, and I have never particularly understood why it has been important to the Bush administration to deny them that. It worked rather well, I think, under the Clinton administration.

Dr Hoare: That is why it is important to the Bush administration.

Mr Foster-Carter: Yes, the ABC - "Anything But Clinton" - but it should be past that now. One would like to think that there are more solid bases for making policy. On the proliferation front, again the broad task that one is trying to do in all of this, I think - and easier to state than to accomplish - is to persuade or cajole the North Koreans into realising that there are better ways to be in the 21^st century, and that most of what they do probably does not really do them, particularly in the long term, any good at all. They do sell missiles, as Dr Hoare has said. Most of that is not technically illegal, is it, because they are not signatories to the Missile Technology Control Regime? It is just extremely unhelpful in various contexts. I do not have a particular view on the Proliferation Security Initiative. The phrase, "Send a gunboat" would be unfair. However, although the odd shipment has been stopped - we recall the Spanish Marines, and the Yemen Government saying, "Oi, where's our missiles?" - that was embarrassing. Of course, you can send stuff by air. If they are sending missiles, as one hears, over Chinese airspace to Iran, then this interdicting business is not really on at all. Much as one may disapprove of it - and I like the Danegeld analogy - they were prepared to be bought off over missiles, and they still are. I am much less clear, incidentally, as to whether they are prepared to be bought off on the nuclear front. That is another matter. But missiles? Yes, they have actually said it and they have actually named a price. I feel uncomfortable saying that one should pay bad people to stop doing bad things that one wished they would not have done in the first place. However, if the Six Party Talks were going somewhere; if we had the framework of engagement that we did have under the Clinton administration, which was negotiated on this very issue, as you probably know - President Clinton nearly went to Pyongyang to sign an agreement, they were that close - then we could begin, one by one, to solve all this. I am afraid that we went up a ladder a little bit under that administration and we have gone down a lot of snakes, I fear, under this one.

Q204 Chairman: Can I ask you about the safety aspects of the North Korean military programme? First, how secure are their nuclear facilities and how dangerous are their methods of production? Secondly, is there any evidence that they had or still have aspirations or actual programmes on chemical and biological weapons, and, again, the security aspects of that?

Dr Hoare: I think that if they are doing any of these things, there is a security risk. North Korea is a pretty casual sort of place in terms of safety. Most normal, modern safety standards do not apply, I do not think. I will give you one example, which is extremely poignant in a way. Over in Hamhung there is the National Orthopaedic Hospital. In that hospital there is an X-ray machine - the only one outside Pyongyang that appears to be working. This is for the whole country. This X-ray machine was supplied by the East Germans in the 1950s. They have long since run out of film for this machine. If somebody is X-rayed, the doctors go behind the machine and look. They are therefore exposed to the radiation. As one of the UN people said to the doctors - one of the doctors said that he was thinking of giving up smoking - "You needn't bother", because the man is going to die of leukaemia or something before very long. The safety standards are appallingly low - where you can see them. So I suspect that in areas where you cannot see them they are equally low. The conditions of the nuclear plants probably would be very poor, compared to those outside North Korea, because everything else is very poor. I cannot believe that they are somehow, in one particular area, so very careful. If I am right, that casts doubts on their ability to produce enriched uranium via centrifuges, because that requires a lot of electricity - and, my God, it is one country where there is not a lot of electricity! Again, it may be hidden away in the mountains, but there is no evidence of a great deal of power. Secondly, it requires clean water and suchlike. All those things are lacking. If they are engaged in a nuclear programme, I think that there is very grave potential for disaster. As to chemical and biological warfare, the simple answer is that I do not know. There have been claims that they have such programmes. There are claims that the two fertiliser factories that are working - and those two fertiliser factories are only working at about a twentieth of capacity and they are very old, dating at least from the end of Korean War - are actually producing chemicals for chemical warfare. Again, I do not know. When I visited them, they said that they were for fertiliser and we did in fact see some fertiliser being produced; but they could have shown me anything and I would not have known. They have certainly been detected engaged in anti-chemical precautions. They have been seen in chemical protection suits; but, again, there is not a great deal of other evidence.

Mr Foster-Carter: I do not have great technical expertise on these matters, I must say. How many times can one say, "I don't know"! On the safety aspects of the nuclear issue, however, the KEDO - the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation - still theoretically exists, does it not, and the EU remains on its board, and so on? I suppose that for all practical purposes it is dead. In a sense, I would like to record the shedding of a tear because, had we persisted and if by any chance it comes to life again, we would - "we" meaning outside Western powers - have had a direct input into all of this. The new reactors that were being built for them would have to conform to the highest global standards and, before they were ever plugged into the existing North Korean grid, that would have had to have been attended to as well, while the IAEA was at Yongbyon, and so forth. But I suppose that is crying over spilt radiation, or something like that. On the CBW, I have seen some evidence to this Committee that seems strongly to deny it. I do not know any more than anybody else, but my understanding is that the consensus in all that I read, including in the South Korean military and so forth, is that this is a regime.... I suppose I regard it as a Sparta of the East, as a regime that has always put its security first and has always had a rather singular concept. Most small states think they would gain their security by hiding out behind somebody else, or at least ganging together with other small states to promote global law; whereas I think that the North Koreans think that you arm yourself with absolutely everything you possibly can and that is the only sure way that no nasty person is going to come and get you. On that basis - as I understand it, chemical and biological weapons are neither technically difficult nor expensive - it would surprise me very much if they did not. Joseph Bermudez, an American author who appears to be well connected and knowledgeable, writes - regarding the numerous artillery, 10,000 pieces at least, that they have trained on Seoul and so on, north of the ironically named "demilitarised zone" - that some of these are routinely supplied with chemical shells. I do not know how he knows; I do not suppose he made it up.

Dr Hoare: I think that it would be very hard to prove that. One just does not know, I think.

Q205 Chairman: You earlier touched on the question of the Chinese desire for stability and also the South Koreans' concern about a collapse. How likely is that? We have had evidence sessions earlier on in our inquiry where people talked about the visit of President Kim to China and reforms beginning after that visit. How likely is economic change? How likely is economic collapse? Is the current position one which is sustainable or are we likely to see an even worse situation than the food shortages, the famines and the other problems? Is there a potential for a massive social collapse or, alternatively, an uprising?

Dr Hoare: "Don't answer on both sides of the paper at once"! Those are very vital questions. I think that in one sense the North Korean economy collapsed over the period 1986-1996. The old North Korean economy, the heavy industry that was created after the Korean War has, by and large, died. Again, if you go to the east coast, you can see the factories closed down; you can see the equipment that once was in those factories mounted on trucks to be sold for scrap in China, as a means of making money. Unlike other countries where traditional heavy industries have collapsed, North Koreans have very little to replace it. They do not have modern service industries; they do not have computer industries, and so on, except in very, very small ways. It is not feasible for them to do as the Chinese did 20 or 30 years ago in terms of economic changes, because they did that long ago. Most people in North Korea are urban dwellers. They are not people you bring in off the farm; they have come off the farm long ago. So what you are seeing in the last few years is an acceptance - and I think that is actually very important - by the regime that they have to allow a certain degree of independence to people, whether in collective farms or in cities, to develop their own economic bases. So you have a lot of small stalls springing up in Pyongyang, and in other places as well. You have the development of what was previously totally forbidden: individual people offering services, like repairing bicycles. Very small-scale but actually important, in that it indicates a new approach. You have, in 2002, a decision to admit that the currency was in fairyland really, and to move towards a more realistic base on which you would form your currency and on more realistic exchange rates. The moves are having an effect, I think. There is more money about; the move towards the beginnings of a cash economy. This was a society where people did not have money, except a tiny bit of pocket money to buy an ice cream. Everything was supposed to be supplied by the state. The state has had to admit it cannot do that, and so since 2002 there has been a more realistic approach, if you like, to economic development. But they lack the means to do anything very large‑scale. They lack the training; they lack the skilled people who can bring about the required changes. Although North Korea has suffered a lot in recent years, I think that it is still politically strong domestically. The security system is still very powerful. The indoctrination system is still very thorough, and it runs from about six months to about 30. You are under a constant stream of indoctrination, whether you are in a kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, university or the military - and everybody is now supposed to go into the military for seven years. So this is a huge support for the regime in ideological terms. How many people are convinced of what they are taught, I do not know; but, as they have very few alternatives, it seems that many will accept or go along with it, even if some people are getting more and more cynical about it. The Chinese are engaged in economic terms. There are a lot of Chinese small entrepreneurs; there are lot of Chinese provinces that have offices in Pyongyang and elsewhere; there is a lot of Chinese tourism where, partly, the Chinese go and say, "It's like it used to be in our country and we've come to see what the past was like". That keeps the whole thing going. It may not be kept going at a very high level, but it is going; it is functioning. I think that is deliberate Chinese policy. Occasionally, the Chinese will rap the North Koreans on the wrist. They did in 2002, over the Sinuiju special administrative region which was being created. It is a long story and I will not go into it, but essentially, as the Chinese Ambassador put it to me, "We warned our North Korean friends and they wouldn't listen" - so the Chinese put the screws on. For the present, therefore, I do not think that we are seeing the risk of a social collapse, but it could happen. If North Korea is allowed no means to develop further, then the rising expectations of the population might lead to some decision amongst some of the leadership to overthrow the present leadership. Whether that would lead to fundamental changes in North Korea, I do not know. I doubt it. If you get rid of Kim Dae-jung, which may be President Bush's policy - he said he loathes him... I am sorry! Kim Jong-il. Get rid of the right president; get rid of Kim Jong-il. The most likely successors are going to be in the military, because they hold most of the cards and see themselves as the bulwark against outside pressures, and defenders of the state - like the military in most countries, but they have this special effect. If you did have a collapse, I think that the consequences for the surrounding countries would be pretty grim. A lot would go into China, but a lot of the North Koreans have links to Japan and some would try to go to Japan. I do not think that the Japanese want that. Many will try to come into South Korea. I think that all the countries in the region would prefer something like the present set-up to continue, at least for some time.

Q206 Chairman: Do you want to add to that, Mr Foster-Carter?

Mr Foster-Carter: Briefly, yes. This is an absolutely key area and it is complicated. I am cautious now, because I was incautious in the past. I am on record and in print as having predicted that North Korea would collapse definitely by the year 2000, probably by 1995. So one is now a little bit cautious. At the same time, the Maoist concept of contradiction still has its uses, and they are acute. Yes, politically it is an extraordinarily powerful regime. It has its grip, as Dr Hoare has said, on people's minds from a very early age. At the same time something very crucial has happened in the last decade or so and continues, which is that it was a regime that, in its terrible way, looked after you. It demanded complete control over your body and mind but it did give you a job, and so forth. That all collapsed with the famine, and people have actually had to fend for themselves. It would seem to me to be strange, no matter how ignorant you are kept of the outside world, and that begins to be breached in all sorts of ways - up on the border you can use hidden mobiles, secret mobile telephones, using Chinese networks and so forth.... People realise that this government has not done an awful lot for them. So I do not rule out that there might be unrest. It is curious that there seems to have been so little. Perhaps I could add one thing in particular. There will be a succession issue. We know these are Achilles heels for regimes of this nature. Kim Jung-Il has just turned 64 or possibly 65; he has had a complicated marital history, resulting in two or three sons - daughters appear not to count in this revolutionary society. Anyway, without going into all the details, we know this is sort of Borgia territory in such regimes. I think that everybody wants a smooth transition because the alternative may well be worse. Imagine warlords; imagine the degree of lawlessness that we have, dare I say, in present-day Iraq, if there were loose nukes around. Kim Jong-il is not the worst possible thing that one can have. One wishes it to be smooth; it does not mean that it will necessarily be so.

Chairman: Thank you very much. I would like to thank you both for a very interesting session for us. It has given us a lot of food for thought. Sadly, we do have another session immediately, to talk about energy and environment issues in China, so I am afraid we have to conclude now, but thank you both for coming.

Witness: Mr John Ashton, Chief Executive, E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, gave evidence.

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 areas - 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 ten 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, ten 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 per cent. I think the World Bank has estimated something like eight per cent.

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 ten 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.

Q220 Ms Stuart: There are all the assumptions, like on the environment - 180,000 people a year die because of air pollution. In the UK that would be an outrage. 51,000 unrests - that is significant. We have had people give evidence that it actually quite suits the Chinese Government to have 51,000 small-scale unrests, because that is the pressure cooker; that stops the lid from just going off. I could be wrong. Tell me wrong, but I am just getting a bit uneasy.

Mr Ashton: Perhaps I could just pick a couple of bits of that to start with. I would be quite surprised if in the internal discussions of the Chinese Government, when they look at the figures for local unrest, they say, "This is quite a good thing". My perception is that Chinese leaders are very worried about instability and about the way in which resource pressures might fuel instability. If you like, the main offer to the Chinese people of the Chinese Communist Party to be the regime in China is that by and large, up to now, it has successfully delivered stability, I guess since the late 1970s. I think there is a real question of legitimacy - a concern about legitimacy there. A lot of the big decisions that the Chinese leadership takes can be understood as attempts to strengthen the foundations for stability in China. I am not sure I understand the point about risk-taking. I was trying to address the underlying dynamic that simply comes from the scale and the rate of growth of Chinese demand for resources; for timber, for example. I was in China on the day in 1998 that the Chinese Government announced that it was going to ban logging in China - the felling of timber. There had been a major flood, a very damaging flood, and one of the factors that had made that flood worse than it would otherwise have been was that a lot of valley slopes had been illegally felled. One understands that that has been a reasonably successful policy in terms of logging in China itself, but it has also had very tangible consequences outside China; because it is easier to stop people cutting down trees than it is to switch off the demand for timber in your economy. So all of a sudden there was a much stronger demand for timber, some of which was manifested in an increase in illegal logging in Siberia, in South-East Asia and in West Africa, which is linked to what I said earlier about Liberia and the warlords.

Q221 Ms Stuart: Linked to the risk-taking argument, one of the things we sometimes see as an opportunity in helping the Chinese in their economic growth is by exporting some of the environmental technology. Do you think there is scope for that? A risk-taker responds to this; a gambler does not.

Mr Ashton: I think there is huge scope for that. If you take energy for example, China has recently announced what are arguably the world's most aggressive policies, both on energy efficiency and on the promotion of renewable energy. The EU also has reasonably aggressive policies in those areas, which will be highlighted in the UK very soon with the results of the energy review under way. If you say how can the EU engage China, or is there a way in which the EU can engage China that will enable us both to meet our respective requirements for greater energy efficiency and faster deployment of renewable energy by working together than we could by working separately, then that opens up enormous opportunities. If you created, in effect, a single market between Europe and China for ultra-efficient appliances, for very efficient vehicles, for renewable energy products of one kind or another, then you would be accelerating the deployment of those technologies in China, in Europe; and you would be driving down the global prices of them, so you would be doing that globally as well. That is a big business opportunity for European companies, apart from anything else.

Q222 Ms Stuart: What about assisting the Chinese, either as the UK or as members of the EU, in dealing with carbon emissions?

Mr Ashton: I think that is part of the same coin. There is one point about that. The Chinese themselves, I think, have come quite a long way in the last few years in coming to their own assessment of the implications of climate change for China. The Chinese economy is very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A large part of the most productive part of China is on the eastern seaboard: very exposed to a rising sea level; exposed to storm surges; saline intrusion. A large part of Chinese agriculture depends on patterns of rainfall and hydrology that need to be reasonably predictable, and so hydrological instability is a threat to them. That has become a more tangible feature of the internal discussion in China. However, at the same time I think that it does not yet have the urgency that matters of energy security have for the Chinese leadership. The Chinese leadership is worried about China's growing dependence on imported oil and gas. It is worried about the inability to build power stations fast enough to supply the increase in demand for power. Again, I think that they see that as having an immediate stability connotation. When they put climate change next to that, climate change also appears increasingly as a stability issue but it is not an immediate one for them. Chinese emissions are a huge part of the climate change equation. The challenge for us is to engage China in the following way: to say, "How can we work with you in a way that will help us both meet our mutual energy security requirements" - along the lines that I have just been trying to describe - "while at the same time meeting our climate security requirements?" Because if you drive up energy efficiency, if you accelerate renewables, if you find ways of burning coal without emitting carbon dioxide, if you make your transport system less emissions-intensive, you are also addressing the climate problem at the same time.

Q223 Ms Stuart: Do you think that there will be an extensive increase in the use of nuclear energy in China? At the moment it is not a very significant part of the energy mix for the Chinese.

Mr Ashton: It is not. There is a nuclear debate in China, as there is in many other places; but even on the most ambitious assumptions about the rate of growth of nuclear in China, I think the International Energy Agency projection is that even by 2050 it will amount to no more than about five or six per cent of their primary energy production. There is one important consequence of that for the climate change debate, which is that if you address the question globally then, whatever question nuclear energy may or may not be the answer to, it is not the answer to how do we stabilise the climate. At the same time, Chinese deployment of coal is rising much faster than their deployment of nuclear energy and will, by any assumption, continue to do that for at least a generation or two.

Q224 Mr Horam: As I think you were saying in response to my colleague, China is trying to tie down resources worldwide, sometimes in quite a selfish way, if you like. This must have adverse consequences for other countries, affect the foreign policy of other countries, and be in contrast to what you describe as their attempts to improve their own environment. How do you see this working out?

Mr Ashton: I think it goes back to that choice between hard and soft power, and some of the options that the Chinese are investing in in the hard power side of that equation are apparent on the question of resources. I think that it is questionable. If you do a deal with President Mugabe, for example, to secure your mineral resources for a set period of time, it is questionable how reliable that deal will actually prove to be; but it can also have other potentially destabilising consequences.

Q225 Mr Horam: But they do not really see it. As you say, there are priorities about this.

Mr Ashton: Yes.

Q226 Mr Horam: It may well be that their immediate priorities are to secure resources just to keep the economic growth going, because that is necessary to keep civilian control; and the environmental considerations, as you were saying, are necessarily a second priority. "Maybe something we will hopefully achieve in ten years' time, but today we've got to get that timber out of Liberia."

Mr Ashton: I think they are attacking the resource problem from both directions. They are trying to secure their supplies, but they are also trying to use the resources that they procure more efficiently; which is why they have such an aggressive energy efficiency policy.

Q227 Mr Horam: They really do see this, do they? They see the problems they are causing the world by this grab for resources?

Mr Ashton: They see it, I suspect, more in terms of problems that they are exposed to themselves. The more they depend on imported oil, the more geopolitical risk there is for them associated with competition from others for that oil. So why not use that oil as efficiently as possible? At the same time why not invest, as they are doing, in an alternative source of liquid fuels using coal? They have just announced $20 billion of investment, effectively in making vehicle fuel from coal. So I think that they are spreading their bets. However, that is an opportunity for others. If we want to engage in a way that will help them to use resources more efficiently, it is telling us, "Well, actually, we are already interested in this and we are open for that conversation".

Q228 Mr Hamilton: Mr Ashton, can I go back to something that Gisela Stuart mentioned earlier, about renewable energy sources? I notice that about 20 per cent of China's energy consumption comes from renewables - which I think is a lot better than ours at the moment. I wondered whether you could tell us a bit more about renewable energy sources, perhaps in terms of wind. I gather that - is it in the north of the country? - there is considerable resource there for generating wind power, and whether that is something that they are investigating. Also, of course, energy efficiency, which is very important in all this; and whether, in looking for example at automotive power, they are investigating biofuels and the hydrogen fuel cell development - which is very hi-tech, I know. Is there an opportunity for the United Kingdom here, with our Environmental Industries Association, which is pretty big and is growing, to export some of these environmental technologies to China, to help them help themselves and help the world, of course?

Mr Ashton: The short answer is yes, I think there is; but, just running through those areas, the Chinese are investing heavily in wind power and they do have a very prolific wind resource in northern China. That is all correct. I think that they are increasingly interested in developing their own manufacturing capacity. The Danish wind turbine manufacturers are working with them on that. Energy efficiency we have covered a bit already, but that covers a huge range of technologies, both on the supply side and on the demand - the sort of infrastructure and buildings side - and I think that any country that has something to offer there has potential opportunities in China. Biofuels, yes, they are very high. If you go to any Chinese conference on energy, you hear a lot about biofuels. I think that there is one particular area of biofuels which is of interest, which is the increasingly talked-about technology for making ethanol out of what is called cellulosic waste; in other words, agricultural waste. That connects with another concern of the Chinese leadership, which is how do you create new revenue streams for people living in the countryside? They are worried about the income gap between the countryside and the cities, and the massive movement of people from the countryside into the cities. There is a huge amount of agricultural waste being produced in China which, if it could be turned into petrol equivalent, would be of great interest to them. There are technologies, including technologies which British companies have interests in, which offer huge potential in that. I would however come back to the point I made about Europe. For the UK or any other Member State of Europe, those companies that have relevant technologies can explore the opportunities; but if we want at the same time to achieve the geopolitical goals, the strategic goals, of reducing that Chinese resource footprint, then it needs to be part of a coherent strategy operating at a very high level of ambition: a higher level of ambition than we have at the moment in our respective national China policies, or in the EU projection into China. It is about scaling up rather than about understanding the detail of each piece of it.

Q229 Mr Hamilton: Can I come back on one point you made? It relates to wind electricity generation. One of the big problems that we have in the UK are our planning laws. Obviously, people do not like these wind farms. Some people do, but most people do not - especially if you live in Ilkley! Am I right in thinking that, because of the political system they have in China, i.e. a complete lack of any democracy, you can get through planning issues like, "We're going to build a wind farm with 10,000 wind turbines, and too bad if you don't like it, because it's going to be done"? Is that one reason why they might be more successful in generating more electricity from renewable sources?

Mr Ashton: I am not steeped in the detail of Chinese planning requirements, but you only have to spend a few minutes in China to suspect that they are a lot more rudimentary than they are in some places. However, I think that connects also with the questions earlier about civil society. Some of these stresses that environmental activism is giving voice to in China arise from very local questions about how land is used, and how one person's amenity might be another person's threat or jeopardy. I suspect there will be an increasing trend to a more contested, and hopefully in the end more transparent, system of decisions. So I would not imagine that the status quo will remain. I think that it is also true that some of the places in China where there is the most abundant wind resource are also places where the population density is not as high as it is in eastern China - in north-west China for example. If they at the same time were building a grid system which was capable of accommodating a large amount of wind-generated electricity coming from more remote regions, then the planning issues might be a bit less serious.

Q230 Chairman: In the few minutes we have left can I switch focus to the question of water and the importance of water? I understand that the Chinese population has quite a low use of water per capita compared with the world average, or many other countries. Clearly, as there are potentially 200 million people moving from rural areas into urban areas and urbanisation continues at the rate it is going on, you will have serious problems, will you not, of supply of that water? How are they addressing that issue? Are they doing it in a way which is sensible? Are they still talking about diverting rivers, big dam projects, and so on, or are they focusing on other ways?

Mr Ashton: First of all, there is an immense anxiety about water stress in China. There is a structural problem, which is that in the North China Plain you have about a third of China's population and a third of China's economic production, but only about seven per cent of China's available water. That has always been a problem but it is getting worse because the demand for water is increasing. At the same time, the sources of available water are drying up. The aquifers that supply a lot of the water in northern Chinese cities are just running out, and at some point before too long they will be dry. That is why there is debate about very large‑scale projects to move water from southern China to northern China. As I mentioned before, part of the growing worry about climate change is a realisation that the impacts of climate change will make those stresses even worse than they are already. They are also well aware that there is a link to the movement of people. A lot of the people in northern China who are moving into the cities are doing so because there is no longer enough water to grow enough crops to make a living in the arid margins of north-western China. So there is lots of anxiety; quite a lot of debate, I think, about the various choices. Is it wise to be moving large amounts of water in mega-construction projects, or should the emphasis be more on using water more efficiently, conserving water? I think the thrust will be both. My concern is, again, whether the scale of the response and the effectiveness of the response is adequate to the scale of the problem. I think that water stress could potentially be a very destabilising problem in China. One other thing, and it is a link that is not often made. There is a close link, I think, between the efficiency of water use in China and the global food economy. The more Chinese agricultural production is hit by shortage of water - and I should say irrigation is easily the largest single slice of Chinese water consumption - the more that will be an upward pressure on global food prices. On top of that, as China gets richer, there is more of an appetite for meat, and producing meat is more water-intensive than producing arable crops. Some of that water intensity is in effect exported. China has become a very large-scale importer of soya, for example from Brazil, for animal feed. In Brazil there are also issues of water stress, which are exaggerated if you grow more soya. So just another example of the interconnectedness.

Q231 Chairman: Is there also a problem about the growing soil erosion and desertification of the country? Is that now high up the political agenda too, or is that not talked about?

Mr Ashton: No, it has been high on the agenda for a long time. There has been a project which was being invested in greatly when I was first in China in the 1980s, called "the Great Green Wall", which is effectively a massive tree-planting campaign across northern China. It is an attempt, as it were, to hold back the advance of the desert; but, as the Committee will have seen from the recent news coverage of the dust storm in Beijing the other day, the desert is still coming. When you visit Beijing, it almost feels like a kind of advancing army, only more implacable. The Gobi Desert has a very distinct fringe. You have plants there, you have sand there, and the sand is moving in that direction. The edge of the Gobi Desert is about 240 kilometres from Beijing at the moment, and it is advancing at about six kilometres a year. People who live in Beijing understand that in a very tangible and immediate way.

Chairman: We will be visiting China soon as a Committee and no doubt when we are in Beijing we will see what the air is like at that time! Thank you very much, Mr Ashton, for coming along and for giving us a very useful session.