The Guardian view on Chinese premier Li Keqiang's visit to Britain

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/chinese-premier-li-keqiang-visit-britain

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Whether Lord Macartney really refused to kowtow to the Chinese emperor in 1793 and whether, if he did, this contributed to the failure of Britain's first trade mission to Beijing is still not clear. Both sides seemed happy about the protocol at the time. But the mission was indeed a failure, historians pointing to a profound cultural misunderstanding between the two countries as the cause.

When Chinese premier Li Keqiang meets the Queen this week the protocol will doubtless be spotless, while his trade and investment mission is also predestined to be a success. Up to £18bn in Chinese investment in Britain's energy, transport and financial sectors is thought to be coming our way. Yet the cultural misunderstandings observed in the 18th century have their parallels in the 21st, and they relate, as then, to the contradictions between economic and political power. The problem then was that Britain expected its political power to translate easily into trade advantage. The problem now is that China expects its economic power to translate easily into political advantage. It wants to use it to close off criticism of its human rights record, its treatment of minorities and of non-Han regions, its aggressive actions in the South China Sea, and its tight control of the news and information available to Chinese people.

On the very day that Mr Li arrived for his three-day visit, there is news of what appears to have been a secret trial of a prominent Uighur intellectual. Only a few days before that, Chinese and Japanese warplanes were playing a dangerous aerial game of chicken over the ocean inside China's unilaterally declared "air defence identification zone". And it is only a few weeks since Norway became the latest country to give in to Chinese economic blackmail over the Dalai Lama, just as Britain did two years ago. A few weeks earlier bulldozers demolished the biggest church in Wenzhou, a centre of Christian activity. Disturbing events of these kinds do not of course represent the whole picture of life in China or of Chinese policy under President Xi Jinping. Mr Li reminds us of that in the modest essay on his country's needs and hopes which he contributed to another newspaper on the eve of his visit.

Britain wants Chinese investment,and we want to be China's main gateway into Europe. But China's economic leverage here is certainly not so very great that we have no choice but to compromise what should be our principles. If, as one report has suggested, we gave in to a Chinese demand that Mr Li should have an audience with the Queen or else they would cancel the visit, that was a mistake. Concessions on protocol, as Lord Macartney no doubt knew, can lead to more substantial compromises down the line. We do not need to make those compromises and we should not do so.