London teaches Beijing lesson in democracy Opinion by Bloomberg

According to an opinion piece by Bloomberg, the aborted plan for a “super embassy” in the UK illustrates the gap in political culture between China and Britain. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Farewell, China’s “super embassy.” The historic site of the former Royal Mint opposite the Tower of London won’t be playing host to the largest foreign mission in the UK, at least anytime soon, after Beijing missed a deadline last week to appeal the rejection of its application by elected local representatives.

The project would have been the perfect symbol of goodwill for a British government that is pursuing a reset in trade and investment ties with Beijing. Instead, it has turned into another irritant in an already fractious relationship. The Chinese embassy blamed the government for the plan’s failure, and urged the UK “to fulfil its relevant international obligations.”

It’s a saga that shows the vein of miscomprehension and suspicion that runs through UK-China relations. Foreigners find it famously hard to discern the mechanisms of policy and power in China’s opaque, one-party system. The London embassy’s handling of its planned relocation suggests that this difficulty cuts both ways: Chinese officials may also struggle to come to grips with how power is dispersed in a liberal democracy.

The Chinese government bought the Royal Mint compound for £255 million ($325 million) in 2018 with the intention of moving its embassy from Marylebone on the west side of central London. The site stands on the ruins of a 14th-century Cistercian abbey and on burial grounds for victims of the Black Death (arousing some concerns that remains from the worst plague in history might be unearthed during construction). The Royal Mint took over the area in the early 1800s and produced coins there until 1975.

The place would certainly have made an imposing embassy, centred on two historic buildings, though it was never clear why China needed so much space. The proposed development would have had a gross internal floor area of more than 52,000 square meters (560,000 square feet), according to the planning application.

That’s bigger than the US embassy’s custom-designed, 12-story home in the Nine Elms district south of the Thames river that opened in 2018. It’s also more than a quarter larger than China’s own embassy in the US — a country with five times the population of Britain.

Planning officers recommended approving the project, deeming it well-designed and the site’s use as an embassy acceptable. There were some early expressions of support from councillors in the borough of Tower Hamlets, even those troubled by China’s human rights record. Yet when the proposal came up for a vote last December, the 46-member council unanimously rejected it. So what went wrong?

What’s clear is that the embassy didn’t make many friends along the way. Officials appear to have treated the approval process as a formality, perhaps assuming that the central government would shepherd through a project with diplomatic significance. Beijing “found it strange local officials could block such a move,” Bloomberg News reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Naturally. If the positions were switched and this was happening in Beijing, it’s difficult to imagine that local officials would dare to resist a project that carried the blessing of the highest echelons of the Communist Party — whatever the rules might say about where decision-making power lay. Hence, embassy personnel might easily have concluded that the same would apply in London.

Britain, needless to say, doesn’t work like that. Councillors guard their independence jealously, and sometimes delight in defying the central government. Margaret Thatcher was so irritated by the antics of Greater London Council Leader Ken Livingstone in the 1980s that she abolished the council (Livingstone returned as the capital’s mayor in 2000 when a London-wide democratic tier was reinstated).

Embassy officials appear to have been oblivious to this cultural backdrop. Councillors were “attempting to disrupt” the project, China’s former ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, wrote in a letter to the borough’s then-mayor, the East London Advertiser reported in December 2020. That’s an interesting way to talk about the people who will rule on your application. The letter was “extraordinarily tactless,” Councillor Peter Golds told me.

There were plenty of planning grounds to reject the application — increased traffic, possible damage to heritage assets and the risk of terrorist attacks were among issues raised in 51 letters of objection from residents’ groups. But a general deterioration in China’s international image since 2018 can’t have helped. Adverse publicity has focused on treatment of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang (Tower Hamlets has the largest proportion of Muslims of any local authority in England and Wales, at 40 per cent); the alleged presence of secret police stations in Britain; and a fracas at the Chinese consulate in Manchester in October during which a protester was pulled inside the grounds and beaten.

The embassy isn’t entirely wrong to point the finger at the central government. There is a mechanism, known as “calling in,” for the housing secretary to intervene in a planning application, taking it out of local hands. But would China really want this?

It would mean a public inquiry, and potentially inconvenient questions about what the embassy would do with all that space. That may also explain why the Chinese embassy didn’t appeal, when the statistics suggest it would have had a reasonable chance of winning. About three in 10 planning appeals are successful.

We can surmise that China would much rather have this all sorted out in a quiet backroom, away from the prying eyes of uppity local democrats (and nosy journalists). There’s not much chance of that. Even if the government were inclined to try, any attempt to override local interests would surely run into organized and vociferous resistance.

Sorry, we’re not in Beijing anymore.