Hitler, Xi Jinping & The City Corporation

CITY OF LONDON CORPORATION AND THE NEO-NAZIS OF BEIJING by Graeme Harrower

Tyranny: Past and Present

On 12 September 1938 / 1 July 2021, Führer Adolf Hitler / President Xi Jinping addressed a party rally.*

The Führer charted the history of the Nazi Party from 1923. The President charted the history of the Chinese Communist Party from 1921.

The Führer explained that “the formation of unity of the people demanded an organisation which trained them … the Nazi Party. To-day that organisation reaches into every house.” The President explained that without the Party there would be no new China, and it had “profoundly transformed the advancement of the Chinese nation”.

The Führer referred to “absolute” leadership. The President referred to “absolute” leadership.

The Führer explained that “National Socialism wants to create a true unity of the nation.” The President explained that “Only Socialism can save China, and only Socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China.”

The Führer condemned the hypocrisy of democratic nations criticising his government. The President condemned “the sanctimonious preaching from those who feel they have the right to lecture us”. He added: “We have never bullied, oppressed or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will.” [Note the qualification “of any other country”. But it’s a lie: Tibet was another country before it was invaded by China in 1950, and remains occupied to this day.]

The Führer expressed his determination to reunify the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia with the Reich. The President expressed his determination to reunify Taiwan with mainland China. [The Führer succeeded in his aim less than three weeks later, with the approval of Neville Chamberlain, who two years later was granted the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. The President will achieve his aim if democratic countries continue pursuing a policy of appeasement.]

The Führer told the crowds that “it is the duty of us all never again to bow our heads to any alien will.” The President told the crowds that “We will never allow any foreign power to bully, oppress or subjugate us.” He added that foreign countries that dare “bully” China would see “their heads bashed”. [The Führer didn’t go that far in this speech, but his followers did bash heads in the years that followed.]

At the time of the Führer’s speech, Jews and those with different political views in Germany suffered severe oppression; in the years that followed, they were mostly murdered. At the time of the President’s speech, Uyghurs and Tibetans are suffering severe oppression, and any Chinese person who disagrees with the government of a tyrant who raves about “bashing heads” is likely to get their own head bashed / be imprisoned / disappear.

City Corporation’s Appeasement of Tyranny: Past and Present

The City of London Corporation, having supported the appeasement of the Nazis in 1938 [scroll down link for details], is appeasing the Chinese Communist Party today.

The Chair of Policy apparently thinks that the best thing the Corporation can do for “all the Chinese people”, presumably including those in concentration camps because of their ethnicity or in jail because of their political or religious beliefs, is to talk to their oppressors about climate change. [Scroll down link for details]

Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua meets with City of London Corporation Policy Chair Catherine McGuinness.

In response to calls from the World Uyghur Congress and Hong Kong Watch that the Corporation should end its appeasement of the Chinese government, the Lord Mayor and Chair of Policy decided to reply in each instance by repeating the same soundbites, which have repeatedly been proved to be false.

Those soundbites would be comical if the subject matter was not so serious. One of them is that the Corporation is taking a “calibrated approach to dealing with China”. How does it “calibrate” its response to the threat of “bashing heads” – just talk more about climate change, and hope that the Corporation’s “values” will somehow rub off on the head bashers? And what “values” will the head bashers see, beyond the moral cowardice of appeasement?

Perhaps aware of the feebleness of the soundbites, the Corporation’s PR team have tried to get on the front foot in defending the appeasement policy by putting some defiant words in the mouth of the Chair of Policy. On the same day that the tyrant Xi Jinping raved about “bashing heads”, she sent an email to all members of the Court of Common Council extolling the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speech at Mansion House that day and a “vision booklet” produced by the Treasury, adding the words:

“In the light of recent email exchanges and questions, members will also be interested to note that the vision booklet refers to the importance of deepening our financial services links with the largest emerging markets, including China, India and Brazil, and the Chancellor also addressed the question of ongoing economic ties with China specifically in his speech.”

Councillor Mark Wheatley then sent an email to the Court identifying the specific reference to China in the Chancellor’s speech as follows:

“The truth is China is both one of the most important economies in the world and a state with fundamentally different values to ours.

We need a mature and balanced relationship.

That means being eyes wide open about their increasing international influence and continuing to take a principled stand on issues we judge to contravene our values.

After all, principles only matter if they extend beyond our convenience.”

Referring to China as “a state with fundamentally different values to ours” is an obscene euphemism. Do genocide, organ harvesting, oppression and “bashing heads” now count as “values”? If the Chancellor, Lord Mayor and Chair of Policy attend a Holocaust memorial event, will they respectfully refer to the cause of the mass murder commemorated by the event as being a state having “fundamentally different values to ours”?

How can we have “a mature and balanced relationship” with a government that considers making threats of “bashing heads” is a legitimate way to conduct foreign policy?

When has the Corporation ever taken “a principled stand” against the Chinese government’s barbarism?

As Councillor Wheatley remarked: “When will we assert principles (particularly in light of our promotion of [China] as an [Economic Social and Governance] exemplar) which extend beyond our own ‘convenience’? You might not want to face this ‘inconvenient truth’ but you must one day.”

The Chair of Policy’s enthusiastic support for the Chancellor’s statements accords with the soundbite that the Corporation follows the government’s lead, except that the Corporation has never taken any “stand” against China, and the Nuremberg defence of “we were just following orders” is in any case not a good one. (It isn’t a coincidence that the war crimes trials in which that phrase was coined were held in the city where Hitler delivered the speech quoted above.)

Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming meets William Russell, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in 2020. Perhaps they were discussing how the City Corporation might fully rebrand itself as a dedicated follower of fascist corporatism, and how much it might cost to licence Cabaret Voltaire’s 1978 industrial dance tune Do the Mussolini Headkick as musical accompaniment.

City Corporation’s Appeasement of Tyranny: the Future?

An anti-appeasement motion will be put to the Court on 9 September. The leadership will be very concerned to ensure that a majority of the Court’s 122 members support the Corporation’s current policy. The leadership can normally rely on most members to vote with them, since the Court has the culture of a private club / livery company / masonic lodge rather than a democratic political body, due to the dominance of the business vote. But persuading members to take personal responsibility for condoning genocide and oppression on a neo-Nazi scale may be less easy.

So members should expect the leadership to use their standard spin and smear tactics over the next couple of months to try to get their way. But while some members may be persuaded that morality isn’t a “mature and balanced” position to take, or be distracted by slippery arguments based on relativism, because it serves their micro-political careers, or because they think it’s “bad form” not to support their Poo Bahs, they are being watched by a public – some of them City voters – who won’t accept any of this nonsense.

Notes

Attempts to fuse Nazism and bolshevism (with Chinese characteristics) are nothing new as this piece Killers On The Right: Inside Europe’s Fascist Underground by Martin A. Lee and Kevin Coogan (Mother Jones, Volume 12, No. 4, May 1987, the illustration here is part of page 43) shows. The extremist ideology of ‘convergence’ sketched by Lee and Coogan in Mother Jones was taken up by the official National Front in the UK in the 1980s but it was far more influential in Italy where one of its inheritors is The League, whose senator Armando Siri was feted with red carpet treatment at the City of London’s Guildhall HQ back in 2018.

In the wake of the introduction of the National Security Law in Hong Kong there has been media commentary on the use of Nazi jurisprudence in Xi’s China. For example the piece The Nazi Inspiring China’s Communists: A decades-old legal argument used by Hitler has found support in Beijing by Chang Che, The Atlantic, 1 December 2020:

China has in recent years witnessed a surge of interest in the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Known as Hitler’s “Crown Jurist,” Schmitt joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and, though he was only officially a Nazi Party member for three years, his anti-liberal jurisprudence had a lasting impact—at the time, by helping to justify Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of Jews and political opponents, and then long afterward. Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.” Such a hamstrung state, according to Schmitt, could not protect its own citizens from external enemies.

China’s fascination with Schmitt took off in the early 2000s when the philosopher Liu Xiaofeng translated the German thinker’s major works into Chinese. Dubbed “Schmitt fever,” his ideas energized the political science, philosophy, and law departments of China’s universities. Chen Duanhong, a law professor at Peking University, called Schmitt “the most successful theorist” to have brought political concepts into his discipline. “His constitutional doctrine is what we revere,” Chen wrote in 2012, before adding, of his Nazi membership, “That’s his personal choice.” An alum of Peking University’s philosophy program, who asked not to be identified speaking on sensitive issues, told me that Schmitt’s work was among “the common language, a part of the academic establishment” at the university.

Schmitt’s influence is most evident when it comes to Beijing’s policy toward Hong Kong. Since its handover to China from Britain in 1997, the city has ostensibly been ruled under a “one country, two systems” framework, whereby it would be part of China, but its freedoms, independent judiciary, and other forms of autonomy would be preserved for 50 years. Over time, these freedoms have been eroded as the CCP has sought greater control, and more recently have been undermined completely with the national-security law.

Chen, who has written extensively on Hong Kong policy since 2014 and, according to The New York Times, is a former adviser to Beijing on the issue, cited Schmitt directly in defense of the concept of a national-security law back in 2018. “The German jurist Carl Schmitt,” he argued in an article, distinguishes between state norms and constitutional norms. “When the state is in dire peril,” Chen wrote, citing Schmitt, state leaders have the right to suspend constitutional norms, “especially provisions for civil rights.” Jiang Shigong, also a law professor at Peking University, has made a similar case. Jiang, who worked as a researcher in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2008, employs Schmitt’s ideas extensively in his 2010 book, China’s Hong Kong, to resolve tensions between sovereignty and the rule of law in favor of the Communist Party.*

Jiang is also widely credited with authoring the 2014 Chinese-government white paper that gives Beijing “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong. In a nod to Schmitt, the paper claims that the preservation of sovereignty—of “one country”—must take precedence over civil liberties—of “two systems.” Using Schmitt’s rationale, he raises the stakes of inaction in Hong Kong insurmountably high: No longer a liberal transgression, the security law becomes an existential necessity.

Chen and Jiang are “the most concrete expression thus far of [China’s] post-1990s turn to Schmittian ideas,” Ryan Mitchell, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in a paper in July. They are the vanguard of the statist movement, which supplies the rationale for the authoritarian impulses of China’s leaders. And though it is unclear precisely how powerful they are in the upper echelons of the party, these statists share the same outlook as their paramount leader. “Xi Jinping’s big project is on reinventing and revitalizing state capacity,” Jude Blanchette, China chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “He is a statist.”

*Graeme Harrower’s sources for Xi Jinping’s speech are the reports of 1 July in The Guardian, Evening Standard and The Telegraph. Harrower’s sources for Hitler’s speech are Bulletin of International News Vol. 15, No. 19 (Sep. 24, 1938), pp. 8-11 (4 pages), published by Royal Institute of International Affairs: and, Adolf Hitler – speech on the “Wehrmacht Day” (Short excerptions), September 12, 1938 from what appears to be a fascist source we wouldn’t link to and wouldn’t want to validate by saving it in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. However it can be found by using web searches.

Former Lord Mayor of London and UKIP candidate alderman Ian Luder might be the perfect patsy to point both the Court of Aldermen and the entire City of London council down the royal road to ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’.