LONDON: Rarely have the exaggerated pretensions of a British prime minister been so harshly and humiliatingly brought crashing to earth as with David Cameron’s policy on China. China’s leaders are too skilled in diplomacy to state it bluntly during Cameron’s current Beijing visit, but the rest of the world, including numerous British commentators, knows exactly what has occurred.

Last year Cameron met the Dalai Lama, which in China’s terms has about the same level of subtlety as Xi Jinping meeting Scottish nationalist leader Alex Salmond to “wish him well” in his campaign for Scottish independence or de Gaulle’s notorious 1967 “Vive le Quebec libre” speech. It was predictably met with the “big freeze” - British ministers being refused meetings with their senior Chinese counterparts.

Cameron seems to have believed that China’s leaders would blink first in the ensuing standoff — as though the world’s second largest economy, with 7.8 per cent growth, needed help from a UK whose GDP has not even regained its level of five years ago. It didn’t happen and, as the commentator Simon Jenkins put it, “Cameron could hardly have grovelled lower. Downing Street sources say Britain has now ‘turned a page’ and is ‘looking to the future’; it will show ‘mutual respect and understanding’.” The lesson that China is now a great power and Britain is not was forcibly driven home.

This humiliation for Cameron regrettably inevitably reflects on the country he leads. But the policy of seeking the best mutually beneficial ties between Britain and China should be resumed.

These relations are in reality, not just as a trite phrase, a potential “win-win situation”. Britain needs China’s investment in its infrastructure, China as a market for faltering exports, and to grab a small proportion of the 100 million Chinese tourists who will soon be travelling abroad. China needs Britain’s hi-tech knowledge in areas such as life sciences, and London, the world’s biggest foreign exchange trading centre, as a base for its currency’s internationalisation.

All Cameron did was to make these relations more difficult. Not even the British government believes its official rhetoric that its earlier policies had no effect on economic ties. If that were true, Cameron would not feel the need to eat political humble pie and lead the biggest ever group of business leaders to China.

Some general lessons can be drawn from this episode. Seen from China, Britain’s attempts to claim some moral high ground in its dealings with the country have no credibility. What is Britain’s record? Its first major encounter with China was to send troops to force the country to import British opium. Then it seized the island of Hong Kong — perhaps the Chinese government will ask for the Isle of Wight in compensation. Then its troops destroyed the summer palace in Beijing — perhaps the People’s Liberation Army should loot and burn Buckingham Palace. Britain lectures China on democracy in Hong Kong when, in the whole time the UK ruled the island, it never allowed democratic government until it realised it would be forced to return its colony to China. Or, to come up to the present, Britain was the chief US ally in an invasion of Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths while China raised more than 600 million people — more than the EU’s entire population — out of poverty.

David Cameron’s political career is coming to an end. After he loses the 2015 general election, and the Tory party has carried out the ritual slaughter of the failed leader, the new prime minister, Labour leader Ed Miliband, may want to ponder the more general lessons of Cameron’s Chinese fiasco for British foreign policy as he plans his Beijing visit.

There are many things people all over the world want from this country in which we can take pride — investment, Shakespeare, science, humour, pop music and trade, to name but a few. But it would be good to apologise for, and stay out of, things the world did not want to receive from this country — visits from gunships, opium, seizure of islands and interference in their internal affairs.

If that more general lesson can be absorbed, Cameron’s current humiliation in Beijing will have served a useful purpose after all.

By arrangement with the Guardian