Some time ago, in one of the first programmes for senior Chinese officials that I directed at Oxford University, an eminent member of the UK’s upper house gave a comprehensive lecture on recent constitutional change. He covered devolution, the Lords and concluded with a preliminary review of the possible impact of the European Convention on Human Rights on our legal system and indeed sovereignty itself.

The Chinese civil servants listened attentively. When milord sat down I called for questions and comments. Many hands were raised and as it happened the first question was direct to the point of bluntness: ‘Why do Western countries use the issue of human rights to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries?’ You can see where he was coming from.

The honourable lord was flummoxed and didn’t answer directly. He answered everything else and the officials were polite enough not to push the point or make him lose face. At the end of the session, after the speaker had left, I kept the group back to respond myself. I said that the ‘human rights’ question had been a very good one, especially if we considered the framework of Anglo-American foreign policy in that period. It was incumbent on British citizens to address this, but, by the same token, they, the Chinese civil servants, had the responsibility to consider the realities of their own domestic policy, and not to use Western policy as an escape clause. I can’t say whether the group agreed, but their government kept sending officials to Oxford.

Chinese officials are not immune to criticism of their politics and society, but like many governments and individuals, they don’t like it in public. Their sensitivity to ‘human rights’ is not essentially that of the discovered perpetrator, nor a defence of Westphalian sovereignty or a Wilsonian, even Leninist invocation of a nation’s right to self-determination. At its heart lies the accurate assumption that prescribing human rights is a contemporary embellishment to the entrenchment of the established world order represented in the UN Security Council, the World Bank, GATT etc. The Chinese were long excluded, and as with the G8, they still feel outside.

China, they say rightly, is a developing country and has a subordinate position. It’s an outsider and so has a legitimate common interest with other developing countries, say in Africa, and perhaps even an altruistic urge to push further.

A merit of Frank Ching’s short and information packed text (it’s about the same length as the Observer books of Weather, Body, Genius et al, and with the same pithy store of factual material) is his recognition that China’s position, material interests, domestic problems and agenda aren’t, and can’t, be determined by a thin notion of human rights. Especially one so thin as to mean one person taking umbrage at a perceived sleight and heading straight off to court. The limits of Ching’s approach, and as he reports, also that of the Chinese government as it comes more on board with contemporary human rights speak, lie with taking the invocation of human rights as the model and content of social progress.

China: the truth about its human rights record uses the SARS outbreak and Tibet as two examples. In November 2002, but not reported until February 2003, what became known as SARS was identified in Guangdong province. Ching identifies Chinese secrecy on this as a human rights abuse and world health threat. The global health authorities were horrified, and their symbiotic relationship with the media ratcheted up fear and insecurity. In fact, five people died in Guangdong and by the spring of 2003 twelve people worldwide. When a year later a new strain of avian flu was identified, the Chinese authorities were praised by the WHO for their public notification of the outbreak. There followed another global panic. You might argue like the man in the railway carriage who tears up newspapers to keep the elephants away, that it works because there are no elephants in his carriage. Or you could suggest the Chinese health authorities dealt effectively with the outbreaks, and, although their media policy might be wrong, that medical intervention still trumps a news story.

As long as southern China and the rest of South East Asia are poor, then poultry farmers will eat infected chicken and ease the difficult transition of the virus to human beings. China’s significant health problems are ones of development, more specifically the growing divergence between the dynamic eastern, coastal provinces and the subsistence economies of the western hinterland. In urban Shanghai life expectancy is 79; in rural Yunnan it is 65. Incidentally, the average male life expectancy in the Glasgow East constituency is 63 years.

As for Tibet, I was in Beijing and other cities in the period of the recent confrontation in Lhasa and elsewhere. The general opinion of taxi drivers was that the economic development of Tibet should have made this a non-issue and still might. The officials I spoke to were genuinely shocked, not so much at the disturbances, but at what a bad press they had received. They really thought they had done a good job pumping resources into the autonomous region.

The interesting point, however, was their projected solution. It was to learn from the West how to handle the media! They urged me to include media presentation and skills negotiation into public policy programmes that we were discussing. The People’s Republic is learning presentational skills, and although we may wait a while to see an investigating police officer appealing for witnesses to the murder of a TV presenter on prime time broadcasts, it won’t be too long. Perhaps, before the authorities of this atheist state claim that the true reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a software engineer in a government funded science park in Lhasa.

In the short term will come the trials of government officials and concrete entrepreneurs for malfeasance in Sichuan: now will this be an infringement of their human rights?