Letter of the week

Faraz Baber of the British Property Foundation is quoted as saying:

“As long as it is conforming to workmanship and design standards, whether it comes from Europe or not is not really the point.”

Actually, there is an ethical dimension to this proposal. China is a one-party dictatorship with a corrupt legal system and an appalling record on human rights.

Its booming economy is built on cheap labour and a complete disregard for workers’ safety and rights. For example, China accounts for 80% of the world’s coal mining deaths even though they mine only 35% of the world’s coal. Independent trade unions are illegal.

Thousands of Chinese citizens are imprisoned without trial for their political and religious views and torture is routine. China executes more people than the rest of the world put together and non-violent crimes such as tax fraud attract the death penalty.

This repression extends to the housing sphere where thousands of families are being summarily evicted in order that major building projects such as the Olympics can proceed. Amnesty International says, Zheng Enchong, a Shanghai defence lawyer, was recently sentenced to three years in prison after helping hundreds of displaced families contest their evictions. He was convicted of “illegally providing state secrets to entities outside China” because he faxed court papers to a human rights organisation.

There is silence about these issues in the West because so many of our cheap consumer products now come from China. But housing associations have a responsibility to act ethically. Do we really want to give support to such a bad regime?

Colin Wiles, Cambridge