The UK nationalized British Steel this week, taking the loss-making Scunthorpe plant into public hands to keep the blast furnaces running and protect a few thousand jobs. Standard industrial-policy stuff, the kind of thing governments do when a “vital national capability” is about to go dark.
China’s commerce ministry was not pleased. It says the move “firmly opposes and is strongly dissatisfied,” accuses the UK of trampling the “legitimate rights and interests” of Jingye Group (the plant’s now-former owner), and is demanding Britain “faithfully fulfil” its obligations under a 1986 bilateral investment treaty — full and fair compensation, please.
Here’s the thing:
When the Chinese Communist Party seized private industry in the 1950s, “compensation” meant a token 5% annual interest payment on a nominal share value — not a buyout, just a trickle. Those payments were cancelled entirely by 1966, and plenty of the original owners spent the Cultural Revolution being publicly denounced as class enemies rather than collecting a check.
And land reform in the early ’50s wasn’t compensated at all — it was redistributed at gunpoint, with landlords facing show trials and, by some estimates, over a million executions.
So the state that invented modern nationalization-without-compensation is now the one lecturing another government about treaty-grade investor protections. It’s not that China is wrong to want Jingye paid fairly — an independent valuer is sorting that out this autumn, and it’s a legitimate question. It’s that the outrage is coming from a government whose own founding economic settlement never came close to the standard it’s now demanding. Rich, in the literal sense that started this whole thing.
Source: BBC News, “China hits out at British Steel nationalisation”