Last October, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, suddenly proclaimed that Tibet had always been a part of China. Most Western authorities on Tibetan history dispute this. Beijing's response was contemptuous. It was obvious, scoffed the official press, that Britain was after China's money. In February, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Beijing that with the world gripped by an economic crisis, now was not the time to concentrate on human rights in China. Yet only two months earlier, when several thousand very brave Chinese signed a human rights declaration, some of the main signatories were arrested.

I've just finished a thick book on the Chinese criminal justice system. There are dozens of capital crimes in China, and more people are executed there annually — between 2,000 and 5,000, the regime won't say exactly how many — than in the rest of the world combined. No wonder, then, that Ding Zilin, whose son was murdered in Tiananmen Square, and who formed an alliance of 126 "Tiananmen Mothers" whose children were also killed, has written this: "A person can make many different choices. I made the choice of documenting death. I have scaled a mountain of corpses and I have floated in the tears of the victims' families."