China admits to having executed 1,718 of its citizens in 2008, according to a report just published by Amnesty International. That’s 72% of the 2,390 executions recorded worldwide. China’s 68 capital crimes include murder and bag snatching, along with tax evasion, forging VAT invoices and other white-collar offences.

The state suppresses religious and ethnic minorities, occupies Tibet and, again according to Amnesty International, has 500,000 of its citizens held in forced labour camps.

And yet even the United Nations is divided over China. A recent UN peer review of China’s human rights record saw western countries, like Canada and Australia, criticise the Beijing regime. Iran, Egypt and Cuba, on the other hand, were sympathetic – and criticised China’s critics.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said China’s human rights record cannot be allowed to interfere with tackling the global economic, climate change and security crises. She presumably has the backing of President Obama, who has pledged to close Guantanamo Bay and put human rights high on his administration’s agenda.

Clinton is not alone in seeing the value of expediency. British businesses of every stripe have fallen over themselves to set up shop in the boom economy that is China, where the state controls the licensing of lawyers and closes law firms that defend dissidents.

So just how ambivalent can we afford to be about China?

Should our human rights lawyers be reporting on abuses, writing letters of intervention, petitioning Beijing, protesting at every opportunity? And what will they achieve, apart from further isolating the country and erecting barriers to constructive dialogue?

China holds huge reserves of US dollars and could cause untold damage in a trade war. Is there a solution to this problem?