After evacuating its civilians from Libya, China abstained on the latest Security Council vote on the Libyan situation. Some people said this amounted to interference.

In the terminology of Quantum physics, it was indeed interference. In Quantum physics involvement amounts to interference. Any action whether direct or peripheral will produce an effect.

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Interference in this sense is unavoidable. Everything in the world is interconnected. Everything affects everything else (although the extent of the effect depends on proximity). To push the analogy further, non-interference is itself a form of interference. Speaking from the point of view of the social sciences, non-interference reflects and flows from a particular system of values. Non-interference is a particular type of interference, and produces its own effects on the world.

And complete non-interference is impossible in practice. When South Africa was still practicing Apartheid, to ask China to remain silent about the continued existence of such a barbaric and backward system would have been impossible. China denounced the system of white minority rule as one of the most egregious violations of human rights the world had ever seen and openly supported the suffering people of South Africa. Although many years have passed, China can have no regrets about the stance that it took.

Little more than half a century ago, the black population of the USA rose in a great movement to demand their rights. Their actions transfixed the world – astonished that a country that saw itself as the home of human rights had for 200 years – since its foundation – denied those rights to an ethnic minority. All over China, people gathered to applaud the struggle of black people in America, reflecting the heartfelt support of the Chinese people and government for the civil rights movement. When that great page in the history of civilization was written the Chinese people were shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King as he struggled to realize his dream.

China also supported the South Korean students in their fight against military rule, and the people of Okinawa in their struggle against US military occupation. There are many other examples of the Chinese people standing alongside people of other nations in their fight for justice. They reflect the ideals of fairness and justice that inspired the Communist Party to found the People's Republic. China's stand on these issues boosted the country's standing in the world – in modern terminology its soft power.

Of course, these examples do seem to contradict the principle of non-interference. But humanity has passed through a complicated history. We live in a contradictory world. The chaos and war of 17th century Europe produced the Treaty of Westphalia, and with it the concept of "sovereignty and equality" between states that eventually spread round the world. But overemphasizing the idea of sovereignty led to the failure of the international community to prevent Nazi Germany's mass extermination of the Jews. Furthermore, Germany, far from reciprocating this policy of non-interference, went so far as to invade other countries.

The result was the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War. The two great principles of the UN are peace and security, and for this reason it must balance sovereignty and human rights. Sovereignty must be used to protect human rights and not as an excuse for oppression. The United Nations Charter rules that under extreme conditions, faced with a grave threat to international security or human rights, sovereignty is no longer the highest principle governing interstate relations. If the UN Security Council judges that there has been a grave violation of human rights, the UN has the right to take action, up to and including military action, to restore regional peace and stability.