China problem can’t be solved by crude labels
Is China friend or foe? That’s the question I was asked on the radio recently in light of the dropped case against two men accused of spying for Beijing. It’s a pleasingly simple framing, perfect for a talk show. But I couldn’t help feeling that such simplicity would be a very bad way to make foreign policy.
The debate over whether the UK should label China an “enemy” or a “threat” has reignited with fury after the collapsed trial of Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry. The anger is understandable. If the CPS is right and the case was dropped because of the government’s equivocal language on China, two potential spies will have been let off on a technicality of the nowredundant Official Secrets Act.
But that doesn’t mean the UK should now formally change its designation of China from a “challenge” to a “threat”. The world is more complicated than mere friends and foes, and no country embodies our sophisticated interconnections more than China, a gargantuan socialist-capitalist chimera. There is a reason that governments across the West have refrained from putting blunt labels on it, and that includes the United States.
I don’t deny the threats that Beijing poses to the UK and the western-led world order. If anything, we need to talk about them more and deal with them better. Much of China’s earlier economic growth was based on reverse-engineering western technology, often facilitated through theft. Cyberattacks continue to target British institutions, the Electoral Commission and British parliamentarians among recent targets. China’s economic gravity has pulled British critical infrastructure into its orbit, from telecoms to nuclear and steel. Ministers and the security services should absolutely continue to raise awareness of these threats.
All this under an often belligerent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) , led by a latter-day Chairman Mao.
Britain must reduce its need for Chinese trade and investment
Under Xi Jinping, China has systematically oppressed its minorities, from the Uighurs to pro-democracy protesters. Its looming threat over self-governing Taiwan risks throwing world supply chains, especially in critical semiconductors, into chaos and would further check American power in the region.
But that’s only one side of the ledger. Today’s China is the product of four decades of globalisation on an unprecedented scale. It is not the Soviet Union of the last century, which tried to spread communism across the world and threatened nuclear armageddon. The CCP prioritises regime stability at home above all, followed closely by economic growth and technological advance. It is now a major trading partner for almost all of the world and the fourth-largest for the UK.
The two economies have been remarkably complementary. Imports from China have helped to keep life affordable and raise living standards in the UK, even as wages stagnated after 2008. The well-trodden narrative of job losses is more an American and German experience, Britain having delegated shipbuilding to South Korea and steelmaking to Europe long before China came on the scene. Since the UK’s shift to selling services, the Chinese middle class have poured hundreds of billions of pounds into British universities, law firms and the City.
So China presents both threat and opportunity. It is not schizophrenic or weak to recognise that the world’s second-largest economy, a country full of contradictions itself, home to almost a fifth of humanity, rubs up against the UK in myriad ways, both positive and negative. And as we move into a post-globalisation era, where China’s economic and technological power grow to challenge the western-led world order, a good China policy will try to limit the bad while maximising the good.
The UK must delineate its red lines, protecting the very core interests that China can never access (such as ownership of critical infrastructure). If the proposed London embassy really presents a security threat that can’t be mitigated, it must be rejected. Chinese students are welcome but there must be zero tolerance for intellectual property theft. Suspected spies must never be let off on a technicality.
Yet while keeping China out, there also needs to be more recognition of how to get our own house in order so as to reduce our need for Chinese trade and investment. Why can we no longer build railways or fix bridges? Why are our energy prices so high? How can British innovations scale into world-leading companies instead of being lost to Silicon Valley?
In this quest for more economic leverage, Britain needs to bolster its partnerships and supply chains with other countries. But none of that will happen overnight, and Chinese trade can still benefit the UK in the meantime, or bankroll necessary reforms. Crucially, all of this recalibration can be done without first shouting “China is a threat!”, as bracing as that might feel.
Australia is having some success at speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Under its prime minister, Anthony Albanese, the rhetoric with China has warmed so much that the red carpet was literally rolled out for him on a visit to Beijing this year. Yet he has just signed a rare earths deal with the US to diversify that critical supply chain from Chinese control and is working hard to Trump-proof Aukus, the Indo-Pacific submarine deal.
So let’s not mistake fierce rhetoric for successful foreign policy. In today’s unprecedentedly complicated world, dealing with China requires more strategy, more nuance. The People’s Republic is not a friend but that doesn’t make it an enemy either. You might say that it’s an epoch-defining challenge.
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