If there is one constant in the UK’s policy towards China over the past three decades it has been its short-termism and inconsistency, the scathing intelligence and security committee report on China rightly finds, comparing Britain’s endless course corrections with Beijing’s capacity to think strategically about how to advance the global interests of the Chinese Communist party.
If Downing Street thinks in terms of the next news bulletin, China has a planning cycle that in some of its documents takes it to 2049, as the ISC was told by one of its intelligence agency witnesses.
Moreover, China brings a whole-of-government response, while in the UK too much strategy is conceived in the Cabinet Office, as its implementation rests with individual Whitehall policy departments, many with no security remit or expertise.
The shift in the UK government’s strategy towards China has also too often been the product of individual prime ministers. Tony Blair came to power in 1997 just a few weeks before the handover of Hong Kong to China, leading to a decline in intelligence staffing and resourcing in China from 1997 to 2005, the committee report found.
Blair promised difficult issues would be confronted, but the broad thrust of the relationship was to be based on being positive, and extending trade. The speed of China’s rise after Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 caught the west by surprise, with China’s GDP overtaking the British economy in 2005, Germany’s in 2006 and, in 2010, moving into second place globally, replacing Japan and behind only the US.
In 2009, Gordon Brown was sufficiently struck by China’s transformation that he published in conjunction with David Miliband, the then foreign secretary, “a framework for engagement”, a document that painted China exclusively as an international partner and source of prosperity rather than a threat.
In his foreword, Brown said: “The UK has a lot to offer China. Our commitment to economic openness, our strength in science and innovation, our cutting-edge design and our world-class universities all interest a country engaging with the rest of the international community like never before.” It was a given that globalisation was great, and that prosperity would lead to greater openness.
Tory ex-PM David Cameron’s so-called “golden era” with China was largely an acceleration of the Labour policy. He and George Osborne tried to strengthen financial ties with Beijing, even being prepared to break ranks with the US in March 2015 by signing up as a founding member of China’s new infrastructure investment bank, an institution that the US saw as a rival to the World Bank.
Osborne led the way in encouraging Chinese investment in the next generation of civil nuclear power plants in the UK and he ensured that the City of London would become the base for the first clearing house for the yuan outside Asia.
It was, in the words of the committee, an era when “Chinese money was readily accepted by HMG with few questions asked”.
Since then, partly because of the repression of democracy in Hong Kong and under pressure from Donald Trump, Conservative backbenchers have forced ministers into a slow process of reassessment, one that has been mirrored right across Europe. In a change of mood, security interests were prioritised over economic ones. That required seeing China as a country seeking technological dominance over the west, targeting the acquisition of intellectual property and data in Britain’s specialised industrial sectors.
At China’s service was the largest state intelligence apparatus in the world, intent on enforcing Chinese values upon liberal democracy. In a particularly arresting commentary, the committee said: “Without swift and decisive action, we are on a trajectory for the nightmare scenario where China steals blueprints, sets standards, and builds products, exerting political and economic influence at every step.”
The UK ISC inquiry started work in 2019 but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and government obstructionism. As such, it gathers evidence as Whitehall slowly turns away from optimism about China. The committee notes how long it took intelligence agencies and ministers to make the intellectual leap by turning its attention from covert Chinese operations to the impact of overt Chinese investment upon the UK infrastructure, research, technology and academia. It charts many government strategies on China, but doubts if individual departments felt guided by any of them, continuing to plough their own furrow in terms of Chinese students, civil nuclear investment or wider technological investment.
One reason was that Boris Johnson, a self-confessed Sinophile, instinctively did not like seeing China in the dark terms he appeared to reserve for Russia. But the broad direction of Whitehall policy over the past two to three years led by agencies and figures such as the security minister, Tom Tugendhat, did change, and perhaps the sum of the committee’s judgments, hampered by deadlines, does not quite capture the scale of the change wrought by recent legislation. The UK by now in policy terms is aligned with the mainstream European response to China, judging by the German government’s Chinese strategy published by coincidence on Thursday.
In some places, by contrast, the report pulls its punches, not calling for the closure of Confucius Institutes or setting out a strategy of how UK universities can wean themselves off their financial dependency on Chinese students. The report does not explain why extensive investment from undemocratic Gulf states is welcome, but China’s is not.
The mantra “de-risk, but do not decouple” has become the staple policy in the west. The future test is how that comes to be interpreted in detail, and it is noticeable that Whitehall is doing all it can to prevent the ISC from monitoring that process.
Rishi Sunak prefers to speak of China as an “epoch-defining challenge” rather than an explicit threat to the UK’s security, the phrase chosen by his predecessor, Liz Truss, during her brief premiership. The Foreign Office is slowly starting to assert itself in terms of dialogue, and the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, who is an advocate for engagement, plans a visit to Beijing shortly. One suspects that the ISC’s warnings, even though they chime with a strong view from Conservative backbenchers, are unlikely to act as much of a brake on the UK’s approach to China.
