How to deal with China is the biggest geopolitical challenge facing Britain and the western democracies in 2021 – and one to which they have, as yet, supplied no coherent answer. China’s influence is growing rapidly around the world. It is predicted to overtake the US as the biggest economy by 2028. Its politicians, diplomats and military chiefs exhibit the bullish assertiveness of a new imperial superpower. This, they believe, is China’s moment.
At the same time, China is increasingly distrusted and disliked. A recent Pew global attitudes survey found negative views to be at an all-time high in Germany, South Korea and other advanced economies. Nearly three-quarters of Americans and Britons view China unfavourably, up from 35% and 16% respectively in 2002. Trust in China’s president, Xi Jinping, “to do the right thing in world affairs” has plummeted.
China’s overweening ambition and this concomitant rise in hostility are both relatively new. In Britain’s case, it is only five years since David Cameron hailed the dawn of a “golden era”. Back then, it seemed China’s strength, measured in hi-tech, investment and trade, could be safely harnessed to the UK’s advantage. Such collaboration, it was fondly believed, would ultimately hasten China’s transition from one-party state to democracy.
The bursting of this bubble in 2020 was swift and painful. The sheer horror of the pandemic inevitably harmed China’s reputation. Yet the inimical actions of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) in playing down the initial outbreak in Wuhan, thwarting legitimate WHO investigations, penalising Australia for demanding an independent inquiry and exploiting the crisis commercially and politically were more damaging still.
Grieving citizens in Wuhan have been intimidated and threatened by police for questioning official handling of the Covid crisis. Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who reported on the early stages of the Wuhan outbreak, was jailed last week for four years for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. State-controlled media continue to ensure inconvenient facts are suppressed.
A second phenomenon was central to China’s 2020 fall from grace: the CCP’s ever more open contempt for democratic freedoms and human rights. Each day seemed to bring fresh evidence of its arrogant insouciance, whether it was unbelievable denials of torture and forced sterilisation in labour camps in Xinjiang, renewed repression in Tibet or the persecution of Hongkongers opposed to oppressive security laws.
Xi’s ruthless consolidation of power around himself has thrown an unforgiving spotlight on the state’s Orwellian intrusions into the domestic lives of its citizens. One example is the way the ubiquitous messaging app Weixin (WeChat) is used to monitor private conversations, censor key words or phrases and report suspect users to the police. In Xi’s cowardly new world, even the most innocent Winstons are guilty until the party deems otherwise.
Such developments also induced a growing realisation that the behaviour of this nouveau riche superpower is not so very different from that of the empires that preceded it. Put-upon neighbours such as Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines can testify to Beijing’s bullying. China almost started a border war with India last year. It still might. Its gunboats routinely flout international law in the South China Sea.
Non-aligned developing countries that traditionally viewed China as a benign ally now have reasons to reconsider. Xi’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, a $1tn (£760bn) global infrastructure and investment project, is reportedly caught in a cash crunch. American researchers say lending by two Chinese state-controlled banks plunged from $75bn in 2016 to $4bn in 2019. Pandemic-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere are scrambling to renegotiate Chinese debt.
In 2020, Donald Trump tried hard to blame China for everything from Covid to factory closures. His scapegoating was cynical and unfair. Likewise, Boris Johnson, bending to US pressure, abruptly turned against the tech giant Huawei, supposedly on security grounds. Some analysts say there is more than a whiff of calculated cold war “reds under the bed” scaremongering in western behaviour. They have a point.
Yet there is little doubt 2021 will see concerted western pushback. Measures under discussion range from sanctions on individuals to bans on Chinese investment in strategic industries and new laws linking two-way trade to human rights. Joe Biden, who deems China a “strategic competitor”, is proposing an alliance of democracies to counter its global influence. Like Britain, the US plans another policy “tilt” towards the Indo-Pacific.
Much of the western opprobrium heaped on Beijing stems from of its own actions and is thoroughly deserved. A potentially dangerous crisis can be avoided if Xi steps back. It is in his interests to do so. More than other factors, Xi’s aggressively nationalist, expansive policies abroad and Mao-like dictatorship at home have fuelled the deterioration in relations. The “performance legitimacy” calculations that keep the CCP in power suggest he think again.
Xi has overreached. He should drop the big man act and dial things down. But Britain and its partners must be similarly clear headed. The west simply cannot afford a second cold war. It must find ways to work with China, not fight it.
