Rishi Sunak has been accused of backsliding on China. Having labelled Beijing Britain’s ‘biggest long-term threat’ during this summer’s tour-de-farce with Liz Truss, the Prime Minister is now upsetting Sino-sceptics by hinting he will abandon her plans to declare China a ‘threat’ to national security as part of the ongoing review of UK foreign policy.
Iain Duncan Smith, a leading China hawk, told Politico this was “a cop-out” which Xi Jingping and the Chinese Communist Party will see as “a sign of weakness” on Sunak’s part. That is specially as he will also not commitment to matching Truss’s aspiration to arm Taiwan. The suggestion is that Sunak’s Treasury brain means he is unwilling to take tough action on Beijing: trade comes before principles for the Whitehall bean-counters.
In fact, Sunak’s approach represents the growing realism of our policy on China. Certainly, the Cameron/Osborne days of taking Xi Jingping to the pub in the relentless pursuit of investment are over. That is a welcome pivot. Nonetheless, we must admit that, as ghastly as the CCP is, China’s rise is a fact of international relations. The behemoth can be criticised, challenged, and resisted. But it cannot be ignored.
There is evidence that Alicia Kearns, the newly-elected chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, understands this. She has defended Sunak by pointing that designating China as a threat would “have rendered us an outlier amongst our Five Eyes partners” and “risked distraction from developing a more strategic approach”. What that approach is has become clearer in the last two years.
Boris Johnson’s government was first accused of being too weak on Beijing on issues like 5G. Post-Covid and the clampdown on Hong Kong, the approach became more openly critical, aided by backbench pressure from Duncan Smith and Tom Tugendhat’s China Research Group. The most obvious insight into the new status quo is John Bew’s defence, security, and foreign policy review from last year.
The historian and biographer of realpolitik accepted that Cameron and Osborne’s kowtowing had been wrong-headed, but refused to ramp up the rhetoric of Cold War II. It encouraged China’s neighbours to cooperate and form joint security arrangements. It highlighted why we must point out China’s crimes against humanity, and the need to wean ourselves off Beijing economically.
But it was also realistic. Britain cannot prevent the horrors being inflicted on the Uighurs, defend Taiwan, or liberate Hong Kong any more than we could have hung onto the island 25 years ago. British policy should be Whiggish in rhetoric, defending liberty against despotism. But as Palmerston and Gladstone found with Bismarck, high-minded denunciation is pointless if it cannot be matched by action.
That is the central reality of how we face China today. Militarily, we are minnows, and they are giants. Beijing’s rise has upended the assumption of the post-Cold War order. After the Soviet Union collapsed, we in western Europe cashed in our peace dividend in the safe assumption that American hegemony would prove stable, permanent, and benign. History, what history?
As we now enter a multipolar world, we struggle to adjust to the reality of our weakness. Eastern Europe be necessity still clings to the United States, since Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States need NATO to ward off Russia. But since Russia’s aspirations do not extend to western Europe, France and Germany have no such need to hug Uncle Sam tight.
Hence why both countries have been more tepid in resisting Russia and China. Germany sees China’s rise as a welcome opportunity to sell lots of BMWs to Beijing, whereas France has never missed an opportunity to promote European (for which read French) independence from the United States. Through their new investment agreement, they are deepening ties with China, just as the United States weakens them.
Why are we not doing the same in Britain? China is our sixth largest trade partner, and so any effort to wean ourselves off cheap manufacturing and eager tourists will be slow and costly. But we also struggle to break from a United States where growing Sino-scepticism is the only bipartisan issue left. That is a natural consequence of our post-Suez position as the Robin to America’s Batman,
In 1956, America couldn’t force the Soviets out of Hungary, but it could force us out of Egypt. Our economic weakness and desperate need to remain relevant meant we chucked in our chips with America at the expense of our Empire and freedom of action. We cannot ape European equidistance as we are too dependent on Uncle Sam, We are not the Greece to their Rome. We are Carthage.
The problem we now confront is that whilst we obsessed with paying fealty to the ‘Special Relationship’, we ran down our ability to make a meaningful contribution to it. Occasionally sending an aircraft carrier through the South China Sea is designed more as a desperate sop to Washington than it is an effort to spook Beijing. The Ministry of Defence’s inefficiency means front line troop numbers are continually cut to pay for white elephants which are never delivered.
In any case, it is thought that it would take the United States until the 2040s to be able to successfully defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion. So even without our contribution, we have to accept that the CCP will likely soon occupy the island, whilst the United States huffs, puffs, and does little. The alternative is war and potential nuclear escalation. Thucydides’ Trap looms worryingly on the horizon.
Jaw-jaw, not war-war: that is what Sunak and Biden are hoping for. Why ramp up the rhetoric if we are fundamentally incapable of acting upon it? Whilst we are more aware than ever of the need to threat China is a hostile power, there is no point in speaking harshly and carrying a small stick.
The West’s longer-term approach, to ape Gwyneth Paltrow, must be a conscious uncoupling. We can take comfort in China’s potential demographic disaster, or its unsustainable debt bubbles, or that its leader looks like Winnie the Pooh. But hawks must also acknowledge that renewing our defence capacity will be a long, hard process.
Bew’s Review makes clear that in order to compete with China, remain at the cutting edge of military technology, and ultimately spend more on defence, requires growth. Truss was right. But going for growth does not mean tinkering with tax rates but making meaningful changes to our economic geography.
Increased funding for research and development should be considered part of our Defence budget. China has the capability to knock every US satellite out of space. We can only compete by becoming a science superpower. Duncan Smith should also reconsider his opposition to house-building. A political and economic system where the defence of high house prices is the priority is key to our sluggish growth. The US and China have left us behind partly because they are simply so much better at getting things built.
If we cannot end our national stagnation, whatever term Sunak uses to describe Beijing will be irrelevant. Stripped of our ability to grow or innovate, we would have to accept our fate as one giant Bicester Village, forced by our poverty and impotence to act as a shopping park for our new CCP overlords. That would be a fate just as humiliating and eminently avoidable as our unhappy status as the 51st state of America.