James Cleverly defends his China policy

How should Britain handle its relationship with China? That’s an increasingly fraught question inside the Tory party lately, with several China hawks in government and on the backbenches keen to limit engagement while classifying the country as a security threat.

Earlier this year, James Cleverly faced criticism after becoming the first UK Foreign Secretary to visit Beijing in five years – a trip he defended at the time as necessary for diplomacy, arguing that disengaging from the country was not ‘credible’.

Speaking to Cindy Yu at conference today, for a special edition of the Chinese Whispers podcast, Cleverly defended his position again, saying:

‘Foreign secretary flies to foreign country to have meetings should not be controversial.’

In a rebuke to those who may want to limit engagement with China, he also encouraged other ministers to meet their Chinese counterparts and officials and argued:

‘Pretending that China is not a significant player on the world stage is not a winning strategy. And one of the points I try to get across and sometimes people don’t… sometimes dear friends don’t really hear me when I say this is: engagement with a country is not a prize for good behaviour, it’s not some kind of gift or reward. It is work…’

Cleverly argued that while the official read-outs of summits and dialogues might suggest that government meetings with China hadn’t been particularly fruitful (and indeed the scripts may not have differed much over the past year), it was necessary to be in the room with diplomats, to see which points officials reacted to and to pick up on verbal and body language clues.

Asked by Cindy about Chinese diplomats being particularly inscrutable, Cleverly suggested that – while he was ‘very, very conscious that this is on a whole upper level of arrogance on what I’m going to say’ – there was nothing the Chinese government wanted more than this narrative to take hold, and ‘nobody has a perfect poker face’:

‘If you’ve never played a hand of poker, everybody looks poker faced… And I have some fantastic poker players on my payroll’.

Cleverly also sought to defend the government from charges it has become softer on China since the Truss administration, arguing that becoming less publicly confrontational was not softening, and on ‘practical measures’ such as foreign intervention the government had actually toughened its stances.

On the nightmarish question of what happens if China invades Taiwan, Cleverly said this would be a ‘massive failure of foreign policy’ and while Chinese diplomats would insist that it is an entirely domestic matter, he has told Beijing that:

‘Disruption across the Taiwan strait is everyone’s business… This is not an entirely domestic matter, huge international trade volumes go through that body of water.’

And he issued a stark warning to the country about the consequences of such a move, for both China and the wider world:

‘It would be a catastrophically bad thing for the global economy… and it would be catastrophically bad for the Chinese economy. It would collapse the Chinese economy… and bring a number of other economies down with it.’

Let’s hope it never comes to that.