The Foreign Office has seven ministers, 16,000 employees, an £11bn credit card and one of these days it might get itself a foreign policy. If the trailed excerpts of James Cleverly’s speech to the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet are to be believed, the Foreign Secretary will articulate the government’s pivot back towards Beijing. Cleverly will reportedly declare that ‘no significant problem… can be solved without China’. He will say that while ‘it would be clear and easy – perhaps satisfying – for me to declare a new cold war and say that our goal is to isolate China’, it would be ‘wrong’, ‘a betrayal of our national interest’ and even a ‘wilful misunderstanding of the modern world’.
This pro-China tilt does not come out of the blue. A week ago, Cleverly told the Guardian that the UK couldn’t ‘pull the shutters down on this relationship’ because ‘China will carry on carrying on whether we engage with them or not’. We’ve come a long way, baby, from trade boosting human rights. We’ve also come a long way from last November’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech, in which the Prime Minister pronounced that ‘the so-called golden era is over’ and that Britain had to ‘evolve our approach to China’. Going from ‘We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together’ to ‘Come Back, Be Here’ in the space of six months is certainly an evolution.
However the Foreign Secretary tries to dress this up, he is leading a retreat back to the Cameron-Osborne policy on Beijing, which saw the former chancellor plead pitifully that our two countries ‘stick together’, make Britain ‘China’s best partner in the West’ and ‘create a golden decade’. The notion that re-engaging with China is about ‘climate change’ and ‘pandemic prevention’ is risible, as is Cleverly’s suggestion that the UK can convince Beijing to be transparent about its massive military build-up. No doubt Li Shangfu is undergoing a crisis of conscience as we speak. Cleverly’s appeal to realpolitik would be a little more convincing if it wasn’t paired with such a ludicrous over-estimation of the UK’s global sway. When the Chinese foreign minister speaks, the world listens. When the British Foreign Secretary speaks, the world googles.
If the government wants a reset with China, it should be honest about it: we need China on-side or our post-Brexit prosperity-in-Asia strategy is buggered. That kind of candid self-interest you can respect. Pretences about engaging to encourage China to be a better global citizen deserve no respect. To China they look weak and self-indulgent and hypocritical – because they are. China understands that the UK’s sermonising about democracy, liberalism and human rights is a hollow spiel, fundamental values that become less fundamental whenever it suits.
When the Chinese foreign minister speaks, the world listens. When the British Foreign Secretary speaks, the world googles
When Wuhan gifted the world Covid, we made some noises but consequences were slow in coming, even after details of a cover-up began to emerge. Despite plentiful evidence of the mass repression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, the UK government still refuses to follow parliament in recognising this as a programme of genocide. Beijing is in breach of the China-UK Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, on freedom of speech and other political liberties, yet the UK government still won’t call for the release of pro-democracy newspaper publisher — and British national — Jimmy Lai. Even when Britain does try to sanction China, it’s something pathetic like not sending diplomats to the Winter Olympics. When it comes to China, the UK isn’t a paper tiger, it’s a paper kitten.
Something to be said in Liz Truss’s favour is that, as Foreign Secretary, she articulated something approaching a policy on China. Maybe it was as fanciful as Cleverly’s about the UK’s international leverage. Maybe it was emblematic of the baizuo liberalism the Chinese hold in so much contempt. But it had the advantage of being more or less straightforward. When Truss thought China was being a malign actor, whether on Covid or the Uyghurs or Hong Kong, she said so, in the full knowledge that Britain finally having a concrete position on Beijing would have concrete consequences.
Realist yet self-deluding, hard-headed but soft-bellied, Britain’s latest China policy is the worst of all worlds. Never mind. Give it six months and there’ll be another one.
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