In the coming days, Foreign Secretary David Lammy will visit China and Chancellor Rachel Reeves is eyeing up a visit early next year for economic and financial dialogue. Whilst engagement is important, it’s not unreasonable to expect an understanding of the government’s strategic position on such a defining relationship before ministers board their flights. Does the government believe in deepening and expanding cooperation with China, or does it believe – as it appeared to in opposition – that China is a threat and must be dealt with as such? We are simply left guessing.
As Starmer marks his first 100 days in office, the fact that there is little-to-no clarity on the government’s approach to the defining geopolitical challenge of our time raises eyebrows. Yet in opposition, Labour made the right noises on China. Shadow ministers and backbench MPs would robustly take the Conservative government to task along with a host of Tory backbenchers from all wings of the party. Whether it was on critical national infrastructure, defending the rights of Uighurs and Hong Kong citizens, or protecting our democratic norms from malign CCP influence, Labour said all the right things, but the party could never be accused of having a strategy.
This week, The Spectator’s Katy Balls wrote an excellent piece analysing the new Labour ministry’s approach to the China challenge. She adumbrated the tale of a government that is labouring under the illusion that it can play it cute in China. This won’t end well. The government’s starting point must be to deal with China as it is today – the single biggest threat to our economic security and societal resilience – not as we hoped it would be ten or fifteen years ago. There is no third way.
Look north of the border, for example. China is still set to build its largest non-domestic turbine manufacturing facility right here in Scotland. While the project is a legacy of the last government, it’s astonishing that it hasn’t been submitted to fresh examination. Labour can’t surely think it is in our strategic interest to hand over such important capability to an entity from a hostile state, thus creating a new threat surface and dependency on China. If the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery isn’t forewarning enough – the refinery is a joint venture between Ineos and Chinese state backed PetroChina – then I don’t know what is.
As democratic allies increasingly wake-up to the multifaceted threat from China and pursue strategies to de-risk their economies and societies, it’s time the UK started to do the same.
Caught between the US and Europe, and facing the necessity to attract investment into a weak domestic economy, ministers certainly appear to be cooling their pre-election stance on China in the hope that cheap Chinese money can help them out of the economic hole that Britain finds itself in. Ministers should know that there’s no such thing as no-strings with the CCP, as any nation that is part of the Belt and Road Initiative will testify. And if we’ve learned anything from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and the magnitude of the threat from China far outstrips that of Russia – it’s that the flow of cheap and immediate money from authoritarian states is always a greater risk than reward.
On matters of war and peace, President Zelensky’s government recently announced that 60 per cent of foreign components in Russian weapons being used in Ukraine come from China. China has been, since day one, helping Russia slaughter Ukrainians. Can we expect David Lammy to raise this when he visits Beijing next week?
Then there’s CCP aggression towards Taiwan. Analysis by Bloomberg tells us that an invasion or blockade of Taiwan would hit the global economy far worse than the 2008 financial crash or the COVID pandemic. Has the government started work on mapping out what this would mean for the British economy? Is it working with allies to find ways of deterring such action? As western and democratic allies increasingly wake-up to the multifaceted threat from China and pursue strategies to de-risk their economies and societies, it’s time the UK started to do the same.
This stuff isn’t easy. The threat is a complex one, and manifests itself economically, politically, militarily and technologically. Any China strategy must consider all parts of our economy and society, starting with the areas of highest risk such as our critical national infrastructure, energy market and universities. It should also be central to the ongoing strategic defence review. Such a whole-of-society approach should involve industry, all levels of government, public institutions and civil society. This is critical to fostering a new consensus on China – finally burying the false prophecy of the ‘golden era’ – and navigating today’s turbulent zeitgeist.
Perhaps one of the clearest markers of this turbulence has been the renaissance enjoyed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his century-old observation that ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. Gramsci’s words ring truer today as we navigate this period of messy transition.
The war in Ukraine, the crisis in the Middle East and the rising threat from Beijing serves as a sharp reminder that the future is not fixed. There is a new world incubating amidst the tumult, and how these problems are resolved will shape the world for generations to come.
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