Andrew Foxall

Where is Britain’s China strategy?

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The UK doesn’t have a China strategy. We have not had one since George Osborne declared a ‘golden era’ of Sino-British relations on a trip to Beijing in 2015. In hindsight, Osborne’s ‘era’ looks more like an ‘error’.

Yet, Covid-19 makes clear that the UK needs to adopt one. The death and destruction caused by the coronavirus are partly a result of the bullying and lies that characterised the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to cover up the initial outbreak. Not only has China sought to dodge the blame for the pandemic, but it has also sought to take credit for dealing with it. Throughout Western capitals, long overdue assessments are now taking place about how to deal with China.

Such a strategy will have to be multi-faceted. It will need to take into account China’s full-spectrum approach to foreign policy, in which it combines economic coercion, military sabre-rattling, a mammoth state-sponsored media empire, and cohorts of witting and unwitting accomplices. It also steals intellectual property on a gigantic scale and attempts to snap up the West’s best technology firms. All of this is used in order to achieve Xi Jinping’s goal for China to be the world’s most powerful country by 2049.

We may not have a strategy for dealing with China, but China has a strategy for dealing with us

So central to any UK strategy will be the need to reduce strategic dependency on China. As a report by the Henry Jackson Society notes, the UK is strategically dependent on China for 229 categories of goods, including 57 that relate to critical infrastructure. The pandemic has made clear that the supply of these goods is vulnerable to interruption, whether by mistake or design.

China made more than 40 per cent of the world’s surgical masks, gloves, goggles, visors, and medical equipment before the pandemic began, and has vastly expanded production since.

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