From gold to dust? Navigating a new era in UK-Chinese relations

Last week Richard Moore, the head of the British secret intelligence service, formerly known as ‘C’, gave a rare public speech where he declared that China was “the single greatest priority” for MI6. With elevated tensions between the CCP and Western powers, his pointed language hardly comes as a surprise.

In the past few years, the UK has been careful to avoid China’s ire, sidestepping remarks directly critical of Beijing and cooperating on a range of issues including trade and climate change. However, Moore’s comments are another sign that the tide has turned since Osborne’s ‘golden era’ of Anglo-Sino relations. This was also heightened by comments made by foreign secretary, Liz Truss last month who pulled no punches when she privately accused China of committing ‘genocide’, and described the need for the UK to be ‘strategically dependent’ when it comes to national infrastructure.

This is undoubtedly the hardest line on China we have ever seen from a foreign secretary, and contrary to the Prime Minister’s stance, who recently warned ministers not to “pitchfork away” Chinese investment.  As Eyck Freyman, the author of One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World argues, ‘the UK is realizing that the China, it thought it was courting eight years ago no longer exists’.

This has resulted in the government’s careful juggling of a positive trading relationship against mounting pressure to call out China’s human rights record. Richard Moore was plain about the risks China’s ‘assertive’ stance presents to the West and their ‘arbitrary detention of an estimated 1 million Muslims’, but at the same time he argued that we must cooperate on issues such as the pandemic and climate change ‘even when we compete fiercely elsewhere’. However, many argue this Janus-faced approach is unsustainable and for too long we have made concessions to China, and as a result fallen foul of the ‘debt traps and data traps’ that have in the meantime been laid.

Picture: Samira Ahmed, Dr Peter Highnam, Prof K. VijayRaghavan, Ben Hudson, Prof Angela McLean and Dr Ian Levy speaking at the Pacific Future Forum

Moore also argued that ‘to stay secret, we are going to have to become more open”, and collaborate with private sector to address global security challenges. This was the foundation for discussions at the Pacific Future Forum in October when leaders from the highest levels of government, military and industry convened in the hangar of HMS Prince of Wales to discuss how the public and private sector can work together to address the most pressing issues in the Indo-Pacific. Throughout the two-day event, whether the topic was trade, defence or climate change, each panel found itself debating policy with China, which is being rigorously tested by the recent Western tilt towards the Indo-Pacific.

At the start of the Forum, Rory Metcalf, the Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, warned that in the West we need to avoid telling too many ‘fairy stories’ about rules-based order, which had found itself under great strain. As Michael Auslin, a Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford agreed, it has always been a rules and power-based order, and now we are seeing the ‘slow and steady degradation of norms and values in the Indo-Pacific that have allowed the region to develop peacefully for the past seven years.’

To address this and promote our shared democratic values, the panellists argued that a diverse ‘web of partnerships’ between middle powers in South East Asia, ASEAN, Europe and beyond was critical. Matt Turpin, an expert on U.S policy on China, described how the rules-based order that was founded after World War Two was based on assumptions and conditions which are changing today. Now we need to keep the door open to smaller powers, and embrace ‘alphabet soup’ of coalitions such as the Quad, AUKUS, Five Eyes and CPTPP, which will help dilute the assertiveness and volatility of powers like China.

Although, we must be mindful that China is not above playing the alphabet game, for instance with its Belt and Road Initiative, which as of this year, has signed up 140 countries. Michael Auslin touched on this, outlining the need for an equivalent initiative which would help to absorb the economic losses that middle powers might incur as result of a robust stance towards China. As the world’s largest exporter, there is no option for disengagement, and we must use the WTO to understand China on its own terms and work to inch down its behaviour and ambitions. A convincing argument made by Yukon Huang is that ‘the world is far better off having China involved and bound by the rules than operate as a rogue outsider’.

There is also a danger, which was highlighted in panels on climate change, defence and security that there is a false choice between engagement and competition with China. It was evident on the climate change panel that the seriousness and urgency of the issue requires global cooperation. China is the largest domestic and outbound investor in renewable energy, supplying 80 percent of the solar panels installed in the United States and as Divya Seshamani from the Council for Sustainable Business pointed out, ‘you can vilify China but the reality is that it has helped many countries go green’.

 The complex picture of the West’s relationship with China undoubtedly demands nuance. As the Biden-Xi meeting last month proved, we must adjust our expectations – we cannot ignore our irreconcilable differences in worldviews, and nor should we accede to them. China has never been and will never be like us, but we must set the terms of competitive co-existence, otherwise or economy and the environment will suffer.