Question: In the new era of geopolitical competition and economic rivalry, what strategies should China and the UK adopt to forge a more constructive relationship?
Tim Clement-Jones
The prevailing mood now in Europe is to view China through a security and human rights lens rather than the trade and investment approach of the past 20 years. This has been heavily influenced by the policy of successive US administrations. People make a big mistake thinking geopolitical American policy always changes with a new administration. Not having Trump tweeting at 6am is a relief, but Joe Biden is going to be as hardline over security issues and relations with China as his predecessor. For better or worse in the UK, and to a lesser extent across the EU, having diverged for a decade, driven by the prospect of more limited access to intelligence ties, we have now decided to align ourselves more closely with US policy towards China. The UK’s recent National Security and Investment Act which identifies 17 sensitive sectors, including AI and quantum computing technologies where government can block investment transactions is a close imitation of CFIUS. So, for UK corporate investors in particular there is a new tension between investment and national security. With the new legislation and dynamics around trade, businesses will have to be politically advertent. They will have to look at whether the sector they seek investment in or to invest in in partnership with overseas investors is potentially sensitive.
Globally repatriation of supply chains will become an issue. These things ebb and flow. Over the 20th century, they expanded, shrank and expanded again. But, especially as a result of Brexit, the pandemic and people’s understanding of how the vaccinations were manufactured – and as a result of our new, much poorer relationship with China – repatriation is going to be an imperative. Going forward the best way of engaging with China and Chinese investment will be to avoid sourcing from sensitive provinces, not dealing with issues that could give rise to the sort of national infrastructure security concerns that Huawei did, and engaging positively over the essential global areas for cooperation such as the UN sustainable development goals and climate change. If we don’t, we won’t see net zero by 2050. China isn’t going to disappear as an important economic powerhouse and trading and investment partner. But we need to pick and choose where we trade and cooperate. And in this climate that will require good navigation skills.
Lord Clement-Jones CBE, Member House of Lords. Speaker on AI, Digital, and Creative Industries | UK, China, US and Middle East
Rana Mitter
While the temperature of UK-China relations has become cooler over the last year, in at least one area the UK continues to be highly attractive to many Chinese: education. Over the past five years, numbers of Chinese students have risen by 34 per cent: today there are around 120,000. These numbers are, of course, good financially for a sector that has been badly hit by the pandemic. But they have a greater long-term significance as well. The young Chinese who study in Britain will be tomorrow’s leaders in business, education and media. We should be wary of assuming a cause-and-effect relationship: studying in a liberal society does not automatically turn you liberal, any more than the (much smaller) number of students from the UK studying in China suddenly evince a desire to download the CCP membership app on their phones. But the longer-term effects are important. Today’s top Chinese party leaders are from the last generation that mostly did not have significant overseas experience (as opposed to many business leaders). That could be much less true of the generations to come. As long as the welcome they receive in Britain continues to be a warm one, that connection will have power in ways that are currently hard to predict.
The presence of Chinese students in the UK also provides another important lesson. It gives the UK higher education sector a chance to show that there are some values that are central to what British universities do, and are not negotiable. These include free and open debate on all subjects, including China itself. Academic freedom is the ingredient that has enabled British scholars, students and professors alike, to create a globally-respected system despite continual funding crises and increasing bureaucratization. I have yet to meet Chinese students who did not value the multiplicity of views that they hear in the UK system. Chinese parents clearly like what it produces, even if they have little idea of what goes on in the seminar room; after all, they are usually the ones paying. We need more British students to go the other way – for instance, the government’s new Turing Scheme could be funded to allow attendance at Chinese universities. Then, China must do more to make it clear that it welcomes genuine debate, the lifeblood of all education. Both sides have work to do.
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China; Former Director of the University of Oxford China Centre; Fellow of St Cross College
John McLean
“Global Britain” is a meaningless proposition without a sensible China engagement strategy. To assist in the formulation of such a strategy I would propose setting some principles to the relationship. These include acknowledging that both countries wish to work with each other but accepting they will not see eye to eye on all matters, and that they should reach an understanding of how such matters are dealt with and resolved. Use common areas of agreement (e.g. climate, health, biodiversity) to forge strong areas of collaboration and dial down the megaphone rhetoric. Discuss contentious matters in private and ensure there are regular multi-layered channels of communication. We should recognise that business between the countries is deeply entwined and that the trend of bilateral business engagement is growing. At the same time, be sensitive to the other’s domestic concerns. Being competitive with each other can co-exist with working in partnership on mutually important issues. Finally, both sides must appreciate that for a good trading relationship to flourish, they need to commit to finding solutions and compromises, which will allow relations to move forward.
Translating the principles into specifics, both countries should restart regular bilateral meetings such as the Economic Dialogue and JETCO and further, the respective senior officials should commence to visit each other’s countries to update their knowledge, so that their understanding is based on reality and not an out-of-date perception. For China, it should significantly increase the flow of information about China to the UK, as China should not assume that there is a good degree of understanding within the UK and additionally, China should create a strategy which illustrates to the people of the UK both the substantial changes that are taking place in many areas in China (including technology, infrastructure and how people live) and its rich cultural history. For the UK, the challenge is more fundamental as it needs to create a vision of how Global Britain should work with China and ensure that once determined, Ministers speak with one consistent voice and do not send contradictory signals. In conclusion, whilst there have been challenging times over the last 20 years, bilateral trade has continued to grow and I am sure that with open dialogue and learning from each other, we have the foundations for a truly “Global Britain”.
John McLean OBE is a businessman who has been working with China for over 20 years. He is Chair of the Institute of Directors for The City of London and was formerly on the board of the CBBC (China Britain Business Council).
Astrid Nordin
Actors in China and the UK could enable constructive relations by emphasising strategies that take relationships to be the fundamental building-blocks of the world. Such a stance is not naïve or utopian – it can be a concrete tool to shake up stale approaches to global challenges. A relational approach complements dominant viewpoints that treat the world as though it consisted of separate things – like states, civilizations, or individuals – that first exist independently and then interact. If you take relations as the point of departure, states, civilizations, and individual identities are understood instead as temporary effects of relationships. Such a worldview is illustrated in the Daoist yin-yang diagram, where a light half and a dark half together form a circle, in such a way that light and dark constitute and complement one another, include one another, and can change into one another. Its ethos resonates strongly with thinking associated with ‘the West’, with critical proponents in the UK, not least in discussions about environmental interdependence, pandemic connectivity, planetary ‘butterfly effects’, and possible ethics of care.
Such relational thinking can enable constructive relationships in several ways. First, any characteristics ascribed to these identities-as-effects are partial and context dependent. For example, it doesn’t make sense for UK actors to label China as being or not being a responsible great power. Instead, we see how claims about responsibility and irresponsibility are deployed in specific relationships, in order to shape these by facilitating behavioural change. Removing retrenched positions and labels encourages constructive exchange. Second, a relational approach highlights how relations and their effects can embody one quality and its opposite simultaneously. UK or Chinese foreign policy, for example, is not benevolently caring OR selfishly controlling, but simultaneously both. As such, President Xi can suggest in one relational performance that controlling state behaviour is a form of care, including towards ethnic minorities and overseas communities. In a different relationship he can argue that the best way for China to care for the world is to take responsibility for itself, including in balancing development and emissions. These narratives only make sense as actions deployed in specific relationships in order to shape those relationships. Most importantly, recognising fundamental interdependence encourages humility about one’s own position. It calls for joint responsibility for what is shared.
Professor Astrid Nordin is Lau Chair of Chinese International Relations at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London, United Kingdom.
Alastair Campbell
The immaculate showmanship of the G7 meeting failed to hide the lack of substance whether on vaccines, climate change or resetting relations with China. However, it did expose the absence of any clear geopolitical strategy for a country caught between dependence on the USA and an increasingly hostile post-Brexit Europe. The recently published “integrated review” reflects the belief that the UK maintains its standing and influence in the world and heralds a new commitment to the Indo Pacific but has little to say about Europe and the marketplace that Britain has exited. A grand vison to become a “science and technology superpower” is proclaimed, but no detailed roadmap provided. Hence this attempt to promote a role for a “Global Britain”, instead of focusing on markets of real value to our national interest, increasingly looks like a narcissistic delusion.
Perhaps Johnson and Raab look for inspiration to the era of Castlereagh and Canning, who forged policies which protected British sovereignty and independence against an autocratic Empire and the holy Alliance. Their primary concern was to protect Britain from invasion and advance British interests. To achieve this, they deployed their diplomatic skills to maintain a balance of powers between the contending states of Continental Europe. While the Europeans had to deal with revolutionary and nationalistic movements, Britain could focus on maritime security and opening overseas markets through colonial expansion. Today’s globalised trading environment, however, poses quite different challenges. The colonies have gone, the Commonwealth is economically insignificant, and the major growth markets are now in Asia, and China in particular. Surely British politicians should focus on the challenge of restoring prosperity by prioritizing access to those markets and heed Canning’s principle that: “No state has the right to interfere in the domestic political system of another”. How much more productive to craft a diplomacy which focuses on the national interest rather than grandstanding with the pretence that Britain still has the power and influence of yesteryear. If Britain really aspires to peaceful multilateral cooperation, then it should apply its undoubted diplomatic skills to support a new balance of powers which prevents the emergence of a new hegemon and focus on critical challenges to the international order: climate change and environmental degradation, poverty and terrorism, where Britain has invaluable contributions to make rather than subordinating our foreign policy to the interests of any external power.