Bob Seely is a former MP for the Isle of Wight, and a Foreign Affairs Select Committee member
Where are we on China?
More confused than ever, seems to be the answer
Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, flies to China this week with confusion over Labour’s China policy – sadly much like the rest of the Government’s agenda.
Over the summer Education Secretary Bridget Philipson has caved in on free speech laws under pressure from both universities and Beijing. We are shamefully handing over sovereign territory, the Indian Ocean Chagos Islands, to a China-allied state which has never owned them, whilst Ed Miliband’s obsessive and disastrous race to de-industrialise Britain will make us yet more reliant on China for green tech and for manufactured imports.
We are in a mess over China, just at a time when it is more important than ever to have coherence. President Xi says he wants China to be ready to invade Taiwan by force by 2027. If he sees that threat through, or tries a more subtle form of pressure, perhaps isolating the island by blockade, this Parliament is likely to witness some of the most consequential events of this century that will make or break the global order.
To stand up for our nation we have the likes of Lammy, Philipson and Sir Keir Starmer.
We appear incredibly ill-prepared with politicians out of their depth with the scale of the decisions ahead of them.
It took years to get the UK in a better position on China.
MPs in the last Parliament; myself, Iain Duncan-Smith, Damien Green and others, won a series of arguments with Government to persuade them not only that we needed a more robust approach to China but that, as importantly, we needed a more coherent one too. With the advent of this Labour Government, we appear to have given up on that entirely and indeed are going backwards.
Researcher Rob Clarke and I launched our Civitas study this week in Parliament, Living with the Dragon. It outlines a series of articles by Labour, Conservatives and Liberal politicians as to how we can achieve a coherent China policy. It understands that we cannot avoid trading with China, but explains how we can reduce the risk and increase the benefit, whilst living up to our principles.
We need to be clear, China wishes to dominate the West, not to live in harmony.
It wishes to isolate the US from Europe, and Taiwan from the world. Its economic policy is to use cheap money and over-production to dominate now and in the future. We need to deal with China, because for better or worse we bought it into the global trading system earlier this century – a system it is now subverting from within – but we need to have a coherent approach to China and one where we defend our interests robustly, as nations like Australia do.
In opposition, David Lammy stated that a UK foreign policy under his leadership would be critical of Chinese human rights abuses and would cite China’s atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang as a genocide.
Yet all the signals coming from the FCDO show not a willingness to defend principles or indeed our interests, but a new spinelessness, infected by a de-colonising agenda which is historically wrong, intellectually incoherent and strategically dangerous. For example, our Mandarins at the Foreign Office have ‘advised’ postponing a trip to the UK from Taiwan’s former President, Tsai Ing-wen, so as not to upset China whilst the FCDO is apparently no longer allowed to describe China as a ‘threat’.
Perhaps Labour politicians think that this placating of China will reassure the one-party Communist bosses of Beijing. What in fact they will see is a weak and plaint Labour Government with politicians intimidated by China’s scale.
Despite the usual shallow moral posturing from Labour politicians, it’s clear that Labour are prioritising trade over other considerations. There is an argument for this – it’s not one I agree with – but the problem with it is that it is likely to fail.
The policy of seeking more and more investment from China has ended up thus far with more imports and an appalling balance of trade, much greater dependency on China dominated supply chains, and a cowardly abandoning of any pretence to care about human rights – even when it actively harms us, as slave labour in cotton production and solar panels undoubtably does.
The single biggest danger the UK faces is the creation of economic and supply chain dependency on China, which is set to become so great that in future we will have no choice but to acquiesce in its agenda, even to the extent of abandoning our closest allies in case of conflict in the Pacific. If we allow this to take place, it will be an unmitigated disaster for ourselves but also the world, a betrayal of not only our present but also our future.
Our thinking is so short-sighted, our lack of strategy so evident, that we haven’t even legislated for future battlegrounds, such as genomics, which focuses on DNA structure, evolution, and editing, and which will transform our world.
Genetic information has been called the ‘new gold’. China is planning for that future, and will likely militarise and weaponised this new technology’s capabilities. We have barely realised its existence.
The same is true for rare earth and rare minerals, the supply of which is dominated by China. China attempted to seek a dominant position in our 5G development, and only backbench MPs and the US administration put a stop to it. And in the Ukraine war it is increasing support for Russia, as is its client North Korean state.
As one of the leading free nations in the world, Britain urgently needs a greater sense of strategy in dealing with the rise of authoritarian states, most importantly China. Yes, there is opportunity, but there are threats too, military ones which could destroy the global economy, threats to our ability to support our allies, threats to the future of science and health, to universal human rights, to our education systems, and to our values.
It’s worth remembering the words of the great scholar of conflict and strategy, Sun Tsu, who wrote in The Art of War, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
We had some tactics. We didn’t have a strategy, yet. We are now going backwards. Working with friends and allies around the world, we must develop a strategy, otherwise we gift the future of the free world to the world’s most powerful dictatorship.
Bob Seely’s book Total War, a guide to Russia’s war in Ukraine and against the West, is published by Biteback in the Spring
