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Tom Tugendhat is a British politician who has served in parliament since 2015 as a member of the ruling Conservative party. He is currently chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, a group of MPs who scrutinize the U.K.’s foreign policy, similar to the way in which U.S. congressional committees operate. Tom also co-founded the China Research Group, a think tank within parliament set up to consider the long-term challenges posed by China’s rise. He and the CRG were among several British figures who recently had sanctions imposed on them by China, after the U.K. had earlier joined other nations in placing sanctions on Chinese officials involved with Beijing’s policy towards Xinjiang. Tom previously served as a lieutenant colonel in the British Army and was the military assistant to the Chief of the Defence Staff. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Q: You dedicated most of your younger life to gaining deep regional expertise in the Middle East, coming to China policy relatively recently. What experts, experiences, or conversations have made the deepest impressions as you set about learning about China?

A: I did start off in the Middle East, but you can’t really study that region in the last 10 years without seeing the shadow of China. Look at the energy markets, from the Persian Gulf to Khartoum. China’s economic influence is having a profound impact across the Arab world and Africa. 

When I took over the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, my hope was that China’s growing prosperity could have a positive influence in the global rules-based system and that Britain and China could work well together. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the Chinese ambassador tried to bully us. So did various other people from the Chinese Communist Party. That behavior towards me and my committee taught me early on to be cautious about Beijing, and has been my most illuminating experience in this regard.

Five or six years ago, the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer [equivalent to a U.S. Treasury Secretary] George Osborne had a so-called “doctrine” that the U.K. could be China’s “best friend in the West.” Much has changed since then. The U.K. has all but banned Huawei. You have been personally sanctioned. But just last month, Osborne [who is no longer a politician] praised Prime Minister Boris Johnson for resisting the “hotheads” in the Conservative party who supposedly want a new Cold War with China. Is U.K. policy towards China actually a story of continuity?

Of course there is continuity. This is the British government. We believe in tradition and continuous practice. We shouldn’t want a new “Cold War” with China, and we should do everything possible to avoid it. 

Sadly, that’s not just up to me, nor is it up to the British government: One side can drive the agenda in a confrontational direction if it wants to do so. Obviously the hopes of a new “Golden Era” in U.K.-China relations are history. We thought we were getting into one relationship, and it turns out we were getting into something very different. Since 2015, the Xi regime — and you could argue a bit earlier — has made life much harder for everyone who wants to do business with it. Partly as a result of this, the numbers in Parliament are changing. [The Conservative Party rank-and-file have rapidly become more hawkish than the government on China policy. Last year, for example, a group of MPs pressured Johnson to ban Huawei from U.K. telecom networks.]

Obviously the hopes of a new “Golden Era” in U.K.-China relations are history. 

What does the Chinese leadership have to gain from a positive relationship with London? What does it have to lose if relations fall apart?

I think the Chinese state realizes that the U.K. has a disproportionate influence on global affairs because it is a network power, a country that has influence on many others. Of course China’s leaders don’t think we are equal to the United States. But Beijing is trying to reshape the ways the world organizes itself to support their interests, just as all countries do. If they can influence the U.K., they can probably influence many other countries, too. 

Yet it seems that across the Anglophone countries, Beijing has largely lost interest in what its counterparts think about it. Has China written off this strategy of influencing network powers over the past year or so?

I don’t think Beijing doesn’t care what its counterparts think. It’s trying to get them to take a more transactional approach to relations. Perhaps part of that is to fear China, to think of it as threatening and powerful, and to try and make democracies feel more constrained. And I think that’s a mistake. The great irony is that if President Xi had followed Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “hiding strength and biding time” for another 10 or 15 years, we wouldn’t have taken any action, and by the time we woke up it would have been too late for us to do anything about it. I think Xi has moved too early. And I think he must know he’s moved early. The question is: why? 

What do you think forced Xi’s hand?

Well, Xi is an expert on Chinese domestic affairs. He seems to be extremely intelligent. So I suspect there are strong internal reasons for him to claim leadership on the world stage early in his tenure, despite the risk that China still has clear rivals. 

It’s difficult to tell if that comes from a position of strength or weakness. Maybe Xi genuinely believes that China is now on an inevitable path to ascendency, while the West is in irreversible decline.

On the other hand, the obvious demographic factors may play a role, the fact that China faces the prospect of a declining population. There may be economic considerations: The fact that growth is slowing, that they have had to drop the 6 percent growth target is a sign that even artificial targets are being pushed aside. Internal debt as we know is very property-based and may pose a systemic risk. Perhaps Xi didn’t want to wait around for these things to distract the leadership. 

There may also be regime stability factors at play, such as the loyalty of the People’s Liberation Army. We heard a few years back that various generals had sworn public allegiance to Xi. Did PLA officers feel the need to swear public allegiance to Mao, or Deng, or Hu [Jintao]? What internal loyalty issues are sufficiently in doubt today that those kinds of gestures are necessary? Xi also seems to believe that separatism and social instability are a real risk, otherwise why has he cracked down so hard on minorities in Xinjiang and democrats in Hong Kong, and religious groups across China? He clearly thinks the best way to control his country is to be more nationalistic and more ethnically Han and more aggressive internationally.

We shouldn’t assume everyone in Beijing wants a Cold War. Chairman Xi dominates the key institutions today, but we know there are internal dissenters who do not share his views. With different Chinese leadership, it’s not impossible that we’d have a different relationship.

How does a more muscular China threaten U.K. national interests?

The fundamental risk is that China succeeds in changing the way the world organizes itself through the setting of standards and rules. As an international trading nation, this matters directly to the U.K.. A more muscular China also threatens Japan and Australia, for example, two very important allies of ours, by weakening the international system upon which we depend. 

In some ways, Chinese ambassadors’ behavior towards Sweden and France has been helpful to us, since it has spurred European countries to recognize the dangers that an emboldened China might pose. The Chinese ambassador to Sweden recently said: “we treat our friends with fine wine… but for our enemies we have shotguns.” That left the Swedish people with very little doubt — China was not a country they could rely upon.

If the U.S. and China are headed into a new Cold War dynamic, can the U.K. avoid being forced to take sides?

The U.K. took sides a long time ago. The U.K. has been and will be for the foreseeable future a very close ally of the United States. There is no question about that. 

Some other democracies are deluding themselves that they can find a way to sit in the middle. But at some point, you can’t avoid recognizing that the liberties you enjoy matter and are threatened. I’m not talking about total economic decoupling. The United States trades with China, as we know. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are running investment funds in China. But at some point, if China continues with its present path of behavior, democratic countries will recognize that there isn’t really a choice. 

The French seem to believe that they have a choice, don’t they?

I don’t think that’s quite right. True, France has always operated its own foreign policy—leaving the NATO command structure under de Gaulle and only rejoining under Sarkozy. True, France claims to be seeking a different kind of relationship with China, separating the geopolitical relationship from the economic relationship. But France also recognizes, I think, the importance of its many other relationships, including the one with European Union, which it rightly sees as fundamental. France is not actually pursuing a very different relationship with China from the one that we are. I think it’s just putting the emphasis in a slightly different place.

So you don’t see Europe’s attempt to do an investment treaty with Beijing, for example, or France trying to finish the PEACE undersea fiber optic cable to China—operated by Huawei—as a sign of Europe trying to carve out a middle path between the U.S. and China?

I see both projects as legacies of an earlier time. The EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment was the result of talks started by [former British Prime Minister] David Cameron and George Osborne. It was a Hail Mary pass that the U.K. kicked up into the air in 2014 and is only now coming down to land. As anybody who has worked with the European Union knows, once you’ve started off talks they kind of continue with their own momentum no matter what else happens in the outside world. So the China-EU talks have continued under their own impetus for seven years or so, and now they’ve finally come to a conclusion. Let’s see if the final product passes through the European Parliament…I think that’s in doubt.

So the talks went on and on. And eventually where did they end up? Roughly in the same place as some of the U.S.-China trade talks under Trump. In the meantime, of course, the context has changed. Because the treaty needs to be ratified at a time when the relationship is different, some people see it as a geopolitical move, even though it isn’t. [Note: Since this interview was recorded the European Parliament has voted to freeze consideration of the CAI until recently imposed sanctions on several European individuals and organizations are lifted.]

China has just sealed a big investment and political partnership with Iran, but they’re also selling vaccines to the UAE. They’re installing Huawei 5G systems in Saudi Arabia, they’re leasing the Israeli port of Haifa. If Middle Eastern countries are forced to choose sides, do you think that any would tilt in China’s direction?

No doubt. Iran, definitely would: It and China have a much closer strategic partnership than is commonly recognized. Note that Iran was one of the first countries to have a large number of deaths in the early days of the pandemic. The fact that so many people were traveling back and forth should have made clear the connection between the two regimes. 

Elsewhere in the region, it’s more of a mixed picture. Many countries have close economic links to China through energy sales and imports of consumer goods. But love for China is not the same as strategic alignment. For many Middle Eastern states, internal pressure is growing to take some kind of action on the mass detention and persecution of Muslims in western China. The concept of the “community of Islam” is widely shared amongst Muslims—though of course not universally shared—a greater Islamic identity beyond the nation state that includes all Muslims. Seeing Muslims being persecuted in Xinjiang and elsewhere raises consternation in Cairo, Riyadh, Damascus, and Baghdad, even if at the moment they are greeting it with silence.

Is China going to inherit the Afghanistan problem after the U.S. withdraws?

I suspect Afghanistan will change as the United States withdraws. Afghanistan is really a problem of regional proxy conflict. China is one of those regional powers. Beijing wants a very different kind of engagement in Afghanistan than the United States did, for obvious reasons. But yes, I think China will inevitably become more involved. We know, for example, about China’s interest in different forms of mining, particularly rare earths, but also copper, for batteries and construction and other purposes. And Afghanistan is one very large source of copper in the world.

The U.K. government has just released a new policy that follows the United States and many others in adopting an “Indo-Pacific strategy,” describing it as a ‘tilt’ towards the region. What do you think of that metaphor?

Let me clarify: I don’t speak for the government. As chairman of the select committee, my job is to hold the government to account. 

I think the government is using the word “tilt” as a softer way to say “pivot.” They don’t want to suggest that to pay more attention to the Indo-Pacific they are shifting scarce resources and attention away from somewhere else. They’re trying to say that things are going to be more balanced.

The U.K. is preparing to send an aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, on a tour of the Indo-Pacific, but the government has said it won’t sail through the Taiwan Straits. Do you think this is prudent?

There are plans for the HMS Queen Elizabeth to visit other areas for freedom of navigation operations. But my own view is that we should make it clear that all international waters are international, and conduct freedom of navigation operations there. 

Any nation’s ships may pass through the English Channel—and they do, despite its name, and despite its proximity to the U.K.. Right of passage is guaranteed under international law.

There is ever more speculation in Washington that China may be preparing to make a move on Taiwan. How do you believe U.K. interests would be affected in that scenario? Should the U.K. plan to intervene if necessary, or to steer clear no matter what?

The U.K. has a strong interest in Taiwan because of the importance of supporting other democracies and because of the principle of not allowing international borders to be changed by force. Some borders have been changed by force in recent years—for example, in the Crimea and Ukraine. But preventing these things from becoming commonplace is important. Taiwan is also important because it’s a major manufacturer of the semiconductors on which we all rely. 

As to whether China will act against Taiwan, I think the probability of an outright amphibious invasion from the mainland is low. As anybody who’s fought in mountains can tell you, defenders have a great advantage. The PLA must know very well the dangers they would face in trying to conquer and occupy an island covered with mountains. And Chairman Xi knows very well that even though he runs a pretty authoritarian dictatorship, if he were pinned down for months and months he would struggle to retain domestic support. It is much more likely that we will see some form of action against an outlying territory.

China’s ideal solution is to win Taiwan back without ever firing a shot.

China’s ideal solution is to win Taiwan back without ever firing a shot. They are attempting to split up existing alliances, most recently for example by echoing and misrepresenting comments from a New Zealand official to suggest falsely that the Five Eyes community [an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States] is breaking up. We need to push back against this by keeping our alliances tight and coordinated. 

I want to see Japanese F-35s flying off the deck of the Queen Elizabeth. And I would like to see Japan joining Five Eyes, so that it becomes Six Eyes. 

If the U.K.’s goal in the Indo-Pacific is to be present, and to show solidarity with other democracies and other defenders of the rule-based order, but not to involve itself in a potential military conflict, what is the correct forum for doing that? An intelligence-sharing alliance, such as Five or Six Eyes? The quad? The D-10 alliance of democracies?

It’s a bit of everything. I would like to see the U.K. working closely with the Quad [a new, informal arrangement of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia]. Every member of the quad is already a very close ally of ours, but I’d be eager to see us work more with them as a group. We need to deepen our economic links to the region by joining the CPTPP trade pact. I wish the United States would join, too, though that’s unlikely in the immediate future. 

I strongly support the D-10, as I have for years. The goal there should be to keep growing the club. It will be stronger and more effective if it includes more members—all of the largest democracies. The real gains will only be made if we strengthen those states that could otherwise be undermined. That doesn’t apply to the G7, or Australia, India or South Korea.

Judging by discussion in the popular press, Xinjiang has become a bigger issue in the U.K.’s public debate about China than in Europe, or even than in the United States. What British interests do you think are really at stake in Xinjiang? Why is the U.K.—and why are you personally—willing to pay a high price to call attention to the situation in Xinjiang?

I’m not going to comment about the discussion in other countries, but I think there’s at least three contributing factors to the U.K.’s interest in the issue. First, the abuses that we have witnessed in Hong Kong. Second, our large Muslim population, which is an important community in the U.K. and is particularly horrified to see these crimes being committed against Chinese Muslims. And third, I think, the reports of forced labor. Britain is proud of its role as one of the first countries to abolish the slave trade, and we find the prospect of modern-day slavery to be absolutely horrific. 

What does the United Kingdom owe to the people of Hong Kong? Does it have extra responsibilities, given what is happening in Xinjiang?

I have always believed that we had responsibilities towards Hong Kong and wrote about this in 2017 and 2018. We should recognize British Nationals Overseas [British nationals from Hong Kong who enjoy many of the rights of British citizens, but do not have automatic right of abode in the U.K.] and give them the right to move to the U.K., not just to come for six months. Thankfully, support for BNOs has gone from a rather esoteric proposal when I first pushed for it to a much more commonly-held position, and I’m very gratified about that.

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