Sam Hogg was the founder of Beijing to Britain, a weekly briefing newsletter that, until its recent closure, closely monitored how British politics and business thinks about China. A graduate of Leeds University, Hogg grew up between Australia, Scotland and Hong Kong, and has worked in both the private sector and the British Parliament. The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place three weeks before British people vote in a general election on July 4th.
Q: Most of the polls suggest the Labour Party is going to return to power after 14 years of the Conservative Party mostly being in charge. What do we know so far about what Labour’s policy towards China might be?
A: We’re also speaking about 48 hours after Labour published its manifesto, and in it they mentioned China in terms of their ‘Three C’ approach — cooperate, compete and challenge. It’s very similar to the current Conservative government’s approach, which they define as ‘protect, align and engage’. The ‘fourth C’ should be ‘continuation’ because there’s very little to separate Labour’s policy from the current approach.
The differentiator between the two parties is that Labour has pledged to undertake a ‘UK-China audit’, which they haven’t really defined — we don’t know what sectors will be covered, we don’t quite understand what the risk tolerances will be. That, they say, will all be fleshed out — if they win — within the first 100 days of the new government.
BIO AT A GLANCE | |
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AGE | 28 |
BIRTHPLACE | New Zealand |
FORMER POSITION | Founder of Beijing to Britain |
The other things in there are around Hong Kong British Nationals Overseas [known as BNOs, these are Hong Kongers who have the right to move to live in the U.K.], protecting and helping them stay safe in the UK. There was no mention of Taiwan, and no mention of the Indo Pacific in that regard.
Keir Starmer, the likely new prime minister, has a background as a human rights lawyer. Do you think that we could see a shift to a broad foreign policy approach that’s more concerned with human rights, and in particular with China in relation to controversies over Xinjiang and so on?
It’s very difficult to see such a shift taking place. A couple of years ago, David Lammy [the current shadow foreign secretary who is likely to become the new foreign secretary], told an audience of reporters that he would work with multinational partners to pursue and punish the perpetrators of genocide in Xinjiang. But as we now come up to the election, that pledge has completely fallen off the radar. What that suggests is that it’s an incredibly complex situation to approach from a government point of view. And now that Labour are no longer using [issues like Xinjiang] as a point of attack against the Conservative government, they’re not that keen to bring it back up high on their priority list.
More generally, Labour has tried to move their projected foreign policy approach to one of what they have called ‘progressive realism’, dipping its toes into the world of Henry Kissinger and realpolitik, but in a way that is meant to be underpinned by progressive values, such as concern for human rights across the world. How that actually transpires in practice is difficult to know. We all know how many difficult trade offs are required in the relationship with the PRC.
There’s a debate going on across European countries right now about the extent to which Europe should follow the U.S. in putting up trade defenses to prevent a wave of Chinese imports, particularly of electric vehicles — or whether countries like Britain should pursue more imports of Chinese EVs to help them achieve their climate change goals. Has Labour given any indication of where it stands on such difficult issues?
Not really. But this reflects a much wider [British political] issue, which is an inability to face up to and talk about trade offs in a clinical and objective way. Labour have avoided that responsibility for the moment. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor [finance minister] has put forward a so-called ‘securonomics’ approach that she wants to implement, to tie together foreign policy, domestic policy and industrial strategy. If they do this that means they will have to confront many of the trade offs that you’ve just touched on. They are currently defaulting to waiting until they are in government before they really have to start to flesh out those sorts of ideas.
With ‘securonomics’ do you see potential similarities between Labour’s approach and the position that the Democratic Party under Biden has carved out on China? Has there been an attempt to coordinate policy between Labour and its Democrat counterparts?
There is a an effort underway, and has been for over a year now, to get Labour’s leading politicians and their teams out to Washington to meet both Democratic administration officials, and Republicans too — to try and build bridges in anticipation of a potential Trump administration 2.0 — but also to learn about the Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, and what parts the UK could potentially copy or not copy.
But Labour will not be able to replicate the U.S.’s protectionist approach to these issues. We don’t have the sheer size of market, or industries of the scale that the U.S. has to protect. If we in the UK were to bring in 200 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs, we wouldn’t be protecting a massive automotive industry — that ship has long sailed. So Labour will need to be far more dexterous about what policies they choose to implement, and how they work with the U.S. and the EU on these things.
Labour, just like the Conservatives, will be the first to say we welcome investment from the PRC in specific, non-sensitive sectors. The hard part will first be whether PRC investors are all that keen on the UK market.
Labour is not committing to bringing Britain back into the European Union anytime soon, even though Starmer and many of its leaders were against Brexit. Having said that, do you expect Labour to try and align Britain’s China policy more closely with that of Brussels?
I would expect them to make moves to do that. The current Conservative government has worked with South Korea and Japan, and with Australia and the U.S. through AUKUS [a trilateral defense agreement inked in 2021]. We’ve been building these interesting partnerships and alliances, in many cases around China-related issues. So it would be very natural for Labour to try and do the same thing with the EU.
The concern is that some of the Labour thinking on this envisions an EU which is centrist, or center-left, and therefore sympathetic to the party’s overall approach. But there’s a very good chance that we begin 2025 with a pretty different, right-wing looking EU, which on many of the issues outside of the PRC may not want to collaborate or work with a left-wing, or centrist British government.
And of course, pretty early on in a new Labour government, we could see the return of former President Trump to the White House. How do you see Labour working with a future Trump administration on China policy?
They’ll have to base the approach on the fact that Donald Trump sees everything as a deal. We will need to be able to offer things if we want to have a strategy towards the PRC which is aligned with a Trump presidency 2.0. We need to find areas where we can offer something that wins us influence in DC.
That could be something as simple as making comments around China’s entrance to the CPTPP [in 2023 the UK joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between 11 countries including Japan and Canada. The first Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the agreement], and being really clear that we won’t allow them to join it unless they meet the bloc’s [Auckland] principles — through to a potential ban on whatever the next Huawei-shaped company is in the UK.
Left: UK Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch signs the Protocol of Accession to the CPTPP, July 16, 2023. Right: Representatives from the 12 CPTPP members: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the UK. Credit: UK Embassy in New Zealand via X
You touched on Huawei: it was during the first Trump administration that the UK did a 180-degree turn on its approach to that company investing in the country’s telecoms infrastructure. Where do you see Labour landing on Chinese investment in such areas?
I think that the skepticism that currently exists will continue. There needs to be a delineation between welcoming Chinese investment into things that are not seen as strategically sensitive assets, and general Chinese investment. Labour, just like the Conservatives, will be the first to say we welcome investment from the PRC in specific, non-sensitive sectors.
The hard part will first be whether PRC investors are all that keen on the UK market. And secondly, if the conversation around sectors currently not deemed sensitive becomes politicized. If Labour can keep a clear and well reasoned line as to when they do and don’t see problems arising, they can handle this issue. But you need to be confident in your ability to understand risk and exposure, and also confident in your general investment strategy.
We’ve seen, in the last couple of years, speeches by various senior intelligence and military officials raising the specter of the China threat, and more coverage of this in the mainstream media. To what extent are the British public and politicians on the same page as the security officials in this area?
It’s a fascinating question, because there’s a number of factors at play. The security services have provided very valid warnings over Chinese espionage, interference, intimidation, and IP theft for a number of years, and increasingly in a more vocal way. And they do have advocates within the political class: There are members of parliament who will stand up and repeat those things, and push the government to act.
Now government ministers and officials would perhaps come back and say, that’s all well and good, and we completely understand those things, but we need to balance the entire relationship with China. It’s the classic security versus prosperity argument that underpins how any country thinks about both national security and having a strong economy.
When you don’t have a strong economy, and you’ve got a general feeling of malaise and your average consumer feels that they’re going through a cost-of-living crisis, people can change their decisions. The general public in Britain, if we believe the polling data, pretty universally holds the view that China represents a threat or a challenge. But does that translate into changing consumer habits? If a high quality Chinese EV arrived on the market which costs £10,000 [roughly $13,000] less than its nearest competitor from the West, which is also of a slightly worse quality, are you going to be able to convince people not to buy that Chinese EV during a cost of living crisis?
It’s the same thing you see with TikTok. If you take a random group of 18 to 25 year olds and ask, ‘Do you think the PRC is spying on you through TikTok?’ maybe half of them will say ‘Yeah, probably’. But if you ask, ‘Do you care?’ they will probably say ‘Not really, I think everyone spies on me, I’ve been on the internet my entire life, if it’s not the PRC, it’s another company, etc, etc.’ So while some politicians and the security services may perceive a clear security risk, there’s not been a very good job done of explaining those risks in a way that actually [resonates] with the general public.
My number one hope is that we eventually end up with a Prime Minister who is interested in foreign policy… Until we get to that point, I’m concerned that a lot of the stuff we’ve discussed here just won’t be put on the priority list at all.
The best example is the conversation around the Chinese surveillance company Hikvision, which has been banned by the government from sensitive sites, but which this year has seen a massive increase in its sales in the UK. If you go to a local corner shop anywhere in the UK, there’s a very good chance they’re using Hikvision gear: it’s incredibly high quality compared to the products of its competitors, which anyway will cost more now. Arguably and allegedly the reason its products cost less is because it doesn’t compete fairly, and it also has human rights allegations against it, all of which your readers will know about already. But when you go to the average person and say, you can buy a more expensive product that is slightly worse, or a less expensive one or that is slightly better, I’m just not sure we’ve made a good enough case as to why they should choose the former not the latter.
You’ve been critical of the British state’s general lack of capacity to come up with a coherent strategy towards China. What do you see as the steps that Britain needs to be taking to address those shortcomings.
MISCELLANEA | |
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FAVORITE BOOK | Noble House by James Clavell |
FAVORITE FILM | Arrival |
FAVORITE MUSICIAN | Flume |
MOST ADMIRED | Cicero |
If people understood quite how bad certain parts of it were, there would be much more of a scandal around it. I find it incredibly perplexing that many of the people talking about the PRC, and the threats and the opportunities it presents, aren’t actually very knowledgeable about the subject matter. That’s damaging from a strategic policy point of view, because if you’ve identified the wrong things to focus on, you’re going to end up producing the wrong policy down the line.
We don’t have a huge pool of China experts here in the UK. And those we do have aren’t paid that well in the civil service relative to what they could be earning in the private sector. The incentive structures are not there to fix it. I find it particularly painful to see the number of politicians who profess to care about China and the threat that the CCP represents, who have asked absolutely nothing in Parliament about what actual investment is going into our capabilities in this area, or questions like, ‘How many Mandarin speakers are we training?’ or, ‘What systems do we need to put in place?’
The way that you can start to change that is if you look at how the UK has done a 180 degree turn on its approach to artificial intelligence, from the time when ChatGPT was released to now realizing that we need to deal with this properly — that we need to bring in expertise, we need to put ethics front and center and make sure regulation works etc, etc. These were very healthy conversations that we had. And in the course of two years, we got to the point of hosting the world’s first AI Safety summit in 2023.
Our government has defined China as an epoch defining challenge: But no one’s even begun to diagnose where our own capabilities stand on this issue at all. If you don’t have the capabilities, you tend to wrongly prescribe things, and therefore create bad strategy. My concern remains that no one wants to do the really boring nitty gritty work required to build up towards the more exciting stuff, such as publishing a grand strategy towards the PRC.
If you were to look at the number of special advisers who have worked in the Foreign Office for the last 10 years, how many of those will have studied Chinese history or Chinese culture or anything to do with the PRC at all? Or have been foreign policy analysts who come from a think tank or elsewhere? There might be a few of them. But given the sheer size of the PRC market, and threat and challenges that the CCP represents, you would hope that more special advisers would be literate on the issues they’re being forced to discuss. That for me is one very small microcosm of a wider issue.
Can you see a point where the UK has a clear China strategy? Or are we fated to taking an ad hoc approach to problems as and when they emerge?
I agree that it’s very difficult: and having, say, a three-page China strategy would be so reductive that it’s not worth publishing. But there is often a complete mismatch between how one government department is moving towards the PRC on various issues versus how another is; or even in Parliament, one group may understand the PRC threat in the South China Sea, another doesn’t have any understanding at all, another group may have been briefed by random organizations…It’s just so disjointed. It wouldn’t require a huge amount of strategic clarity to start to knit together some of those ends, and to have more of a unified approach.
Do you get the sense that British businesses still see China as an attractive market, and are still pushing the government to improve trade and investment relations with China?
Generally speaking, British business sees the PRC market as almost unmissable, it’s so vast and offers so many potential areas for revenue that they don’t want to miss out on. What they ask for often from the government is a level of cohesion and consistency: give us clearly defined red lines and what you do and don’t want from us and we can work between them.
The second part is a really interesting question, because a number of British businesses that operate in China have lived through far more turbulent times than now, through the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and so on. Maybe they weren’t in China at the time, but they were always waiting to come back into that market at some point. So they take more of a decades-long approach than a government is able to.
But does that necessarily mean they’re more wise about China? I’m not entirely sure. It depends how you define wise. One of the nuances that is lost very often is that the incentive structure for a government is very different from that for a business, whose interests are about maximizing shareholder revenue and profit. For a government, it’s about protecting your population, making sure your economy stays safe, and so on.
An issue that’s present in the U.S. is the seeming lack of interest amongst young people in studying about China, in learning the language, and visiting the country. Is that something you see as a problem in the UK too?
I think it certainly is a problem. If we don’t have enough people learning even the basic language in which over a billion people talk, that’s clearly a problem. At the same time, a lot of what the CCP does puts up massive walls between how we in the West can interact with China.
So it’s a problem that’s been induced both through lack of government investment and clarity here, and also through the way that the Chinese Communist Party behaves. If I was an 18 year old student now, I’d be worried about going to China to study for three years — whereas I wouldn’t feel that same concern if I went to India, or I went to Indonesia.
As you look back on your period following this topic so closely, what would be your number one hope for Britain’s relations with China?
My number one hope is that we eventually end up with a Prime Minister who is interested in foreign policy — because to not be interested in foreign policy in this day and age is to not be interested in domestic policy, industrial policy and trade policy. So I hope that we have someone who gets into Downing Street, who out and out says the way the rest of the world works and operates absolutely fascinates me.
Until we get to that point, I’m concerned that a lot of the stuff we’ve discussed here just won’t be put on the priority list at all. And that will damage our ability to understand the world and to be taken seriously and to do business, even beyond the PRC.
Andrew Peaple is a UK-based editor at The Wire. Previously, Andrew was a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, including stints in Beijing from 2007 to 2010 and in Hong Kong from 2015 to 2019. Among other roles, Andrew was Asia editor for the Heard on the Street column, and the Asia markets editor. @andypeaps