For all their arguments about other issues, the UK’s current governing party, the Conservatives, and the main opposition Labour party have been largely aligned on their China policy over recent history. The transition from the last Labour administration in 2010 to the coalition government led by David Cameron serves as a good example. At the time, one senior member of the new administration told me that on this issue (and on relations with India) they thought the previous government had taken the right approach, and that initially there would be no change to the engagement ethos prevalent at the time.
Will we see such bipartisan harmony this time round if Labour wins the general election on July 4th, as all the polls suggest it will? Deeper back in history, Labour often had slightly friendlier relations with Beijing, largely due to the party and CCP, on paper at least, both belonging to the left wing. But British socialism and the Chinese variant are profoundly different. And these days, the Labour party is keen to stick to the middle ground after a dalliance with leftism under previous leader Jeremy Corbyn that was to prove very costly at the ballot box.
Whatever Labour might do, one thing needs to be understood clearly. The UK’s policy towards China in recent years has tried to be all things to all people, and ended up pleasing no one. It has typified the ‘cakeism’ ethos that the Conservative party has held towards the European Union — an idea made popular by former leader Boris Johnson. Politicians have blithely held to the line that Britain can get what it wants, even as it antagonises partners through arguing with them over trade deals or questioning international agreements to which the country has previously committed.
The 2022 Integrated Review, a major policy document designed to underpin British foreign policy, shows this approach as applied to China. It framed the world’s second largest economy as a partner towards which Britain should operate on a collaborative, competitive and sometimes adversarial basis. The same year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak formally ended the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of UK-China relations, a policy approach his predecessor Cameron had launched to bolster Chinese trade and investment during a state visit by Xi Jinping to Britain in 2015.
By the time of Sunak’s speech, the situation in Hong Kong, with democracy party activists being jailed under national security legislation passed in 2020, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the generally nationalistic, populist tone of the Xi leadership had angered some politicians to the point where a few (but not the majority) have labelled China its current political form as an existential threat.
Fast forward to mid-2024 and Britain’s present posture on China is now framed as ‘protect, align and engage.’ This phrasing has all of the unwieldy complexity of the previous framework, but none of what little flexibility it offered. Pandering towards a visceral, unfocussed fear of China and its so-called threats to British values, the new framework seeks to compensate for the loss of collective protection on tricky issues with China which Britain had benefited from while still a member of the European Union. Not the least of the challenges of the current strategy is that it comes across as mealy mouthed and ambiguous. It sounds like someone saying to a partner that they will be friends on Monday, not speak on Tuesday, and enemies by mid-week! It is hard to take such a stance seriously, either in the UK, or, for that matter in China.
In order to create a more coherent policy on China, Labour will need to factor in three things. The first will be its relations with the US. This will not be straightforward, because the presidential election this coming November offers two such different options. President Biden remaining in the White House will mean some level of continuity. A returning President Trump would bring uncertainty. Still, in either case, the US’s hardline posture on China in terms of trade, educational and technological collaboration, and in security areas, has set the parameters within which Britain will have to operate if it wants to keep on the good side of its main geopolitical partner.
Crafting a better China policy will not be easy, not just because the demands that China makes now are far harder than ever before, but because within the UK there remain starkly different constituencies on this matter.
The second will be the ways in which a Labour administration approaches economic policy. China is the ultimate opportunity cost — a significant market, albeit one undergoing stress at the moment, and already Britain’s fourth largest trading partner, and yet one that remains less present in the country than its size suggests it should be.
If Labour prioritizes economic growth and opportunity above all, then the pressure will be on for it to take a pragmatic approach towards China. But if the likely new government sticks with a more purist attitude, believing that the differences in values between the two countries are too great for real engagement, then the world’s second biggest economy will largely remain out of reach for a more dynamic relationship. Labour will need to look elsewhere for growth overseas: In doing so, it may find out there is nowhere else to look.
The third issue will be to what extent Labour wants to embrace, and extend, Britain’s commitment to addressing transnational challenges, of which global warming is the most pressing. This is one of the areas where Britain and China, through mechanisms like COP, have enjoyed their most collaborative relationship. Labour might want to expand and enhance this.
Crafting a better China policy will not be easy, not just because the demands that China makes now are far harder than ever before, but because within the UK there remain starkly different constituencies on this matter. Businesses on the whole remain more positive, even though they report that the challenges of working in China have never been harder.
Meanwhile, there is a vibrant and — unsurprisingly — deeply critical and effective lobbying group based on some of the activists who have come to Britain from Hong Kong in the last few years. Then there is a range of other voices, from universities to government departments, who all have different aims and ambitions, and who often have no choice but to deal with China. Britain still hosts, after all, over 180,000 Chinese students at its universities. In the current economic climate, their disappearance would cause a systemic crisis for Britain’s colleges.
The likely new Labour administration will find quickly that relations with China are one for the ‘hard’ inbox. But it might be helped by knowing that Britain has dealt in some shape or form with this distant country for many hundreds of years. For much of that time, pragmatism has prevailed. And unbelievably, there were far harder times bilaterally in the past — not least when Chinese Red Guards burned down the British legation in Beijing in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, and Chinese diplomats had fist fights at the same time with police in central London’s Portland Place.
Our mutual histories are not easy, but they offer a useful archive for how Britain and China can, and have, developed together and influenced each other. And they also make clear that for four centuries, good or bad, easy or difficult, both have continued to speak to each other. That remains the only constant. The challenge now is finding out what best to say.
Kerry Brown is the Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He is the author of over 20 books, including Xi: A Study of Power.
