THE Prime Minister has just met Xi Jinping in the sidelines of the current G20 summit in Brazil. He hopes to engage in ‘ serious, pragmatic’ discussions, noting that China is one of Britain’s biggest trading partners, and that both China and Britain are global powers.
The PM and Xi had spoken by telephone on 23 August, agreeing the need for a stable and consistent bilateral relationship; since then the new Foreign Secretary has visited Beijing, and there has been talk of a timely ‘reset’ of bilateral relations after increasingly tense engagement under the previous government.
The prospects for renewed rapprochement between China and the UK are inevitably affected by uncertainty surrounding what the new Trump Administration’s China policies will seek to achieve.
Whatever transpires, the results will profoundly affect not only Britain but all Western democracies.
This reality cannot but influence expectations as to what may, or indeed should, be achievable at the PM’s meeting with Xi. Since context is plainly so important, it can be helpful to consider the major factors involved.
Recently, Xi Jinping has made important public statements spelling out his intentions for a new world order. His vision has been laid out at length to recent assemblies of leaders from the Global South, including the recent APEC meeting, but most explicitly in the official record of bilateral talks Xi held with President Biden there on 16 November.
Xi’s detailed comments over a two-hour conversation, reported by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, are widely judged to be a clear warning to President-elect Trump not to challenge to the rise of China as an equal global power.
In this classic example of reflexive control, Xi’s tone and content are equally directive. ‘Containing China is unwise, unacceptable and bound to fail’. ‘The Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and China’s development right are four red lines for China. They must not be challenged’.
This formula is likely to recur widely in CCP policy statements henceforth.
The British Government’s latest mantra for its China policy runs ‘Challenge, Compete, Co- operate’. Evidently Xi Jinping won’t tolerate ‘challenge’, however powerless and formulaic, on any of the familiar bilateral areas of disagreement.
It seems that today, when the PM tried to raise human rights concerns with Xi Jinping, British journalists present were compelled to leave the room. Debate about democracy and liberal values is seen not only as an impertinent irrelevance in Beijing, but explicitly as a threat to Party power.
Starmer told Xi today that bilateral trade talks at Chancellor level would focus on ‘a more level playing field to help our businesses’.
But aspirations to fair and fruitful competition are unlikely to de realised, given that China plays by no rulebook but its own.
Potential for co-operation is conventionally framed in terms of shared common goods such as global health and climate change.
Sadly, the CCP’s record on both is so spectacularly appalling as to suggest Western proponents of joint effort simply haven’t a clue what China really gets up to in either field, especially how far their naiveté in buying Chinese renewable energy technologies is exploited by its producers.
There may be one silver lining to the PM’s direct exposure today to the free world’s most dangerous, powerful and implacable foe, who has empowered the likes of Putin, the ayatollahs and Kim Jong un to serve his quest for global hegemony, and who is preparing in open sight for existential contest with the West.
It will, however, assuredly be unpopular with a large and influential cohort of British vested interests and their Chinese collaborators.
It is that any sane observer of what happened today between Xi and Starmer today should now understand, if they did not already, that it is impossible to separate a trade relationship with Beijing from the avowed aims of Chinese unelected, unaccountable and untrustworthy rulers.
They use trade to steal our data, undermine competition and gain access to vulnerable infrastructure and operating systems. They hate freedom and democracy, preferring instead Orwellian oppression at home and abroad. They are engaged in cognitive warfare and reflexive control in every encounter with their rivals, among whom Britain is numbered.
For all Xi’s talk of a Cold War being unwinnable, for a decade or more he has been leading hybrid warfare against the West, weaponising every aspect of Chinese state power to weaken and divide his targets so that they are too corrupted, confused and demoralised to uniter in resistance against him.
The war he wants to win is one where we are left to defeat ourselves. Learning today’s lesson, and belatedly choosing a better set of policies to resist the CCP’s grim march to global disaster, would be the best outcome for our government and our country.