The Government cannot be ‘non-aligned’ between China and our genuine allies
From Hong Kong to Huawei to Covid-19, our attitude towards Beijing needs to strengthen faster
When Boris Johnson was ill with Covid-19, Dominic Raab deputised for him. Some feared he would make a power grab, but in fact he behaved with becoming modesty. The problem with Mr Raab is a different one – the way he does his normal job as Foreign Secretary.
The consequence – and part of the aim – of Brexit, for which Mr Raab campaigned bravely, was to let Britain take an independent course. We Brexited, but the Foreign Office, under him, has been at great pains to avoid the consequent independence. We have continued to sign up to numerous EU projects, plans and targets. We have clung uncritically to the Paris Climate Agreement and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, both of which are structured against Western interests. Our international development aid still takes pride in the fact that its work is forbidden to assist wider British strategy. And when the Government reviewed our 5G deal with Huawei, it squashed widespread anxieties about cybersecurity and the objections of our closest allies, and pressed ahead.
Before he was an MP, Mr Raab was a lawyer at the Foreign Office. That is how he still behaves as Foreign Secretary, reading everything carefully and then signing it off once he is satisfied it rocks no boats. The idea that he should think strategically about Britain’s role in the world seems not to have crossed his mind.
Just after the Huawei review came the virus, from China. The decision to stick with Huawei left us, like Singapore in 1942, with our guns facing the wrong way. Here we are, technologically dependent on and frightened by the second biggest military power in the world. China’s incompetence, cover-ups and selfishness have spread an illness caught by more than five million people across the world, which has finished off nearly 40,000 of our citizens.
Taking advantage of the global focus on the virus, the Chinese Communist Party has gone on to repress Hong Kong. This week, its National People’s Congress imposed a new security law whether or not the territory’s Legislative Council wants it. The law will allow ordinary protesters who defend existing civil rights to be locked up as “subversives”, “secessionists”, “terrorists” and “traitors”. Beijing will have noted with pleasure that there has been much less front-page coverage of its latest action than there was of its crushing of huge Hong Kong protests last year. It will have been less pleased by the condemnation put out by Mr Raab yesterday, especially because it was published jointly with the foreign ministers of Australia and Canada, but their expression of “deep concern” is in itself no great deterrent. Their invocation of China’s obligations under the Sino-british Agreement, a treaty lodged at the United Nations, is a move in the right direction. This is an issue where freedom and international order combine, one on which we should build alliances.
Free, open cities, such as London and New York, have suffered badly under Covid; and so – though not chiefly for medical reasons – has the once-free and open city of Hong Kong. It is disappointing that Mr Johnson himself, once the mayor and champion of our great open city, has so far avoided the subject. The old Chinese order, “Tremble and obey”, is working well. China seems to think its model of governance is vindicated by Covid, in contrast to the weediness of the West.
The Government’s stance towards China has been so inadequate that, despite its large and fresh majority in the Commons, it finds its party in revolt. Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the parliamentary party’s new China Research Group, is trying to supply the strategic thinking which the Government shies away from.
Mr Tugendhat unpicks the idea that, because China is such a mighty economic force, we must accept its trade on the terms it dictates. No, he says, the benefits of free trade are real only when the trading parties actually believe in the rules rather than hijacking them. When the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) was reached in 1947, he points out, it created genuine economic partnerships between free-trading nations. Over the years, its successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), has set the bar to entry so low that it has become ineffective. In 2001, China was admitted. Instead of being a friendly stablemate, it has become, under Xi Jinping, a Trojan horse.
The founders of GATT, like those of other new post-war institutions such as the UN Security Council, Nato and – to do them justice – the European Economic Community, saw them as means of sharing common standards and encouraging other nations to do the same. In recent years, these common standards have lapsed, and China has known how to exploit the weakness. How was it, for example, that Britain and America, who paid much higher dues to the World Health Organisation (WHO) than did China, still let China buy influence over the poorer member states of the organisation, thus corrupting its work?
One of the strongest alliances of the like-minded is the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing system between the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Although profoundly practical, it is cultural and strategic too – an expression of a mutual trust which wants to defend a shared vision of the world. Huawei’s intrusion upon that trust, with British permission, is shocking, and is already straining our best alliances. After Covid, it is even more clearly intolerable. We need what Mr Tugendhat calls “a path to zero” from Huawei. Why aren’t we forming cybersecurity and technology partnerships with friendly powers with know-how – Japan, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, as well as the Five Eyes – instead of fattening the Chinese cuckoo in our nest?
The small stirrings this week suggest the Government is waking up to these dangers; but it does not look good that it is being led by its party rather than the other way round. Moves are afoot to edge away from the “Golden Era” of Sino-british relations under George Osborne and David Cameron and the dangers of what some call “authoritarian tech”. But such edging is slowed by the simple, basic fear that the Chinese will stop supplying us with enough PPE if we offend them.
The Government now realises that the promised Telecoms Security Bill to entrench the percentage of Huawei’s involvement seems unlikely to get through Parliament. Even the Labour Party is in danger of looking stronger against China than Her Majesty’s Government. Its spokesman, Stephen Kinnock, is eloquent on the subject.
Our Government rightly wants open, trading relations with China, and to accord it the cultural respect which President Xi, by angrily demanding it, forfeits. Real gains have accrued since China slipped away from the madness of Maoism. It is also reasonable for Britain to want to avoid getting involved on either side in Donald Trump’s lurid campaign for re-election. So words need picking carefully.
But it is an illusion of our traditional policy elites, still heart-broken over Brexit, to think that Britain’s independence from the EU means we should be “non-aligned” in the world, neutral between the great powers. As trade becomes ever more global and the cyber-world makes surveillance, spying and intellectual property theft more prevalent, it becomes ever more important to distinguish between like-minded friends and wolf-warriors in sheep’s clothing. Work with the former; keep the latter outside the fold.