Bob Seely: ‘Mr Bean’s trip to China’ ignored a vital rule – sell, but don’t sell us out

Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP. 

When I look at the decline of the Foreign Office and Whitehall as well as the parochialisation of our political leadership over the past two decades – China will stand as a testament to our leader’s inability to grasp new ideas and great new trends.

Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s visit to China (and Japan) was not a success.

Appearing more Mr Bean than Mr Statesman, he came back with little and was only allowed to visit once he had agreed to the planned Chinese embassy in London, sitting adjacent to highly sensitive cables. Whilst there, he was gently demeaned in a number of different ways, described by Luke de Pulford from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

Starmer continues a depressing tradition. For years our nation’s decision-makers – along with many others in Europe – has failed to see what China is and where the true dangers are. We have no coherent attitude of outlook.

There is no pot of gold at the end of the Chinese economic rainbow. There is no gain in turning a blind eye to its modern slavery or the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) creation of an AI-driven police state, because there is no economic El Dorado. It is a myth peddled by our Treasury and which has been slavishly followed by managerialist politicians.

First, China’s Made in China 2025 policy is designed to wean itself of imports. Prior to Covid, Chinese investment in the UK represents just 0.2 per cent of foreign investment anyway, and that is overwhelmingly focused on high technology, somewhere frankly we should not be welcoming the CCP. Third, jobs created and maintained by Chinese investment amounted to just 3,000 a year, whilst our exports made up just 3.3 per cent of our total. Few firms make durable profits. Their Intellectual Property is taken. Contracts are not enforced. There is a reason we sell less to China than to Ireland or Holland.

By all means, sell to China is you want, but they are far more interested in selling to us. Chinese exports to us were £67 billion. Our imports to them were less than half that.

The reality is that China doesn’t want open and free trade. It wants to use its economic export power to create dependency. It does that by dominating technologies and supply chains. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s fact, just some of us don’t want to listen. This is trade and economics as a form of warfare.

Here’s China’s dictator Xi Jinping speaking in April 2020: China will “aim to form a ‘counterattack and deterrence’ against other countries by fostering killer technologies and strengthening the global supply chain’s dependence on China.”

Elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party has made clear that Western nations are ‘hostile foreign forces’, democracy a ‘false ideological trend’ whilst free speech and human rights have long been denounced.

The CPP builds up domination through mercantilism – the practice of using economies to build state power at others’ expense. It offers super-cheap bank loans to its own firms which then take, steal or buy Intellectual property from Western companies, speeding R&D and cutting costs further. They flood Western markets and undercut Western firms, forcing them out of business. This is not fair trade, nor even free trade, it is trade as a proxy for conflict and domination.

Occasional victories, such as our guerrilla victory in the last Parliament to get Huawei banned, were small victories in a bigger struggle that we are losing.

There are also direct, technical threats, dangerously underestimated. For example, China has been quietly dominating the CIMs – Cellular Modules – industry. About the size of fat credit cards, CIMs contain processors, memory, and a SIM to the Internet. Pretty much everything runs on them or will do; from cars to logistical supply chains, manufacturing and telecoms. China aims to dominate this industry. In future, if China doesn’t like your policy, expect restricted CIM supply, or malware to be transmitted to your CIMS at times of global tensions. Expect your industry, your logistics, your healthcare, to glitch or cease working – along with your weapons. This is conflict preparation on a scale that our political masters do not comprehend.

The purpose of this domination is, in general, to make us supplicants, and specifically, leave us so dependent that, if/when conflict breaks out between China and Taiwan/the US, the UK – and Europe which is in much the same boat – would be too weak to support the US. It would break the Transatlantic alliance. This would be a Pearl Harbour, and not just of military power, but of economic and technical power too. It would be the end of the West, overnight, as well as the order that we, the US and NATO created after World War II.

China is not a ‘challenge’, it is a threat to our entire world order. It wishes to replace our system with its system.

There are of other important elements we could talk about; the appalling human rights abuses of the Uighurs – immediately forgotten by Labour as soon as they got to power – the illegal extension of Chinese territory into the South China Sea, the United Front influence and espionage networks in the UK, the theft of our data, so that when AI and quantum computing becomes powerful enough, it will allow China’s security agencies to understand who it needs to support, oppress or suppress.

So, as Lenin said, what is to be done?

First, no one is suggesting we shouldn’t engage or that we pick arguments for the sake of them. I despair of ministers who bizarrely proclaim that the only choice is either to kow-tow or to stick our head in the sand and two fingers in the air. Let’s engage, but please let’s stop grovelling.

Above all, the immediate priority is to defend ourselves so we can support our alliance system, and defend our economy from China’s mercantilist domination.

We need to understand dependency and economic warfare and to start to wean ourselves off Chinese rare earth, raw material and manufacturing and tech supply chains. It won’t happen overnight, but we need to start. Let’s work with US, Ukraine, Australia, Japan, South Korea and others to produce parallel supply systems and China-free, or China-lite, tech. If European nations want to join, even better.

For consumers, Govt needs to ensure that firms like Amazon are clearer about which products come from China; make it easier to opt for non-Chinese alternatives; put warning labels on goods that may have slave or forced labour components, such as the solar panels that the net-zero druid Ed Miliband wants to import in vast amounts.

Second, let’s start to onshore our industry and drive down energy prices by radically changing the aforementioned net-zero. Our economic and energy policy is suicidally useless. We are destroying our industrial base to slavishly worship net-zero targets which the rest of the world ignores. Our industry ends up in China where two coal-fired power stations a week are built to sell us back the manufacturing that we’ve shut down. This policy impoverishes us, enriches our adversary and makes the world even more polluted. If Xi actively controlled our politicians, he could not come up with a better policy to damage Britain.

If the US slaps tariffs on China because they dump cars, steel, etc on us, then we should join the US. China has long abused its developing nation status at the WTO. They need our markets more than we theirs.

These are just a start. There are many more ideas in a report that Rob Clarke and I edited for the Civitas think tank.

Above all we need coherence, which we still lack. China is a threat. It is trying to subvert the international system. Our best chance to avoid both dependency and war is to stand up for ourselves now, minimise our dependency and strengthen our alliances. Let’s sell, but let’s not sell ourselves out.

Under Labour it won’t happen. They are unwilling and unable to understand the threat, managing to be both irresolute and incompetent – a unique Starmeresque quality; but maybe the next Government will have learned the lessons of the past two decades of failure.

One can but hope.