What does the UK want in its relations with China?

Following Keir Starmer’s recent visit to China, Steve Tsang offers his take on how the UK government should approach its relationship with Beijing. 

Prime Minister Kier Starmer was right to visit China and work to put UK-China relations back on an even keel, even though the deals he secured were paltry at best. He should not have been surprised. What was surprising was that his government encouraged the expectation that the trip would benefit the UK economy when, in fact, more new investment will flow to China than the other way round. Moreover, the visit has shown that the UK does not have a strategy for engaging with China.

While putting relations with China on a firmer basis is to be welcomed, a more important question remains: how will it advance UK interests? Indeed, what does the UK want in its relations with China? And how did the visit fit into the big picture? The simple answer is that we do not know.

British policy towards China has swung and drifted in the last decade, as it is not guided by a longer-term strategic vision. When we are dealing with a leading global power with enormous ambitions, some clearly harmful to us, drifting is an indulgence we cannot afford.

For the UK to have a good China strategy, one that advances our interests effectively, we must start by recapitulating our core interests and compare them to China’s in its long-term global strategy. The most basic is over the UK’s commitment to individual rights and sustaining the rules-based international order while China is committed to repressing individual rights and making the world safe for autocracies. Focusing on our core interests will enable us to see where we should or should not cooperate, and provide an anchor for our policy towards China, despite changes of government.

The core interests of the UK are to uphold the values that make all British citizens free and able to fulfil their individual potential. It requires the UK to uphold democracy, freedom, individual rights, and a rules-based international order, the upholding of which should forbid China from seizing Taiwan by asserting, on very dubious grounds, that Taiwan has always been Chinese.

China under Xi Jinping, in contrast, has a global strategy that aims to make China great again, described by Xi as fulfilling ‘the China Dream of national rejuvenation’. This implies China taking over the besieged liberal international order and transforming it into a Sino-centric variant, based on the tianxia (all under heaven) paradigm. In Xi’s conceptualisation, the best of times in history were when China was pre-eminent, with the mythical tianxia order in place, to which all other nations look up, embrace and defer, thus delivering pax Sinica.  China’s national rejuvenation is about ‘restoring’ China as the pre-eminent power.

Translated into contemporary policy terms, Xi’s China dedicates itself to forge a ‘common destiny for the humankind’ by ‘the democratisation of international relations’. It means China proactively cultivating support in the Global South, which consists mostly of a majority of UN member states and the bulk of the world’s population. China presents itself as devoted to advancing the interests of the Global South, reassuring autocracies they will be safe under Chinese pre-eminence. With their support China will make the UN and the wider international system put the interests of the Global South as interpreted by China first, ahead of the minority and privileged ‘democratic West’.

If Xi has his way, a new rules-based international order will replace liberal internationalism with Sino-centrism, based on Xi and the Communist Party’s preferences. Xi will need to mark the advent of Chinese global pre-eminence by a spectacular event, the most likely of which is for China to take Taiwan, despite American commitment to preventing a forceful change of Taiwan’s status. Despite its rhetorical commitment to peace, the fulfilment of Xi’s global strategy implies a major war if Taiwan, a vibrant democracy that is also a middle power, should fail to surrender. Such a war will have cataclysmic consequences for the world economy.

China under the Communist Party has never shared the UK’s core values, but China before Xi did not have such a grandiose global ambition. A fundamentally mercantilist China, as it was from Deng Xiaoping through Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, was one we could accommodate, but one that works to reshape the world after its image, as under Xi, requires a re-think. In working out a China strategy, the UK cannot lose sight of the implications of Xi’s ‘China Dream’.

Xi’s ’China Dream’, to be fulfilled by 2050, goes against the core interests of the UK. In the very least, the UK should ensure that a Taiwan contingency does not arise, as such an eventuality could imply Washington asking London (and others) to join its efforts to confront it, either militarily or with wide-ranging economic sanctions, or both. It should also work with democratic allies to contest China’s efforts to transform the UN with Global South support.

A China strategy for the UK should first and foremost be based on how we can contain Xi’s global ambitions so we can protect our core values. Preventing a takeover of Taiwan will require the democratic West to reinforce US military deterrence by collective economic deterrence. The latter is more likely to deter as Xi’s top priority is to stay in power and he can hold off invading Taiwan if he knows it will trigger an economic catastrophe for China, potentially unleashing forces to challenge his leadership. This can happen as nearly 50% of China’s external economy is interdependent on the major democratic economies.

There is therefore no need to create a false dichotomy that we either uphold democratic values or engage with China. The reality is that diplomacy is a desirable luxury when engaging with friends but an absolute essential when dealing with one with less than benign intents. Engagement is just an instrument. Economic ties provide leverage in diplomacy, though they always cut both ways.  We must engage with China, but it should be guided by a long-term strategy, so we avoid being distracted by short-term gains that undermine our long-term strategic objectives.

By Steve Tsang, Professor of China Studies and Director of the China Institute at SOAS, London.

His new book (with Olivia Cheung) China’s Global Strategy under Xi Jinping will be released by Oxford University Press on 1 September.