Britain’s great pivot towards China is to be celebrated on Friday by bundling off President Xi Jinping to visit Manchester City’s ground. Football, it seems, not NBA basketball, is about to become the small change of geopolitics, a further sign that Beijing is leaning towards Europe and away from America.
If only Britain’s remarkable snubbing of the US could be confined to the Etihad stadium. Instead across a range of policies we are using the pantomime pomp of a state visit to show that our bets are now being placed on China’s long-term ascendancy and a corresponding decline in American power. This performance may well go down in history as an embarrassing misjudgment comparable to the ceremonial welcome afforded the Romanian communist Nicolae Ceausescu in 1978. Whatever it says in the Chinese calendar, 2015 has become for us the Year of Backing the Wrong Horse.
Naturally Xi is happy to be celebrated and as our government ministers will tell you, if he’s happy, we’re happy. Seen through Xi’s eyes, it will soon be all change in the EU and the US. The turbulent politics of mass migration is weakening François Hollande and even Angela Merkel ahead of their 2017 elections. By then there will also be a new US president, one who will almost certainly be deeply suspicious of China. As for Putin’s Russia, it will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution under the shadow of looming bankruptcy.
Xi, however, will still be going strong and can count on being at the helm until 2022. And who is he going to be talking to? Well, perhaps prime minister Osborne, the man who has made it a personal mission to make Britain the most open European country to China. Hence the mutual flattery-fest this week.
If this special relationship is going anywhere, though, the British government needs to co-ordinate with Washington about the strategic challenge presented by China. Both allies need to clarify the nature of Chinese global intentions. Instead, Whitehall seems to want to dismiss the private but insistent criticism from the US as the ramblings of hardboiled CIA veterans fighting yesterday’s war.
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The US understanding of Chinese aims is that it wants to play Europeans off against each other, and drive a wedge between the EU and Washington. In this reading the British government, in its mercantilist zeal, is helping to weaken the West. Britain was the first non-Asian country to sign up for the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, opening the way for other Europeans to join. It is poised to turn over responsibility for the modernisation of Britain to Beijing — the nuclear industry, the transport links, the upgrading of northern England. The City will become a platform for their currency dealings and equity offerings.
Quite reasonably, Washington urges caution. It wants us to identify properly who we are dealing with. As long as Chinese investment comes from companies that are state-run or state-affiliated, as long as the communist party shapes policy across the economic spectrum and as long as it functions as one of the world’s most aggressive cyber-powers, then questions have to be raised. It is for China to build the necessary trust. On Xi’s recent trip to Washington he and President Obama agreed to curb cybertheft. Within weeks new hacking operations had been spotted in US digital security company and pharmaceutical firms.
The US is mulling over sanctions against China to deter cyberattacks. And here’s the rub: Britain will soon be too entangled with the Chinese economy to consider joining the US in any kind of sanctions operation. It believes it is gaining influence in the world by building a bridge to Beijing, yet is actually losing its power to sway the Chinese leadership. Current policy is that if the Chinese try to hack into the electricity grid, GCHQ will deal with it. Somehow that doesn’t come over as the starting point for a best-of-friends arrangement. Rather, it sounds as if we are taking a calculated security risk in the hope that the Chinese won’t bamboozle us.
We have already started to ignore, or relegate to junior ministers, the pressing questions about human rights abuses. This is going to be an axis based on See-No-Evil, Hear-No-Evil. It will be more about saving Chinese face than about asserting values. Plainly we want more than a trading relationship; equally, that enhanced relationship could end up diminishing our standing in the world. The strategic aim of the present courtship is to neutralise Britain. China — cocky abroad, insecure at home — considers us a push-over in this endeavour. Let it not be so.