A couple of years before a “Golden Era” was declared in relations between Beijing and London, one of the architects of Chinese soft power visited The Times. He Yafei, a member of the state council, politely told us how much he wanted Scotland to stay inside the United Kingdom, how Heathrow airport should be expanded and how we shared a commitment to free trade. Then he was asked about China’s human rights record and one of his entourage complained that we were meddling in their internal affairs. It was an outbreak of that diplomatic disorder known as MAH: Mutually Assured Hypocrisy.
Double standards have always applied to this tangled relationship, and not just since the government of David Cameron made a beeline for Chinese investment. We wanted their treasure and reserved the right to complain about their behaviour in public; they are determined, through unsubtle nudges, to make clear the direction they want us to take before they even consider giving us what we want. Britain, post-Brexit, remains interesting to China so long as it provides some kind of gateway into the EU single market.
Now, as the gilt starts to peel off the Golden Era, China is going to be even more assertive. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, made it plain at last autumn’s party congress: he intends to pursue not only rapid modernisation but a nationalist agenda. The question is whether Britain will take on a supplicant role and bend to Beijing’s rules.
British companies still struggle to sell to China, with its extensive protection for domestic producers. One notable success is British boar semen, which is strengthening Chinese pig stock. But the big British players most useful to China as it moves into higher-value manufacturing such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace are rightly nervous about the role of the Communist Party in joint ventures with state-owned enterprises. They worry about losing their intellectual property. And China is still a long way from independent arbitration in business disputes. It is up to Theresa May to voice these concerns on her trip to China this week. The problem is not so much that she will duck the task as that the Chinese will ignore her because they see us as a bit of a pushover.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, is calling for proper monitoring of strategically sensitive Chinese investment in EU countries. That was prompted by the intervention of US intelligence agencies in a planned Chinese takeover of a German semi-conductor manufacturer. Washington said the tech deal was against US national security interests and Germany dropped it.
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Britain, by contrast, overrode US reservations about Chinese involvement in the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor. Mrs May later froze the project for two months to examine the security implications but eventually gave it the green light. That has sent a signal to Beijing that Britain’s need for a good trading relationship with China after Brexit has made us even more pliant.
If there is a prime ministerial strategy towards China, it is this: discover ways of making Britain relevant to China’s Belt and Road initiative. That’s Beijing’s high-spending soft-power push to build huge infrastructure projects linking it with Europe and thus create a string of new allies and partners. It also reflects China’s ambition to challenge the geopolitical reach of the US by any means possible.
Chinese military commentators, however, make no distinction between hard and soft power — they talk of information war and the acquisition of spheres of influence. That applies to China’s use of cyberweapons to pillage commercially sensitive research. And to the use of espionage to catch up with the rest of the world. American anxiety about Hinkley Point was related to the FBI’s arrest of a Chinese spy who was gathering information about US nuclear power facilities and passing it on to Beijing, in the words of the indictment, to reduce “the time and financial costs of research and development”.
Britain, in its eagerness to strike a deal with an economically powerful state, is aligning itself with a potential foe that is challenging and subverting our primary ally. And it is in danger of being on the wrong side of a civilisational struggle between democracies and techno-authoritarians.
In its rush to be a world leader in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, China is not even pausing to have a brief ethical debate. Its top medical practitioners are gene-editing after a couple of hours of in-house discussion in the hospital; there is no national regulator. It clones monkeys as a stepping stone to further experiments with primates. Everything is subordinated to becoming a research superpower, to its rivalry with the US. It bends rules, sidesteps them, or creates new ones.
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China has become a bully state. It flexes its muscles across the Far East, and is spreading its largesse across the world to buy friends and allies for the great looming showdown in a decade or so with the United States. There is nothing soft about its soft power; its military might is growing by the day. It would be folly for Britain to sacrifice or compromise its vital security interests in the hope of gaining Beijing’s favours. Mrs May, as a former home secretary, knows this better than most: Chinese hackers are as big a menace as the Russians. She must know that the only way to deal with a bully is to look him in the eyes and talk straight. The hypocrisy has to end.