Since 2016, Britain has been blindsighted by Brexit. The government, politicians and the media have been unable to speak of little else. Britons have all been bleating on about their future relationship with the EU. That has all changed. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, fresh from a sensational election victory, has delivered on his campaign promise to get Brexit done.
The nation can divert its gaze, if only temporarily, from Brussels to Beijing. In the post-Brexit world, the conventional wisdom has been that London would turbo-charge its efforts to forge a tight economic partnership with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
This would not be an unreasonable assumption to make. The desire to establish a “golden era” in relations between the two countries precedes the decision to leave the EU. Back in 2015, then-British chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, the architect of this lofty tagline, vowed to “make Britain China’s best partner in the West.”
This came after years of trade delegations to China, new government people-to-people schemes and scores of slobbering ministers sent over to Shanghai on the proviso that they would keep quiet on the human rights front.
All of this happened under the leadership of then-British prime minister David Cameron, who, when it comes to China, and much else, is without a doubt Britain’s most sycophantic prime minister. In 2013, his shamelessness hit a new low: After Beijing gave him the cold shoulder following his meeting with the Dalai Lama, he promised never to meet Tibet’s spiritual leader again.
When Cameron said his China policy was “looking to the future,” all Britons knew what he meant — and, more importantly, knew what he was not looking at, such as the issue of political prisoners.
His deference paid off and two years later, he was granted the pleasure of being pictured, a pint in one hand and a plate of fish-n-chips in the other, with then-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping (習近平).
The desire to tap into the PRC’s market is an understandable temptation. The statistics speak for themselves. If Western leaders are happy to put their morals to one side — assuming they have some in the first place — then Beijing can offer them plenty, including the opportunity to build infrastructure quickly and cheaply.
This is a tempting offer for Johnson, no doubt. As mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, he was gung-ho for big building projects. From new bridges to new airports, Johnson wanted it.
Now he wants to “level up” the UK and he is going to need some help, especially if he wants to make an impact before the next British general election.
So far, during his time in office, there has been talk of China’s state railway company constructing Britain’s high-speed rail system, as well as praise for Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative from Johnson himself.
Yet none of this has been as worrying as the government’s decision to allow Huawei Technologies to help develop the UK’s 5G capacity.
Huawei is the only game in town when it comes to speeding up the country’s Internet connectivity, the British government has said, but this comes with security risks.
As the British Parliament’s own Intelligence and Security Committee has noted, Huawei is not a normal company. Unlike the Nokias and Ericssons of this world, Huawei has deep ties to the CCP. Involving a company with this sort of relationship in the building of Britain’s 5G infrastructure heightens the risk of espionage and sabotage — a point made by Britain’s fellow Five Eye intelligence allies, Australia and the US.
Beijing’s 2017 national intelligence law requiring individuals and organizations to cooperate with China’s intelligence agencies only compounds fears.
While the British government has ignored these warnings, trouble has been brewing on the backbenches. The campaign against Huawei, led by the former leader of the Conservative Party, has attracted prominent supporters including the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, former high-ranking ministers and a former first secretary of state (Britain’s de facto deputy prime minister).
On two occasions so far this month, this security-conscious squad has taken the opportunity to register their concerns in the parliamentary record.
On Tuesday last week, group members, alongside 38 fellow Conservative members of parliament, rebelled against the government’s defeated whip. Although defeated, Johnson’s majority does not seem as large and, what is more, this story is far from over.
The trade-off between pursuing an ethical foreign policy and increasing trade with the PRC has long been known, but it is only in recent years that the security implications of getting into bed with Beijing have been properly discussed.
For decades Britain has been complacent about the rise of China and Johnson’s administration appears no different, but it is not too late. The government still has time to listen to the growing grumbles from its own backbenches and ditch Huawei.
Gray Sergeant is a British writer focusing on East Asian politics.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
RSS