It has been clear for many years that China’s status as a second global superpower poses challenges to the world’s democracies. US President Donald Trump’s marauding behavior as president of the first-placed superpower makes those challenges more acute. In the past, the UK’s relationship with Beijing has been anchored, and sometimes dictated, by the alliance with Washington. Trump’s contempt for former allies, expressed as sabotage of NATO and a scattergun imposition of tariffs scrambles the old strategic calculus.
This is an ominous backdrop for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing. Starmer is trying to perform a difficult balancing act, searching for commercial opportunity in a growing powerhouse while protecting national security from an authoritarian behemoth.
ELEPHANTS, ROOMS
China accounts for just under a fifth of global gross domestic product. Its manufacturing output is greater than all G7 nations combined. It has a formidable AI sector, the only one in the world that competes with the US. It leads the world in green energy technology — a field the climate change-denying Trump administration is happy to neglect.
It would be irrational to refuse to have a functional dialogue with such a country. Starmer is right when he observes that Britain has become an outlier in Europe in this respect and that the eight-year interval since a visit by a prime minister to Beijing was too long. British Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch’s claim that, in Starmer’s place, she would not go, demonstrates only that she has not thought seriously about what the top job involves.
CAUTION with REASON
Conservatives who accuse Starmer of kowtowing to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are quicker to enumerate all the things they dislike about Chinese Communist party rule than to describe a better alternative policy to cautious engagement.
There are good reasons to be cautious, and points of profound disagreement must not be brushed aside in pursuit of investment: the dismantling of civil rights in Hong Kong; the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai (黎智英), a pro-democracy businessman and British citizen; the repression of the Uighur minority that some Labour MPs were prepared to call genocide when in opposition; Beijing’s support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, enabling his war on Ukraine; aggressive espionage, described by a former MI6 chief as a “full press”: intimidation of dissidents in Britain’s Chinese diaspora. The list goes on.
Starmer has pledged to “raise what needs to be raised” with Xi — a standard diplomatic euphemism allowing for cursory mention of delicate topics. In a more substantial exposition of his foreign policy approach last year, the prime minister insisted that engagement with China would never lead him to “trade off security in one area, for a bit more economic access somewhere else.”
TIGHTROPE WALK
That is a fine ambition. In practice, the drive for greater commercial intimacy and the requirement for wariness is inevitably going to create tensions with Beijing. Starmer has form when it comes to denying such conflicts of interest. He refuses to accept, for example, that his courtship of Trump and his reset of relations with the EU pull Britain in different directions.
The contradiction between upholding values of democracy and befriending Xi is even more stark. That is not a reason to refuse engagement, but it might take more than pre-summit assurances from the prime minister to prove that he can get the balance right.
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