The British 'Integrated Review' and the Issue of China

The Integrated Review, issued by the British government after over a year of intense work by officials and partners outside government, was published in March 2021. Its language on China was unambiguous. ‘China’s growing international stature is by far the most significant geopolitical factor in the world today’, it states, before continuing, ‘China presents the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security’. Earlier in the document, it brands China a ‘systemic competitor’. Testifying to these assessments,

It has a ubiquity that would have been unimaginable even a decade or so ago. For a Chinese reader, this omnipresence of China, whether in negative or positive contexts, is a kind of acknowledgement and validation. China is no longer marginal. The era in which it was brushed to the sidelines is clearly over. It would be hyperbole, but in many ways there are two clear drivers to the whole purpose behind this wide-ranging review of the whole landscape of British foreign policy – the exit from the European Union, opening up the possibility of ‘the UK’s freedom to do things differently’ and the rise of the People’s Republic (PRC).

One might even argue that for a country that has historically liked to see itself as pragmatic, wary of the kinds of grand plans and strategies beloved of other political cultures (of which China might be given as a more recent example), even needing to spell out in a structured form, and then try to internalise amongst state functionaries,

In the past, Victorian Prime Minister Palmerston could be imputed with the phrase that ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow’. The problem is that in its current political shape, China does come close to something like a ‘perpetual enemy’ to British (and, it has to be said, American and other democratic nations) core values. And yet it is a country where, as the review ably shows, there are huge areas where something like an alliance is necessary – even unavoidable. The exam question the review partly sets out to answer therefore is how to work with a partner that had become far more important than was ever expected, but who has so many aspects which are antithetical to the British mission, as the review states more than once, to ‘act as a force for good in standing up for human rights around the world’? In the view of this author, the review, for its answers, gets a pass. But the huge question will be whether its necessarily complex conclusions will, in fact, be internalised and implemented by a political and bureaucratic network that, as each day goes by, seem to have jumped to some very strong conclusion on what China means to the UK and how to deal with it.

The China Policy Quandary

The problems posed by China have been a looming issue for some time. The failure through economic engagement to end up with a partner which looked like it would be performing at least some kind of political reform taking it away from a one Party Marxist Leninist model any time soon has led the US and its key allies, in Europe, Australasia and elsewhere, to an increasingly stark impasse. The time when China could have been ‘dealt’ with by ostracising and turning backs on it has long past – if there ever was such a moment. Perhaps in 1989, during the widescale uprising in Beijing and elsewhere, there was a chance to consolidate an international coalition to freeze China out, disengage, and ensure that it simply went the way of the Soviet Union. That chance was slight enough then, but from the 1990s, and particularly after China entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001, its economic acceleration, its integration into the global system, and its rising importance across a whole raft of areas, meant that the ‘choice’ has become increasingly and starkly limited, and has ended up looking more like an imperative. One has no choice but to deal with China, and yet at the same time one has to accept that many of its political values are in direct contrast to those espoused by Western liberal democracies. It is authoritarian, has Rule of Law, is collectivist in its ethos, and, under Xi Jinping, the key leader since 2012- 3, has overtly set itself against what it calls Western Universalism and standards of human rights.

The ‘Integrated Review’ (hereafter ‘Review’), at the beginning, mentions the two most powerful examples of this antinomy, the clash between values and practices. The first is over Hong Kong. Over 2020, after a series of largescale protests in the city since 2014, the Beijing government enforced a National Security Law with wide remit, allowing prosecution of those accused of jeopardising the city’s security both inside and outside. This prompted the Johnson government to issue a statement saying that China had broken the Sino-British 1984 agreement governing the terms of the resumption of sovereignty in 1997 to the PRC. Beijing’s response was savage. Over the rest of 2020 and into 2021 a number of political figures supporting democracy parties in the city were taken in by the authorities. The British offer of a ‘pathway to citizenship’ for Hong Kong residents who qualified for British National Overseas status (up to 3.5 million people) infuriated Beijing even more. The simple fact remains that for historic reasons, Britain still has a special link to Hong Kong – and for many UK parliamentarians one they wish to speak forcibly about. This is despite the fact that under the assertive and much more muscular stance of Xi Jinping’s government, the one country, two systems rubric on which the handover was agreed is now largely a matter of words, with Beijing, standing as the world’s second largest economy, no longer in the mood to hear lectures from a partner it sees as much smaller and less important than it.

The second example is the reports of widespread human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, an area that covers almost a fifth of China’s landmass, and which has a population of approximately 14 million Uyghur people. The incarceration of as many as one million of these people in ‘re-education’ centres (labelled concentration camps in many reports) from 2017 onwards on the pretext of dealing with security concerns has sparked international condemnation. The fact that so close to the start of the report this issue is mentioned is important. Xinjiang, in fact, is not a new problem. There were serious issues that were widely known about in the region in the 1990s. Long before this, the tensions and sensitivities in the area were well documented.1 However, the Tibet issue was one that was much more widely known at this time in the UK, largely due to the unique policy of suzerainty that London maintained till 2009.

with many accusing it of being engaged in genocide.

With COVID19, which originated as a pandemic in China before spreading over early 2020 to the rest of the world, alerting many in the UK to China’s influence and its new status, issues like Hong Kong and Xinjiang have been integrated into a narrative in which China represents an intense threat. Within the ruling Conservative Party, a China Research Group was established, stating that it wished to study and understand China better. Most of its public utterances on the country however are largely critical, and, unsurprisingly, political. When the British government, following the lead of the US and EU, placed sanctions on a small number of officials claimed to be involved in the clampdown in Xinjiang in March 2021, the Chinese government responded by similarly placing figures from the China Research Group, and the group itself, on their own sanction list.

This is symptomatic of the fact that China is clearly, in terms of values and visions, not an ally of Britain. And yet, as the ‘Review’ also acknowledges, on issues like ‘climate change, multilateral government, conflict resolution, health risks and poverty reduction’ China shifts from being a competitor to something akin to an ally. Unlike the US under former President Trump it did not draw back from the 2015 Paris Climate Change agreement. Ironically, under Xi Jinping, China has become a far more stalwart partner in combatting climate change, committing in the current 14th Five Year Plan which started in March 2021 to do more to greening the country, and reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. On pandemics, too, the disaster of 2020 showed that good quality dialogue with China on health issues like this mattered, if for nothing more than self-interest. And in early 2021, the Chinese government announced that absolute poverty in the country had been eliminated.

These issues, in different ways, and about different challenges, captured the constant quandary that people live with in the third decade of the 21st century – that, despite lamentations in the West, the world on most developmental measures was much better now than at any time in modern history in terms of life expectancy, literacy, and rising material life standards, largely through the achievements of China and India. Others has contributed to this success story, for sure, but first and second most populous countries could claim the bulk of the work. And while there were academic arguments about just how much credit the Chinese government could take for this, and how it was calculating its success, the simple fact was that the country was materially far better off than it had ever been in its modern history, and it just happened that the Communist Party had been in power while this happened. It might be one of the few points in common, but politicians in Communist autocracies are no more averse than their democratic opposite numbers to take credit even when it might be due others. On this point, therefore, criticising them was either churlish, or purblind, or both!

The China Quandary with British Characteristics

Over 2020, as British politicians in larger numbers than ever before woke up to the importance of China, this created a new, very local version of the broader China quandary spelled out above. This was how to deal with the inevitable shift towards a world where, for the first time ever, the most powerful capitalist economy was run by a Communist state. It is an inelegant caricature, but for brevity has to be deployed here. Broadly, the positions on China ranged between those who placed absolute primacy on values. For them, engagement with a country that presented issues like those of Hong Kong and Xinjiang was unconscionable. There should be complete decoupling, and the sooner the better. On the other hand, there were the pragmatists, those who focussed on trade and growth, for whom the UK’s somewhat underwhelming links with China in terms of investment and trade meant that as the UK was freed from the constraints of the European Union (EU) it might now seek deeper and better returns from its undeveloped relations with such a huge, and fast growing emerging economy.2 For this latter group, self-interest was paramount. Values were of little use if one was racing towards poverty.

The ‘Review’ recognises the complexity of the UK’s position. Firstly, while stressing throughout the document the importance of alliances, from the US to the Commonwealth, NATO, and other fora the UK has a position in, and speaking about the continuing importance and value of the links with the EU, there is also an underlying acknowledgement that

In the past, in terms of human rights arguments, and the broader values discourse, Britain being in a group of other important economies and partners gave it at least some measure of protection. It is striking that for the sanctions in March 2021 levelled by the Chinese, there was one list for the EU, and one for Britain. Britain now stands exposed to Chinese ire when it comes - and the signs are that it is likely to come increasingly thick and fast. Secondly, there is the important philosophical point made by the ‘Review’ on page 12 – that ‘foreign policy rests on the strength of the economy’. This is the paradox: that one of the rationales for leaving the EU was to have more agency in seeking economic partners, that China is one of the UK’s largest opportunities, but that greater direct political argument with China runs the risk of leading, increasingly inevitably, to economic consequences when things go wrong. The ‘Review’ refers to the concept of ‘economic statecraf’ and how the UK should practise this. To learn more, it might look to the PRC. China knows well the power of its economic size and of its future growth – though this is increasingly now more about the kind of growth (rising middle class consumption and the desire for services that the UK, for one might be able to offer) than its overall volume. The stark fact is that in this sort of conflict between the UK and China, despite Britain being the world’s fifth largest economy, it is still less important to China than China is to it. Being an effective critic of China on the values front depends crucially on being relevant to Beijing – something that it is increasingly questionable Britain is in the way it might imagine, and which comes across in the ‘Review’. That leads to the danger of just producing high sounding critical rhetoric that sounds good domestically but has no impact on its target. One could deploy the phrase ‘narcissistic’ about this kind of diplomacy. At very least, it ends up being all about the originators of the condemnatory language, with little to do with the target, unaffected and mostly unheeding of the criticisms levelled at them.

The Solution

The ‘Review’ despite being furnished with a foreword which, though carrying the name of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, must have been produced by his political advisers, and which is dense in patriotic, largely nostalgic language, is a policy orientated document. It is meant to be of utility to the officials and others who, on a daily basis, wrestle with the quandary that China presents. It does therefore attempt to spell out a solution. That solution is not a simple one, because the problem is not straightforward. But it does try to guide policy between complete break up with China on the one hand, and utter capitulation to it on the other.

to attempt to diversify through positing the Indo-Pacific as a key region to use to counter-balance against China; and to invest in China capacity in the UK, along the lines of the ‘know your enemy’ philosophy once enunciated by Sir Percy Craddock, a foreign policy adviser under Margaret Thatcher and John Major (and, it must be added, a sinologist).

The ‘competitor, co-operator, adversary’ trinity is one that had been prefigured by the EU in their March 2019 communication from the European Commission to the European Council on China. There, as with the integrated review, China had been labelled ’a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance’. Anthony Blinken, newly appointed US Secretary of State for the US, had used a similar division in a speech on foreign policy in early March 2021, stating that ‘Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be’. In many ways, the ‘Review’ simply folds the UK strategic response to China into this division, aligning itself with its key allies. And while the tripartite division is not spelt out as explicitly as in the case of the EU and US, it is clear that in global issues like health and climate change, China is a co-operative partner, in issues like technology it is a competitor, and for values it is an adversary. The UK defines itself as a power that will stand up for human rights and democratic values. It is clear, however, that in this arena, it will only have impact if it acts in concert with others – particularly the US and the EU. This will mean a need to constantly revise and calibrate what issues fall into which of the three areas above, and how much consensus there is with other partners on this. The UK will need to be perpetually attuned to the position of others to make sure that it does at least maintain some unity with its partners. Otherwise, it will fall into the deadly trap of both alienating them, and possible fighting on its own against China – the worst possible outcome. That raises questions about just how much strategic autonomy the newly liberated UK really has on this, one of the key issues it is facing.

For the Indo-Pacific, while this term has existed for over a decade, appearing in the language of the Australians and others as they became more sensitive to the need to have some kind of counterbalance to the looming dominance of China in their economies and region, the UK’s interest in this concept is partly driven by a need to show support for its allies, and also partly to prove that it is, once again, a truly global power with a new sense of strategic autonomy. One striking aspect of the ‘Review’ is the ways in which it outlines a Britain that seeks to be friends to everyone. Commitment to the concept of the Indo-Pacific is one such way of doing this, supporting far more important players in the region like the US, Japan and Australia. Even so, this commitment is vulnerable to the same criticism that could be levelled at everyone else engaged in creating this new region – how viable it is as a real alternative to China and its own conceptualisation through the Belt and Road Initiative of broadly the same space. Not the least of the issues is highlighted by a concise article by Muhsin Puthan Purayil in the Asian Affairs journal who, in 2021, made a sizeable list of India’s differences with the US, and its increasingly desire to have greater autonomy of its own. Close links with Russia and Iran were two areas of real conflict with the US. The author lists many more. Quite how the Indo-Pacific will work when one of the key potential partners has so many reservations about the idea in the first place is one of a number of issues here.

The final remedy is a more long-standing one. ‘We will invest’, the Review declares, ‘in enhanced China-facing capacity, through which we will develop a better understanding of China and its people’. For a country that produces only 300 graduates in Chinese studies each year from its universities, this is a welcome statement. One of the great impediments to dealing with China in recent decades is that, while there have been tens of thousands of Chinese working on understanding the UK by coming to study here, learn English, and know at least something about Britain and its culture, politics and history, that has not been reciprocated. If reciprocity is often what the UK asks for in issues with China, then there needs to be some of that quality in the areas where China’s capacity is clearly beyond the UK’s. The problem here is part practical, part intellectual. For the first, it would take an immense, ongoing effort to train enough people on issues relating to China to even stand still, let along deliver more ambitious targets. For a country where levels of foreign language study are already stagnating, this is a huge thing to ask. But on top of this is the fact that there are different kinds of knowledge, and different conclusions that can be drawn from it. The China Research Group in parliament certainly says it produced knowledge. And it probably does. But that is about a very specific area, and one that is shorn of a more nuanced, complex context. Maybe

These are not easy things to produce overnight. The ‘Review’ therefore proposes a remedy that sounds good, and yet might be next to impossible to easily implement. But it is at least an important acknowledgement that as things stand, the UK’s position is not a strong one.

Conclusion

In the three areas where the ‘Review’ declares strong strategic aspirations, China matters. In terms of the UK being an exemplar of rule of law, democratic standards, and human rights, China is the great opponent. It fundamentally contests enlightenment values and opposes what it sees as the arrogance and hegemony of western universalism. Its hybridity and difference are huge, and increasingly important, sources of tension and challenge. The UK alone cannot face down these issues. It is a major question whether in fact anything can be done about this rather than creating an uneasy geopolitical architecture where China and the democratic world just have to agree to disagree. Rhetorically, therefore, on this issue the UK has to say what it says, but it is unclear what it will actually be able to achieve after the act of simply saying.

For the second, the aspiration for the UK to become a technological, and science global leader, China is a competitor, but, tantalisingly, perhaps a partner. For Artificial Intelligence, healthcare, and in other areas of biotechnology and engineering, China is creeping past others, producing new ideas and new processes. Its universities are already becoming globally competitive. And while it is still catching up, the amount of investment and effort it is making is a sign of serious intent. China should not be underestimated. This means that the UK needs to factor in China’s complex role in this, sometimes as a key partner in research, and sometimes as a potential destination for British universities seeking new kinds of relations.

For the third, the idea of a UK able to create its own bespoke trading deals and grasp new opportunities, China also figures decisively. For all the harsh language about Hong Kong, and Xinjiang at the start of the report, therefore, there is a simple recognition that ‘we will continue to pursue a positive trade and investment partnership with China’. As China proceeds on the path towards becoming the world’s largest economy sometime in the next decade, this mission by the UK to have good economic benefits from a country it also has such fundamental differences in terms of values will become more critical, and more arduous.

The simple fact is that China has more options than the UK and can control the relationship on its own terms as never before.

But its implementation will offer the real test. British politicians often speak in a language perhaps two or three decades behind the times when they declare, as some do, that the UK should work with China, but tell the country strongly when it disagrees. China now can either simply ignore language it does not like, or, when it does get irritated, reject the UK. Of course, there will be costs for Beijing in doing that – but the costs in the UK are almost bound to be higher as it seeks to achieve the three aims outlined above. The ‘Integrated Review’ talks of the importance of knowledge. It would be good that at least this knowledge about China were better understood, and its powers, and aspirations, more widely appreciated. That, more than anything else, would help make the ‘Integrated Review’ not just a successful document, but the start of a successful process. Now it is down to the politicians, rather than the thinkers, to try to carry this forward.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He is an Associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London, an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run from the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg. He is President-Elect of the Kent Archaeological Society and an Affiliate of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University. From 2012 to 2015 he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this he worked at Chatham House from 2006 to 2012, as Senior Fellow and then Head of the Asia Programme.

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