Rishi Sunak’s pre-emptive strike against Liz Truss over the Foreign Office’s alleged cowardice towards China appears to have been a bold attempt to fend off an impending attack from his Tory leadership rival.
But it throws the contestants into a potentially out-of-control fight as they seek to prove their qualifications as authoritarianism’s truer foe.
Sunak had spotted a coming attack from Truss when, asked by ITV during their debate to ask Sunak one question, Truss chose the niche Westminster question of whether he supported a meeting of the UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue Council, which will take place. It seemed a clear attempt to draw a dividing line between Sunak’s Treasury-led orthodoxy on China and her call for a more robust approach.
There were also Sunday newspaper briefings last week by Truss allies accusing Sunak of seeking trade deals with China.
Enjoying the support of the fiercely anti-China Times newspaper, Sunak’s team believed that a surprise attack on the “Chinese Red Carpet” would please its media base and undermine its credentials as a Cold War warrior. He also cleverly echoed MI6 chief Richard Moore’s remarks last week that China was now the UK’s top priority.
But his first-mover strike didn’t just alarm the Chinese embassy in the UK. There is also a group of Tory MPs who have long feared an outbreak of a Dutch auction of anti-China rhetoric. Boris Johnson’s brother Joe, for example, has long warned that if Brexit were to be followed by a full-fledged CH-exit (economic separation from the world’s second-largest economy), it would be the equivalent of trying to pilot the Global Britain plane after demobilizing its two main engines in the air.
In a country looking for growth, the expropriation of China’s state-controlled markets may not excite British business. Many of these firms would have preferred Sunak’s earlier message in his Mansion House speech last year – where he said the China debate lacked nuance, adding that “we can confidently continue our economic relationship with China on a safe, mutually beneficial way without compromising our values”.
Regardless of whether Sunak made the right tactical choice in outrunning Truss, it is unclear how far Sunak has genuinely broken new ground in his four policy proposals – to close all 30 Confucius Institutes in the UK, build stronger diplomatic alliances security against China, to use MI5 to help British business cooperation and to examine the case for banning Chinese acquisitions of key British firms, including strategically sensitive technology firms.
The weekly intelligence briefing from Beijing to Britain was quite scathing, saying: “These are not ideas that will impress think tanks, China analysts or business leaders. They are leading ideas, they have not been evaluated, they are difficult to measure and they are not new.”
Sunak effectively lifted an amendment to the higher education bill tabled in June with cross-party support by Alicia Kearns and Tom Tugendhat, the two senior Tories on the foreign affairs committee. Kearns claimed the universities were weaponized and part of a Chinese hybrid war.
Their rebellion was bought when ministers allowed a new clause into the bill requiring the Office of Students to monitor Confucius Institutes to ensure they did not infringe on free speech and, if necessary, terminate a partnership.
Kearns’ critics said recent academic studies showed that Confucius Institutes do not have the malign influence that detractors claim. And if the secret purpose of the institute is not to teach Chinese, but to make the West more open to China, they have hardly succeeded. Even some China hawks like former diplomat Charlie Parton have not called for a total ban.
Nor would China take a mass lockdown lying down. The British Council will surely be closed in retaliation.
Rana Miter of the Oxford China Center was also critical, saying the UK desperately needed more people who could read and understand Chinese. He argued that the reason for the Chinese funded institutes was the lack of funding from the UK government to teach Mandarin. The one thing the UK could not afford was to be ignorant of China.
Sunak’s other restriction on Chinese activity in universities is hardly revolutionary. He proposed forcing all UK universities to disclose all Chinese partnerships worth £50,000 or more. The Higher Education Bill had set the threshold at £75,000.
Another Sunak proposal — a call to ban strategically sensitive firms falling under Chinese control — is also an issue the government has kept on its radar ever since the passage of the National Security and Investment Act in the wake of the Huawei debacle. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng just last week used the act to prevent the Beijing Infinite Vision Technology Company from acquiring vision monitoring technology from the University of Manchester. There was nothing wrong with highlighting the issue, but Sunak seems theatrically trying to close a long-closed stable door.
More notably, neither Sunak nor Truss have so far openly discussed China’s two big living issues – the defense of Taiwan and whether the UK government should declare genocide in Xinjiang.
Trots has already got into hot water with the sinophile Johnson government, saying the UK should learn from Ukraine’s mistakes and offer arms to Taiwan to help the country deter a Chinese invasion. She has not repeated that remark, but her entire stance on the threat to freedom, the central theme of her remarks, suggests that she, as prime minister, will at least push America toward a more proactive stance toward Taiwan.
The issue of genocide has not yet erupted, but it could if UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet defies Chinese lobbying and publishes a report stating that genocide did indeed occur in Xinjiang.
The UK, under successive foreign ministers, has strongly resisted saying that genocide did take place, citing the UK’s long-standing view that international courts, not national parliaments, should determine whether genocide took place. Truss associates, however, report that she believes there was genocide.
Either way, Beijing will be watching like a hawk to see if the China issue continues to be seen as a source of rich ammunition for the candidates, or if it was instead a one-off trick by Sunak to defuse a bomb that Truss intended to detonate on – late in the campaign.
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