Why the UK shouldn't declare China a 'threat'

Let's not mistake fierce rhetoric for smart foreign policy

I’ve been bursting to write this column for a while now, concerned at the turn of debate in the UK in reaction to the dropped case against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry.

Court artist sketch of Christopher Berry, left, and Christopher Cash last year

There is a lot of legitimate, understandable fury surrounding the case. If the CPS is right and the trial collapsed because of the government’s equivocal language on China, then two potential Chinese spies will have been let off on a technicality of the now-redundant Official Secrets Act.

This is clearly an appalling state of affairs if it is really what happened (I am of the view that the allegations against Cash and Berry should have been properly aired and tested in court). But it has led to a lot of questions from all quarters on why the UK wouldn’t just declare China a threat, as opposed to the current wording of ‘epoch-defining challenge’.

But in my column, I set out the reasons why ‘challenge’ is still a very good way to describe China, rather than ‘threat’.

What we are talking about is a formal government designation, not how you or I (or the security services) might more colloquially use the word ‘threat’. I recognise and agree that China does pose some threats – cyber-espionage, IP theft (especially in previous decades), control of critical infrastructure.

But as I write:

That’s only one side of the ledger. Today’s China is the product of four decades of globalisation on an unprecedented scale. It is not the Soviet Union of the last century, which tried to spread communism across the world and threatened nuclear armageddon.

The CCP prioritises regime stability at home above all, followed closely by economic growth and technological advance. It is now a major trading partner for almost all of the world and the fourth-largest for the UK.

The two economies have been remarkably complementary. Imports from China have helped to keep life affordable and raise living standards in the UK, even as wages stagnated after 2008. The well-trodden narrative of job losses is more an American and German experience, Britain having delegated shipbuilding to South Korea and steelmaking to Europe long before China came on the scene. Since the UK’s shift to selling services, the Chinese middle class have poured hundreds of billions of pounds into British universities, law firms and the City.

So China presents both threat and opportunity. It is not schizophrenic or weak to recognise that the world’s second-largest economy, a country full of contradictions itself, home to almost a fifth of humanity, rubs up against the UK in myriad ways, both positive and negative.

Beyond that, it also seems to me that as we move into a more tense, post-globalisation era, the UK certainly needs to do more to counter China’s rising power, but there is a lot it can do (which I list in the column) without shouting first ‘China is a threat!’ You can call it a ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ approach, if you like, and I argue that Australia has had some success on this front recently.

There is much more detail in the full column: do give it a read.

What I’ve been reading:

• Opposing views on the Cash and Berry case, but I think there is merit in the following from both Charles Parton and Kerry Brown, two leading China academics with differing views on the case:

  • Charlie in the Financial Times: ‘China spy case has an aroma of appeasement’

  • Kerry in the Double Jeopardy podcast, co-hosted by a former director of public prosecutions in the UK: ‘Why Did The Chinese Spying Case Really Collapse?’

• Not China but I found this 1998 interview with George Kennan by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman fascinating. It is the American statesman lamenting how knee-jerk and ill-informed policy from the White House and Senate to expand NATO, is sure to aggravate a post-Soviet Russia.

  ‘Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.’

  I feel that some later foreign policy discussions in the West echo similar dynamics…

A fun picture…

This one from the great photo archiver Tong Bingxue: ‘Then and Now’ photos of Chengdu in 1989, and 2025. I always marvel at what effects such rapid change does to the Chinese collective psyche (if indeed there is such a thing!)