Ask the wrong question and you get the wrong answer.
In the days after Yang Tengbo was outed as an alleged Chinese agent it was asked again and again whether China was a threat to the UK.
To ask whether the Chinese Communist Party is a threat is to ignore the obvious: Beijing is a clear and urgent threat to our national security, our economic interests, and our values in the world. The right question is what should our response to the threat posed by Beijing be?
For those of us who have spent years campaigning for the Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists or British Hong Kongers, as well as the sovereignty of Taiwanese people, it was galling to see that Beijing’s aggression only become headline news after a British royal had allegedly been targeted in the Chinese Communist Party’s espionage efforts.
The exposure of that alleged Chinese agent last month wasn’t new. It wasn’t even the only case involving alleged Chinese espionage before the British courts that week.
To act as if Prince Andrew was the first alleged victim of Beijing is to ignore the 126,000 British Hong Kongers who have had their life savings stolen, with the complicity of British banks. It would be to ignore the British citizens, like Jimmy Lai, who are in prison simply for exercising the rights they were guaranteed under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a deal which Beijing has broken.
It is not just the human rights of British nationals under threat. The increasingly authoritarian nature of the Chinese government cannot be separated from the economic threat China poses to UK companies, consumers and workers. They are two sides of the same coin.
As we decarbonise our economy and seek to create new green jobs we will have to work with China, given how much of the world’s manufacturing emanates from the Far East. However, we cannot build our own green manufacturing base while British workers and British firms compete with Chinese industry that uses Uyghur Muslim slave labour and dirty energy. Nor can our high skill, high value industries compete with China when their state-owned industries routinely steal our intellectual property.
Our future trading relationship with China must be a fair one. A one-sided approach that chases short-term opportunities while ignoring strategic threats will leave us diminished in the world.
Under the last government, the UK’s policy towards China fluctuated wildly between prostrating to Chairman Xi and a performatively aggressive approach, aping the Republican Party across the Atlantic.
The new government has promised a new, more consistent approach that balances economic realities with the need to defend our nation and promote our political values. We welcome this but the China Audit must recognise that economic cooperation cannot be compartmentalised from the need to challenge on security threats and human rights.
The irony of the UK’s debate is that Beijing clearly views its relationship with the west through the prism of managing threats. The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a domestic effort that sees China disengage from international supply chains that would compromise its own economic sovereignty or national security while seeking to control the strategic economic assets of international competitors. Whereas the Chinese state now controls the last remaining blast furnaces in the UK’s steel industry - Beijing would never contemplate such a loss of sovereign capacity.
The choice here isn’t between a new cold war and sacrificing our economic interests and national values. We should be clearer about where our red lines are and stick to them. That means not doing any deals that would give the Chinese control over economic sovereign capacities and key infrastructure.
We should not allow any manufactured goods which originate from Muslim slave labour in the Uyghur region to enter the UK. We should uphold our international credibility by making it clear that we protect the human rights of Brits in and from Hong Kong, and that there will be economic consequences for the breaching of the deal we made with China. And the UK government should consistently deploy Magnitsky sanctions against those who have been involved in serious human rights violations.
China’s economic power offers it political power, which it is using to attempt to remake the global order around its authoritarian worldview. Yet Beijing’s relationship on the global stage isn’t one way or asymmetrical. China’s power comes from its concerted, deep integration into the world economy - a policy which offers the rest of the world leverage too.
We can use the opportunities offered by that integration to stand up for our interests and values; or we can attempt to disintegrate from China in strategically important areas. Continuing to bind our future to China without pushing back where we must and pulling away where we should, would be the worst of all worlds.