A warning last week by UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab that UK-China ties could not return to “business as usual” after the coronavirus pandemic underlines that it is not just relations between Washington and Beijing that have been strained by the outbreak — and this could have major implications for international relations in the future.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the relationship between the UK and China had cooled in 2019 during the political unrest in Hong Kong. Boris Johnson, for whom Raab is standing in at the moment while the prime minister recovers from his bout of COVID-19, squarely defended the protesters at the time, much to Beijing’s irritation.
Last year too, a trip to China by Phillip Hammond, Britain’s finance minister at the time, was cancelled after Chinese officials perceived a speech by Gavin Williamson, the defense minister, as saber rattling. Williamson asserted that London could deploy an aircraft carrier in the Pacific for its first operational cruise in 2021. This was sensitive for Beijing, in part because it is involved in disputes with neighboring countries over territorial claims in the South China Sea.
This cooling may now turn into a deep freeze. It is not just Raab in the UK government who has publicly cast doubt on China’s transparency over the initial diagnosis and spread of the coronavirus.
Michael Gove, one of the four senior UK government ministers leading the fight against the infection, expressed skepticism at the end of March about China’s official virus statistics. “The first case of coronavirus in China was established in December of last year, but it was also the case that some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this,” he said.
In addition, a report last month by the powerful foreign affairs select committee of the House of Commons accused the Chinese government of spreading disinformation. It made the remarkable claim that this “has already cost lives" and urged the UK government “to issue clear and transparent messages at home to confront and rebut disinformation.”
UK-Chinese relations cooling may now turn into a deep freeze. It is not just Raab in the UK government who has publicly cast doubt on China’s transparency over the initial diagnosis and spread of the coronavirus.
Andrew Hammond
It is not just the coronavirus issue for which Beijing is currently under attack in London. Several Conservative MPs, including foreign affairs committee chairman Tom Tugendhat, are urging Johnson’s government to review its decision to allow the Chinese telecoms company Huawei to supply the technology at the heart of the nation’s 5G network.
In this context of growing anti-China sentiment, there is now a real possibility that relations could become as frosty as they were in the period after prime minister David Cameron offended Beijing by meeting the Dalai Lama in 2012. London quickly reversed tack after this and the Conservative governments of both a chastened Cameron and his successor Theresa May subsequently ratcheted down, in public at least, human rights concerns about China, with relations entering what was called a “golden era” after President Xi Jinping’s UK visit in 2015.
This underlines that, for all the British overnment’s coronavirus rhetoric against Beijing, a similar U-turn in the future cannot be ruled out either; there is growing international concern about China’s actions over the pandemic, but London will soon have a significant post-Brexit dependence on intensifying economic ties with fast growing economies in Asia and beyond, including Beijing.
Indeed, even before Brexit, economics had assumed greater importance in relations, with London putting ever greater emphasis on consolidating ties with Beijing. The UK already receives the largest amount of Chinese foreign direct investment of any EU country, and is one of Beijing’s top three trade partners in Europe. Meanwhile, China is the UK’s second largest non-EU trade partner.
By making the interests of commerce so prominent in the relationship, London has received significant criticism since 2013. For instance, an unnamed senior Obama administration official was widely quoted in 2015 as being “wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of Beijing which is not the best way to engage a rising power.”
Moreover, the Trump team in Washington has not been impressed by Johnson’s decision on Huawei and what it perceives as the UK’s semi-endorsement of Beijing’s huge $1 trillion Belt and Road infrastructure project. After Italy became the first G7 nation to endorse the plan this year, China is now looking for other key nations to do so, and former finance minister Hammond attended last April’s Belt and Road Summit in Beijing.
Yet while the UK’s China stance has certainly not been without controversy, Conservative ministers have generally taken the view in the past few years that enhancing ties with Beijing is in the UK’s national interest. They calculate that Xi could be in power for much (if not all) of the next decade, and it is widely viewed that there is an opportunity to develop a relationship that could make a significant contribution to UK prosperity for a generation to come.
This is why it would be such a significant break in UK policy if the Johnson government moved to a much more hard-line stance. With Brexit on the horizon, London faces a difficult balancing act in the months to come as it seeks to reconcile its future economic needs with growing concerns over what it perceives as China’s coronavirus cover-up.
- Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics
