Challenging China: Britain after Brexit grapples with a new foreign policy

At Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, home of the Royal Navy, last-minute preparations for the new aircraft carrier’s maiden deployment are frantically under way.

Deep below the Queen Elizabeth’s flight deck, fork-lift trucks manoeuvre bundles of bunk mattresses and trolleys full of carrots and potatoes to the storerooms. In a sign of the UK’s close defence alliance with Washington, 250 of the 1,600 crew will be members of the US Marine Corps who have already brought on board a popcorn machine.

Set to cover 26,000 nautical miles from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aden and on to the Philippine Sea, the deployment will seek to demonstrate that post-Brexit Britain still has international relevance. Defence secretary Ben Wallace describes the carrier as “a warship, a mother ship, a surveillance reconnaissance ship . . . and a projector of Britain’s soft and hard power”.

But its centrepiece of the eight-month voyage, a freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea, is intended as a military signal to Beijing, whose increasing air and sea incursions around Taiwan are raising tensions in the region.

The departure this weekend is a pivotal moment in Britain’s efforts to forge a new foreign policy outside the EU, a demonstration of the difficult balancing act required in reconciling its new economic, political and security imperatives.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, British ministers talked optimistically about negotiating a trade deal with Beijing — one of many promised agreements with major economies — and are anxious to secure China’s co-operation in tackling climate change ahead of the COP26 summit this autumn, which will be hosted in Scotland. But newly independent from Brussels, Downing Street is also keen to reinforce its political and military ties with the US, just as Washington is girding itself for what many analysts describe as a new cold war with China.

Navigating these competing priorities is proving difficult. Since Prime Minister Boris Johnson abandoned the “golden era” of Sino-British relations promised by a previous Conservative government in 2015, the party’s growing number of China hawks hoped that he would take a tough line with Beijing in the recent security, defence, and foreign policy review. But while the review declared China to be a “systemic competitor” and emphasised a “tilt” in defence priorities towards Asia, it also said Britain would be seeking “deeper trade links and more Chinese investment”.

Many China-sceptic Tories and security experts complain this does not go far enough in addressing what they see as the rising threats posed by Beijing. Britain, they argue, should be more forthright in setting boundaries with a country which has nearly doubled its defence spending in the last decade, boosted espionage operations against the west, including cyber hacking, and imposed a draconian new security law on Hong Kong.

Tobias Ellwood, a former Foreign Office minister who now chairs the House of Commons defence committee, insists the UK is “still in a period of denial” on China. “Only individual voices are warning about what’s coming over the horizon,” he says.

“A kind way of putting it would be that this is a policy of strategic ambiguity,” says Lord Peter Ricketts, the UK’s former national security adviser. “A less kind way would be to say the government isn’t able to tell us where the balance is going to lie between a competitor challenge [with China], an adversarial relationship and one where we are needing them economically.”

Striking a balance

The UK’s China policy has not been in stasis. Over the past year, the government has banned Huawei from 5G networks, offered UK passports to British National Overseas citizens in Hong Kong, and issued sanctions against officials implicated in the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The new National Security and Investment Act, which gained royal assent two weeks ago, promises to prevent companies linked to states such as China from buying sensitive UK assets.

But behind the scenes, there is tension over exactly how Britain should position itself. “There’s still confusion in government about our China policy,” says one British diplomat. “The economic ministries don’t want to put the relationship at risk and the education department isn’t really tackling issues like free speech and intellectual property in the way some would like. But in the end the integrated [policy] review tried to strike a balance that accepts the world we are in.”

Those close to the drafting process claim that the Treasury was pushing for even warmer language on the economic partnership, but that it was expunged “at the last minute” after an intervention from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The Treasury’s position may be a hangover from the “golden era”, when then chancellor George Osborne conducted a tour of China accompanied by ministers and business chiefs, aimed at establishing Britain as Beijing’s “number one partner in the west”. UK officials admit now that this sowed the seeds of numerous problems. “When you look at something like Huawei or some of our academic partnerships with China, you can see some of the consequences,” says one.

Security officials complain that even if what they saw as the uncritical pursuit of Chinese investment has passed, there is still a failure to understand the realities of doing business with the country and the state’s influence over the private sector. One Whitehall insider suggested that fear of eliciting the same harsh sanctions imposed by Beijing on Australia has driven self-censorship when it comes to taking actions which are in the UK’s national interest.

“Caution, caution, always being worried about the response . . . some parts of this government, in their anxiety, are almost doing the Chinese Communist party’s job for them,” the insider says.

Charles Parton, a former British diplomat and China expert, has repeatedly urged the government to be more active in preventing companies and universities entering partnerships with Chinese organisations on technologies that could be exploited for both military and civilian use. A report published this year by the think-tank Civitas found that over half of the 24 Russell Group universities had research ties with Chinese manufacturers and higher education institutions which had links to the military.

He has pushed for the formation of a government body that could provide businesses or universities a “swift ruling” on whether planned co-operation was advisable. “China loves ambiguity. If it doesn’t know what the boundaries are, of course it’s going to push them by fair means or foul,” Parton says. “It also wastes a huge amount of energy if you’re maintaining ambiguity and businesses or academics or others don’t know what the limits are.”

Call for strategic clarity

Against this background of political uncertainty, the deployment to the Indo-Pacific — a decade since the £3.2bn investment in the Queen Elizabeth carrier was first confirmed — appears to be a decisive move. Setting out his plans in parliament last month, Wallace warned of Beijing’s increasing maritime assertiveness, and promised Britain would be “confident but not confrontational” in its transit of the South China Sea — a critical trade route almost all of which China claims as sovereign territory.

“We must stand up for our values and rights wherever they come under threat, not just in our backyard, but far from our shores,” he told MPs.

However, the UK’s decision to bypass the Taiwan Strait and instead sail east towards Japan encapsulates the contradictions in its China policy. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative party leader and a China hawk, urged the government to “let the Chinese know that they disapprove of their very aggressive actions against their [Taiwanese] neighbours” by re-plotting the carrier’s transit to sail through the strait.

For the UK’s armed forces, the voyage is vital proof of its continued stature in the face of cuts. Despite a surprise budget boost of £16bn last autumn, this year’s defence review has still left the military smarting from a 9,500 reduction in army personnel to an estimated force of 72,500 by 2025, leaving the smallest army for over three centuries. The number of Challenger tanks has been cut by a third and more than 100 aircraft axed.

Commander Chris Ansell, executive officer of HMS Queen Elizabeth, manages all the carrier’s facilities “from a four-and-a-half star hotel to conference centre to a warship”. He says the point of the deployment is “projecting influence and projecting our ability to interact with our partners around the world, showing that we can be good, reliable allies”.

The carrier’s battlegroup will include a Dutch frigate and a US destroyer, as well as 10 US F35-B lightning jets, just outnumbering the UK’s eight F35-Bs which are also deployed on board. This demonstration of solidarity and interoperability with defence partners is intended as a show of strength.

However, Ellwood argues it is another indication of the UK’s failure to take the security risks seriously enough. “We can’t even muster our own carrier group without leaning on allies to offer additional ships,” the head of the parliamentary defence committee says. “The review needed to recognise that from a maritime perspective, we are seeing China advance its strategic influence and our navy is simply not going to be able to contest the regions China is advancing into.”

His particular concern is that there’s a delay in new frigates coming on stream. “We’re going down in our maritime footprint at a time when the review is saying, let’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific and have an east of Suez presence,” Ellwood says. “What we’re doing is tactically responding to China but without any strategic clarity of where we want to go.”

The US has welcomed the UK’s focus on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific. But privately, American officials say they wish Britain would work more closely post-Brexit with its European allies, who last month published their own Indo-Pacific strategy.

Curtis Scaparrotti, a retired US general who was formerly Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, describes the UK’s pivot to the region as “helpful”. “The fact that you gain presence, experience, make sure the carrier is interoperable with other allies, including the US, and they know that you’re available to come, that’s something China can’t ignore,” he says, even though he adds: “The only question I have is whether you can maintain it.”

Tom Tugendhat, chair of the China Research Group of Tory MPs who are concerned about Beijing’s influence, is more blunt. “I think [the Indo-Pacific tilt] is a good idea so long as it’s enduring,” he says. “If it’s just a one off there’s no point. Going out quickly and coming back is advertising weakness.”

British military officials are considering how to make the commitment to Asia meaningful. Beyond the existing armed forces presence in Brunei, a military base in Oman and a maritime command in Bahrain, chiefs are privately discussing the idea — deemed too controversial for the defence review — of basing an aircraft carrier in Asia long-term.

“You could quite quickly end up with a permanent presence in the Indo-Pacific centred around one of the aircraft carriers with a coalition including the US, South Koreans and Australians all contributing,” says one military official. “Yes, this would put pressure on the fighter jet numbers, but they wouldn’t all have to be British.”

Consensus criticism

Whether or not Downing Street would risk such a confrontation is unclear. In the short term, the UK is busy trying to collaborate with western allies on China policy — an effort which gained urgency after last year’s decision to excise Huawei from UK 5G networks, prompting discussions with allies on how to fast-track the development of alternative telecoms providers.

British diplomats are also seeking to position the UK as part of a wider group which can speak out on human rights violations in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, to avoid being isolated as critics.

“I think that there was some hope in China that they could essentially pick off the UK as being a country that was separate from its European neighbours [after Brexit],” says Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford university. While he believes that threat has receded somewhat with the new, more consensus-minded US administration, he suggests there is still a “certain element of [Beijing] trying to work out where, if anywhere, there is a wedge opportunity with the UK.”

But establishing a forum of allies has not been easy. Britain’s invitation of Australia, India and South Korea to next month’s G7 summit in Cornwall rankled with some European countries, which feared Johnson was trying to convene an “anti-China” grouping of the so-called D10 democracies. British briefings recently have stressed that the countries have been invited as one-off guests to the G7 summit and that they are “like-minded democracies” that just happen to be in the Asia-Pacific region — not part of a strategic group trying to contain Beijing.

British diplomats now downplay the idea of a D10 group becoming a formal entity, noting the European opposition. “You have to be careful not to paint yourself as part of an anti-China alliance,” says one. “That’s what Beijing wants: to be able to suggest countries are ganging up on China and interfering in its domestic affairs.”

Dominic Raab, UK foreign secretary, has recently gone quiet about the prospect of Britain joining the grouping known as the quad — comprising the US, Japan, India and Australia and sometimes dubbed the “Asian Nato” — an idea he did not exclude during a visit to India last December.

Wider moves towards broadening the remit of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with statements calling out authoritarianism in Hong Kong, have backfired. Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian warned that any “eyes” challenging China’s sovereignty should be wary of being “poked and blinded”, while New Zealand’s foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, said last month she was “uncomfortable” with the Five Eyes being co-opted beyond its intelligence function to call out China.

Tugendhat believes the UK has a vital role to play in convening a coherent western approach towards Beijing, but he also argues Britain would have more success if its own policy priorities were clear. “What we need to do is to build a new [China] forum,” he says. “But for that, you need to know what you’re trying to do.”