Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
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Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the challenges presented to the international order by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation following the recent summit held in Tianjin.
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)
My Lords, there are moments which stick in your mind because they tell you that “something has changed”. Sometimes it is obvious, such as when the Brandenburg Gate was opened and the Berlin Wall fell, but at other times it takes a bit longer before it becomes clear just what has happened. I had one of those “Is this history being made?” feelings when I watched the footage of the 2025 China Victory Day parade in the first week in September. It was not just the parade but the parade combined with the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, hosted by China in Tianjin between 31 August and 1 September, which made me reflect.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is an intergovernmental organisation which brings together 10 countries, including China, Russia and India. Its members represent 42% of the world’s population and account for 23% of global GDP, and the official languages are Russian and Chinese. A feature of this particular summit was the attendance of the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. This was his first visit to China in seven years. Two days later, on 3 September, in Tiananmen Square, the 2025 China Victory Day Parade in Beijing celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. Over 12,000 troops of the People’s Liberation Army participated in the parade. For anybody who saw this, it was absolutely awesome, strategic and precise. It almost made me think, “Is this real?” President Xi showcased China’s new weapons and demonstrated the modernisation of the PLA, with hypersonic missiles, stealth drones, underwater drones and long-range, nuclear-capable missiles. He was joined by 25 foreign Heads of State and Government. They came from Asia, Africa, Latin America and eastern Europe. Western nations were hardly represented.
However, there were two high-profile guests. President Xi was flanked by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the leader of North Korea. Traditionally, there is little brotherly love lost between Russia, China and North Korea, and the three leaders had not appeared together in public before they did so in Beijing. Bilateral meetings between China and Korea and North Korea had not been uncommon. Similarly, Russia and China have regular contact. But Putin’s first foreign trip in his new presidential term was a state visit to Beijing, and they had met in the margins of the SCO at the 2024 summit in Astana in Kazakhstan. What made this different was that it was the first time that the three leaders had appeared together in public. In less than a week, China, Russia, North Korea and India had come together. Arguably this was the moment which demonstrated that Russia had accepted China’s dominance and a challenge to the hegemony of the United States of America. In Xi Jinping’s words, his country’s rise is “unstoppable”, or, to quote the Chinese Foreign Minister’s words after the summit,
“the monopoly of global governance by a few countries must not continue”.
We are used to talking about threats and how we will meet them, but I want to take a completely different stance and to reflect on how the world is changing, how western democracies have to respond, and how the multilateral institutions which we have created and developed since 1945 are out of step with what is happening around the globe. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989; in 1991, the Soviet Union formally dissolved; in 1992, Francis Fukuyama predicted the “end of history” and the “last man”. Going back to the deep European traditions of Hegel, he reasoned that history is linear and that, ultimately, it will culminate in a rational free society—if we only allow things to develop, everywhere will become a liberal democracy.
There was a period when it looked a bit like this. In 1997, the British Government set up DfID. We no longer used international or overseas aid as a national policy tool; it was for poverty relief. In 1999, Tony Blair’s speech to the Economic Club of Chicago talked about “the international community”. The Canadian Government published their report The Responsibility to Protect following the failure of the international community to intervene in Rwanda. There was an extraordinary period of idealism, and we were not alone in this. The German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, foresaw in 2007 that Russia would be so intertwined with the EU’s exceptional role model of international co-operation that it would inevitably get like us. It was Steinmeier who helped the Russians join the WTO in 2011. The German phrase was “Wandel durch Handel”. The world would change because we would trade with them and, because we would be so intertwined through trade, they would all become like us—liberal democracies. I know some noble Lords are starting to wonder where I am going with this little history lesson. Even centralised states such as China were beginning to think that only by becoming a liberal democracy could they be economically successful.
The global financial crisis of 2008 changed all that—then, even the capitalist liberal democracies were seen not to be in control of capital flows. The World Trade Organization is now in the position that virtually everyone is either a member or has observer status. I think the only three countries that are not are Eritrea, Kosovo and North Korea. Its institutions are completely dysfunctional and the dispute-resolution process is not working. Curiously, while Russia completely ignores the WTO, China takes a very different approach. It has a twin track of co-operating and being quite rule-compliant, in some ways.
I wanted this debate so that we would reflect on two things. First, the world around us is changing, whether we like it or not. If all we do is simply continue to identify what we think are threats, without defining what we think the world should look like, we will only ever be responsive to other people’s actions and, I suggest, will be losing. Secondly, given that it is close to Trafalgar Day—I declare my interest, together with the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, on the other side, as an honorary captain in the Royal Navy—I will take the liberty of quoting Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who said:
“I owe all my success in life to having been always a quarter of an hour before my time”.
In other words, you look ahead. That does not mean some strange blue-sky thinking, but looking a step ahead to see what is coming. I suggest that there is a big battle coming that will determine the most dominant global power. That battle will be between America and China.
It is no good talking about enemies. This is about democracies, and democracies have to stick together. Economically, quite frankly, we cannot live for six months without China, but China can quite happily live for six months without us. I urge the Minister to consider whether we should define what “good” looks like and start moving away from economic indicators and have coalitions of democracies that work together, fighting for what they stand for and making it much clearer why it is worth fighting for.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, we often talk about the way in which liberal democracy is in retreat in the part of the world that we have just been hearing about, particularly in Russia. I wonder whether we have not put that question back to front. The Russian state was founded in 882. If we look at the period between its foundation and the present, we see that it has been an autocracy for 1,120 years. There was a little moment of constitutional monarchy in 1905; there was the period between February and October 1917; and then, if we very generously count the early Putin as well as the Yeltsin years, we can come up with 23 years in which Russia has adhered to something that we would recognise as the rule of law and representative government. That is not a whole lot of democratic muscle memory to fall back on.
The point I want to make is that this is very normal. One way of explaining the rise of Putin is to look at what happened in all the other ex-Soviet states—what happened when the USSR suddenly broke apart and, in almost every case outside the Baltics, went into some kind of autocracy. What was it that all those strongmen had in common—the Karimovs and Aliyevs and so on? Was it charisma? Was it some demotic connection with their people? Was it intelligence? No. They just happened to be the Soviet officials who were in charge of the Uzbek SSR—or whatever it was—at the time when the break-up came. They suddenly found themselves in charge of sovereign states and they very quickly set about ensuring that their grip on power would be unchallenged and there would be a kind of one-party state.
That is the norm. That is the sobering thought. We in anglophone western democracies are the exception. It is not the Putins and the Karimovs who are extraordinary but the Washingtons—the people who do not try to set up hereditary dictatorial power. That should make us aware of the fragility of our model and of the constant need to defend it, by being ready not only to deploy arms proportionately in defence of freedom but to defend it intellectually and culturally at home. This is where the challenge of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation comes from. It is a fundamentally illiberal alternative model, and it is growing; it is popular. All these new countries are adhering to it because that autocratic way of government appeals to something very deep in the human psyche. It is how we administered ourselves for the 10,000 years between the discovery of agriculture and a couple of hundred years ago, at most—an eyeblink in evolutionary terms.
That is why this matters. It is not because of the strategic importance of the region—every region thinks it is strategically important, including central Asia. When I was a new MEP, my noble friend Lord Callanan and I were put on the central Asia delegation. As an MEP, if you were a goody-goody federalist they gave you the Caribbean or South Africa. We were critics of the single currency, so they gave us central Asia, and I am very glad they did. I got to know the region pretty well, and I loved it. I visit it still; I have friends there. But with the best will in the world, it is not of great strategic importance to us—not as a maritime country. Sir Halford Mackinder used to say that it was the inventor of geostrategy, the key region, the heartland:
“he who controls the heartland controls the world”.
Barely had he said that than the First World War came along and disproved him, as did the Second World War. It may have had some tangential strategic relevance to us at the height of the great game, when Stoddart and Conolly were murdered in Bukhara in 1842, but it is a stretch to say that it matters to us now, as an archipelago at the western tip of the Eurasian land mass.
This matters not for reasons of direct geostrategic interest but because there is this cultural challenge—this alternative way of running our affairs—which appeals to people, including in the west. The reason that India, Pakistan, Iran and all these places are adhering to organisations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation —the clue as to who runs it is in the name, by the way—is that they think that our system is in decline. One reason they think that is because we keep telling them. We have become so ready to dismiss and distance ourselves from our own past. We have this extraordinary lack of self-confidence. If our children get any history at all, we tend to present it as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation.
I would be prepared to defend the proposition —I cannot prove it—that almost any child in a primary school in this country would be much more familiar with the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King than those of Lilburne, Locke, Wycliffe, Wilkes, Milton or Millar; and that is just the Johns. We are not teaching them our own history of freedom and personal responsibility, of the elevation of the individual above the collective and of the importance of the rule of law. That, it seems to me, is our challenge as legislators. We need to emphasise that we are inheritors of this sublime tradition, that it is better than the alternative and that it raised the human race to a pinnacle of wealth and freedom. Keeping that heritage going means teaching the next generation about why it is special, why they are lucky to be the guardians of this sublime patrimony, why they will hold it—as we do—on a repairing lease and why they, too, will have a commensurate obligation to pass it on intact to those who come after.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, it is the turn of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
No worries. My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston, for securing this important debate and for her clear introduction, which rightly highlighted Francis Fukuyama, who was always bizarrely hubristic with his end-of-history thesis and indeed now looks very far into the past.
My contribution will have two foci. The first is to urge that we consider the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in the context of the behaviour of its second-most powerful member, Russia, and its allies in the continuing attack on Ukraine, and of other organisation members, including Iran and Belarus and, of course, China. My other focus will be somewhat in disagreement with the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, on one aspect of what has been described as the “Shanghai spirit” and one particular part of it: the so-called respect for the diversity of civilisations.
To return to my first focus, I wish to report to the Committee a little of my experiences last week when I travelled with fellow parliamentarians—with financial support from British companies, which I will be appropriately declaring in due course—to Ukraine as part of a delegation from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Explosive Weapons and their Impact. The focus was on the clearing of mines and unexploded ordnance, something that the Ukrainians have to deal with at a totally unprecedented scale, at least in the form of risk. Some 29% of their nation, or 174,000 square kilometres, is at risk of being affected by mines and unexploded ordnance. We visited the State Emergency Service of Ukraine and the Mines Advisory Group and Halo Trust projects.
We also saw the crucial efforts to treat those who have fallen victim to the mines at the charities Superhumans and Unbroken. We saw the human cost of the continuing Russian assault. We also saw close up the vicious, and sometimes internationally illegal, weapons that the Russians and their allies are using against civilian populations. Holding a submunition, a cluster bomb—obviously, once it had been rendered safe—and seeing a children’s storybook booby-trapped with explosives was an acute demonstration of the sheer difficulties that the Ukrainians face and the nature of the actions of the Russian-led alliance, many of whose members were in Tianjin.
Understandably, in the face of the horrors of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the desperate desire to get the Israeli hostages home, the media and even the political focus have not always been on Ukraine. However, I want to stress the importance of continuing to provide the Ukrainians with practical support and moral support, both directly and through projects such as that of BBC Media Action, which is assisting in the vital task of explosive ordnance risk education. Behind that must be a strong, determined delivery of the message from the international community—or as much of it as we can bring together—that there is a principle that larger countries cannot simply decide to take chunks out of their neighbours. Further, that there are rules of war and breaking these must not just be called out, but must have genuine, long-term, serious consequences for the regimes responsible. The human race has a long way to go. It was back in 697 that the law of innocence was promulgated by Gaelic and Pictish nobles at the Synod of Birr. It extended what had been protection for monks and religious male figures to women and other non-combatants. That is a very long time ago and we still have failed to deliver that, as I saw in Ukraine.
I come now to the to the second part of my contribution today, which is around the term “civilisations”, which, as I noted, is described as part of the Shanghai spirit. This language is increasingly penetrating many international settings, frequently from the influence of China. I note, for example, that on 7 June 2024 the UN General Assembly adopted 10 June as the international day for dialogue among civilisations. I agree with the words of the US representative during that debate that we should instead be talking about cultures. The US representative then urged vigilance over how words such as “civilisation” are used.
This is a term in the form of western civilisation that we are hearing increasingly in your Lordships’ House, and I would ask those who are increasingly using it to consider how they are playing into the hands of dangerous forces which are using it in places such Xinjiang. Making claims of exceptionalism, of the purity of one historical cultural formulation over another, is playing into the hands of the narrative that we are hearing from China and other countries that needs to be challenged, not accepted.
I am pleased to say that there a growing reaction against that, against the idea of discrete, distinct civilisations, an international shedding of civilizational thinking. I note that on display today in your Lordships’ Library is the cover of Josephine Quinn’s excellent book How the World Made the West which addresses this issue. She notes Polybius’s remark that the Romans were a multicultural melting pot willing to substitute their customs for better practices from elsewhere. There is no such thing as pure Roman civilisation or indeed western civilisation. This book explicitly takes aim at Samuel P Huntington’s influential 1996 clash of civilisations thesis, which is effectively being adopted in this debate. It is deeply dangerous and a framing for a great deal of Islamophobic and other xenophobic rhetoric and action. Challenging this claim is an urgent task.
Responding to the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, I point out that democracy and democratic elements have a very long history going back, of course, as is often cited, to ancient Greece, but much further than that to a millennia before in ancient Assyria.
Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, I do not want to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in her discourse on the Ukraine war. My position is known on that. As for the rest of it, I have more sympathy with the spirit of the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, than I have with that of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan.
I may have a closer connection with Tianjin than any Member of either House having gone to school there nearly 80 years ago. I hope this will not in itself cause me to be thought of as a security risk. I agree with the noble Baroness that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation poses challenges to the international order. I accept that, and I think we all do, but we need to be clear about the nature of the challenges and of the order being challenged.
The challenges referred to by the noble Baroness arise from the fact that power in the world is shifting. The clout of the NATO world is shrinking while that of the non-NATO world is growing, and accommodation of the international order to these shifts in the balance of power is absolutely inevitable. That has always happened throughout history, and the question is whether it will be peaceful or violent. The numbers are striking—the noble Baroness mentioned some of them.
In the late 1980s, the countries later to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation accounted for only about 5% of global output while western nations produced well over 50%. Today, the SCO’s member states generate 23% of global output while the western share has shrunk to 30%. To take demography, whereas in the late 1980s the west still represented close to a quarter of the world’s population, today the SCO countries account for 42% while the NATO world has shrunk to about 10%. If we take BRICS-plus, the scale of the shift is even more dramatic, with 56% of the world’s population, roughly 40% of the world’s global output, being controlled by this non-western grouping. So we should find nothing surprising about the Tianjin summits initiative. They are designed to insert a large group of countries into the structure of global governance, from which they felt they have been excluded. That is the essence of it.
Shifts in global power always hard to accommodate peacefully because we do not have a world Government —we cannot simply vote out one lot of people and vote in another lot. The reason why we in Britain find it so hard to accept the current shift is that we mix it up with morals. We claim to stand for a set of rules, institutions and power arrangements which are or should be morally binding on everyone. We therefore interpret any challenge to that order as, ipso facto, immoral and to be resisted, if possible by war.
The view from Tianjin is of course very different. President Xi calls the western rules-based international order a cloak for the “bullying behaviour” and “hegemonic ambitions” of the United States. China, we need to recall, had most of its coastline divided up between colonial powers. Tianjin, where I went to school in 1948, had just emerged from extraterritorial status. So, multipolarity is also a moral position, not just an assertion of power. It is also a moral, anti-imperial position. Properly interpreted, it means the quest for peace through agreement between powers with different value systems; that is the only way we will get a peaceful world. It means we in this country have to accept domestic policies we find abhorrent, accept the notion of spheres of influence, accept as legitimate the use of soft power by China and others to influence opinion in this country without becoming paranoid about it, as I think we tend to be.
It is our highly negative attitude to multipolarity which has caused it to spill over into economic warfare—I mean both economic sanctions and tariff wars. Can our rulers not see that it is the policy of economic sanctions which has led to the world dividing into economic blocs? That is not an inescapable tenancy of multipolarity but it comes out of the union of geopolitics and economics—economics used as an instrument of geopolitics. In addition, except for very small examples, sanctions have never deterred or stopped behaviour of which we disapprove. What they do achieve is to divert trade in money and goods away from their comparative advantage to protected areas, which therefore makes the world poorer, and that is what is happening today.
We must accept the reality of a multipolar world, and we must reform the institutions best fitted to govern it. The noble Baroness referred to one or two of them. The UN Security Council, the IMF and the WTO have to be reformed. China needs to be a partner in this process, and that means accepting China’s right to share in the governance of the world. We have not done that so far, and the importance of this debate is to draw attention to that fact.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, not least because I am in complete agreement with the last point that he made. It is a central one in this debate.
We face a new world order in which diplomacy is adapting, somewhat slowly, to the characteristics of populist government. A populist, social media-driven world is inherently less stable, less predictable and more dangerous. Against this background, the SCO and the western-led liberal orders offer very distinct frameworks for international co-operation and governance, which will need to adapt to these changes.
As highlighted by the 2025 Tianjin summit, the SCO emphasises collective security, counterterrorism and regional stability, valuing sovereignty and non-interference by the West. The western-led liberal order prioritises free market economics, democratic governance and human rights. The SCO, primarily centred on Eurasia, with key members such as China, as we have heard, Russia and India, fosters regional alliances. The western-led order is global in scope, with institutions such as the UN and the World Trade Organisation seeking to play central roles, while populist leaders in the West condemn their ineffectiveness and outdated irrelevance. How should the British Government respond?
First, I argue that we need to update our analysis of UK policy in the region to take account of fast-moving post-SCO meeting events. New objectives must be redefined through engagement opportunities. The UK could and should more vigorously engage with SCO countries to enhance trade ties and collaborate on security issues, particularly in combating terrorism and drug trafficking. With the western-led order, we should continue and strengthen participation which supports our economic interests and growth through bilateral and global trade, while reinforcing but not seeking to impose democratic values and human rights.
We must be more sensitive to the fact that change takes time, so the macropolitical message from Tianjin for us is to evaluate which partnerships align most with our long-term national interests. We must engage in dialogue and definitely not disengage with both SCO and western-led countries. We must explore mutual benefits and seek a balance between promoting democratic values and securing economic interests. We should forget calls for cultural imposition and the forceful use of unequal power dynamics: they lead years of work in building co-operation and respect down an abrupt cul-de-sac.
There is certainly a case for more active diplomacy and fewer public shouting matches, so we should be leveraging diplomatic, economic and cultural tools to influence and engage with SCO member states through bilateral dialogue, multilateral platforms and cultural, sporting and educational exchange programmes. We must rediscover the might of soft power. Above all, we should encourage UK businesses to adopt responsible trade practices that emphasise ethical standards, seeking through diplomacy and respect to influence human rights and to reach out for global action on global challenges such as climate change, where equitable co-operation is vital. It is such a platform that allows for the most effective advocacy for human rights and fair governance, with support for like-minded NGOs that we can fund and support in their work towards human rights and fair governance in SCO countries.
I will give one example of how we can put this approach into practice in countries of the SCO and, in particular, in Uzbekistan. The relationship between the UK Government and Uzbekistan is currently marked by a spirit of co-operation and growing engagement. With a growing economy, young population and active foreign policy, Uzbekistan serves as a key for transportation, logistics and cultural exchange in Eurasia. From a purely strategic point of view, Uzbekistan can be seen as a potential world-class provider of rare earth minerals. Keen to develop its significant and mostly untapped resources, Uzbek Government-led entities seek to form joint ventures, attract foreign investment and explore new projects, with a view to becoming major global suppliers for high-tech and green energy industries.
Uzbekistan and the UK have already signed an ambitious co-operation programme for 2025-26, covering politics, economics, education, energy and climate change. Frequent visits and meetings between senior Ministers support regular strategic dialogue and promote trust. The UK’s involvement in Uzbek higher education is a central pillar of this relationship, and the UK actively supports Uzbekistan in ensuring governance reform, economic development and human rights.
Collaboration on border security, training and climate resilience reflects a broadening agenda beyond trade. Uzbekistan is critical to security in the region and beyond, not least with its shared border with Afghanistan, and that is an important part of our national security. We should be more active on the front foot with Uzbekistan. For example, an invitation to the President is long overdue, in my view. At the very least, we should continue to build on the significant strengths of countries such as Uzbekistan, whose focus on pragmatic multivector diplomacy means that we should strengthen the relationship with the country as a valued partner, to act as a balance to the somewhat less advanced relationships with some other members of the SCO.
For all the concerns that have been expressed, the outcomes from the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Tianjin are an opportunity for careful engagement, while always being aware of the potential risks and challenges. In the new world reality, we would be unwise not to identify and pursue these opportunities, fully respecting and understanding the differences that separate us.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, to comment on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on Tuesday I was at Oxford University, where the head of the presidential administration of Uzbekistan was presiding at the launch of the Uzbek language and cultural centre at the university. Indeed, this month, the University of Cardiff opened a campus in Kazakhstan, so we are active.
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston, on this debate, which is very sparsely populated. It needs to be taken to the Floor of the House, because it is crucial that we think through what is going on in the world and how we respond to it. However, I slightly resist one or two of the comments that implied that this change is inevitable and we just have to adapt to it; I do not accept that. We have to have a dynamic role to interact with it and possibly try to help it move in a slightly different direction from what they may intend. I do not mean that in a destructive sense, but we need to engage.
It is interesting that, at the moment, the Government do not seem to know what their relationship with China ought to be. So, today, the head of MI5 said that China is a threat, but the Government are saying that we do not want to upset them. We need to think it through. The noble Baroness is absolutely right about the presentation of the SCO. I say in passing that the photo at the end of it was of 15 men—they were all men—of which 14 were autocrats. There is no doubt at all that this is a different organisation from ours. It is in some way inimical to us, but it exists.
On the figures, it is worth pointing out that the strength of those numbers depends an awful lot on India—and, of course, China, but China is at the core of it. India is a democracy, the one country that is, so that, clearly, is a basis for us to engage, if ever there was one. That is not to say to India, “You shouldn’t be doing this”, but to say, “You are a democracy and they’re not”. It is really important that we have an open channel through and with India on that basis.
I also want to talk about the influence of Russia and China in Africa. China’s belt and road initiative across Asia and Africa is pouring massive resources and potential dependency into countries in Africa, reinforced by what was the Wagner regime, now the Africa Corps, from Russia, whose objectives are not benign. As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said, we should expect the SCO to use its soft power, but it is a bit ironic that it is doing so just as we are dismantling ours. It seems to me that this is a good pause for us to think about how we use all our influences.
Earlier today, the Minister said, quite rightly, that this is not just about aid. I accept that; it is about all the resources that characterise what we stand for: trade, investment, culture, the British Council, the BBC and aid. It is about all those things, and we need to promote them much more vigorously.
We have to recognise that China is a major player. People sometimes express surprise that China has emerged in this category but, if you look at the history of the last 2,000 years, China was a major power for most of it. It is hardly surprising that it is now, and it has numbers, capacity and strength. Engagement is clear, but we have to decide what our interests are, what our security is and how we will deal with that. China needs to understand that, while we are willing to engage, trade and co-invest, we are not going to compromise our security any more than China would compromise its own. That is where we have not got it right, right now; we look a bit confused and unclear, and we need to sharpen that up.
The other problem is where the leadership is coming from. The current leadership of the West—the United States—is causing us a lot of difficulties. It does not seem committed to the values that we talk about. President Trump is very happy to talk about his friends in Hungary and Slovakia who are undermining most of our principles, but he is okay about it. He likes strong men—autocratic men, as far as I can see—and is less interested in the rule of law and human rights. He seems a bit cavalier about them, so we cannot rely on the United States to be the leading champions of this.
That puts a role on us to be clearer—if we are sure about our values—about how to assert them much more emphatically than we have done. The noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, was right at the beginning that we are at a pivotal point. It has been going on for a long time, but it is only just dawning on people how pivotal it is. We need to assess that.
Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear me say that we need to improve our relationships with our own continent. We may have differences of view—unlike others, I believe that the exit from the European Union was both bad for us and bad for them; I would love to go back, but I am not pushing that point—but it is clear that we have to find common values. If we are to address this world order, we need to do it in common cause with like-minded parties and countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which share our values.
I congratulate the noble Baroness and plead for the Government to allow more time and space for these issues to be debated more widely, with inputs that may help the Government get a clearer handle on where we are. We cannot afford to walk away from China—I do not think we should—but we need to be sure, when dealing with China, that it knows where we are coming from and that we know where it is coming from. It needs to be much more open and clearer that we have a different set of values.
My final worry is that when there is a vote in the United Nations, all these countries in Africa, hardly surprisingly, tend to feel that the lead comes not from us but from elsewhere. If we do not do something soon, we will not win any votes in the United Nations.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston, for securing this debate and to all the other fascinating contributions. There seems to have been a concentration, in this corner, from the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, and my noble friends Lord Moynihan and Lord Hannan, of talk about Uzbekistan—somewhat surprisingly. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, reminded us, when we were MEPs, we had the opportunity to visit that country on two or three occasions. It was fascinating, and we suffered from what was referred to as “terrorist hospitality”: on a number of occasions, food and drink was literally forced on us and we were unable to refuse, whether we liked it or not. It did, of course, have an appalling human rights record, at the time, machine-gunning demonstrators and boiling opponents in oil. This was a number of years ago; I hope its record has got slightly better recently.
Given the domination of China-related news in recent days, I am sure noble Lords will have arrived at this debate with the topic at hand already at the forefront of their minds. This is an extremely topical debate—the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, must have had a vision of the future when she secured it. I hope that we can leave here after the contribution from the Minister feeling somewhat slightly less bemused by the Government’s approach to China. I also hope, however, that ongoing events have made them acutely aware the threat of the Chinese Communist Party’s growing global influence to international stability and order. As my noble friend Lord Hannan pointed out, the clue to who runs the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is indeed in the name, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, pointed out in her excellent introduction, the international order that has held since the end of the Cold War is fraying.
Out from under the threat of communism arose a liberal system that centred itself on the rule of law through robust yet unimposing international treaties and institutions—in no small part catalysed and maintained by this country—an order emerged that allowed states, both big and small to interact, to coexist freely and with their own sovereignty. Now, as growing economies begin to compete with the upholders of the prevailing peaceful order, new spheres of influence are cropping up to fracture the old and impose their authority on the new. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation—slightly misnamed in my view—and its component countries, has no small part to play in that.
The Russian Federation, nations that it engulfed under the Iron Curtain just half a century ago, India, Pakistan, Iran and China make up nearly half the global population and are using their strength and manpower to ally and to exert their influence in an aggressive and partisan manner. The last of those countries, China, has managed to influence and manoeuvre some of the most developed nations in the world—and we here are indeed a case in point. Imagine the free rein that they have with the more underdeveloped nations in search of a route to supposed prosperity. It may seem an attractive notion: rich and poor partnerships aimed at guiding countries to the promised land but the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. The belt and road initiative, coated as a benevolent partnership, has led to many countries in Africa and elsewhere becoming shackled to the Chinese by a collar of unshakeable debt, allowing their guarantor to exercise control and coercion with no repercussions whatever.
The SCO is the other side of that same coin but, rather than one nation, it is, as I said, a near majority of the globe acting to impress themselves into the international order. It is a danger under the guise of a developer. Let me just cover a few of the demonstrations that we saw from the organisation’s summit last month, when it announced, with no hint of irony, its global governance initiative. It pledged to promote democracy when leading members are explicit authoritarians. The interesting sole exception to that is of course India, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, pointed out. I struggle to see why it would want to be part of such an organisation. The SCO pledged to abide by the international rule of law, “equally and uniformly”, it says in its declaration, all of course while one of its members is waging an illegal war on Ukraine. It preaches multilateralism when decisions are made unilaterally and with force on smaller surrounding countries.
The SCO represents a clear worry to the peaceful system that has governed our relations for the past three and a half decades. The current Government, I say with sadness but not surprise, have not so far stepped up to this threat. The only place that I can begin is with a brief overview of what has unfolded with regard to China in the past few weeks. A prosecution accusing two men of spying on behalf of China was dropped on 15 September due to a lack of evidence, a decision followed by proclamations of astonishment and surprise from Ministers. The Minister of State for Security told the Commons that the decision had been entirely independent, before the DPP revealed that he had spent months asking the Government to release evidence before the case was dropped. The Education Secretary was then wheeled out at the weekend to do the media rounds, in which she changed the Government’s tune, claiming that the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser was not involved in “the substance” of the case, whatever that means, amid speculation as to whether or not he attended a meeting on whether a conviction would have negative economic and diplomatic effects. Then, on Monday, the Minister of State for Security once again took to attempting to convince the House that the National Security Adviser does not actually advise on matters of national security.
At PMQs yesterday, in the most explicit and unequivocal of terms, the Prime Minister affirmed that neither the National Security Adviser, the Home Secretary nor anyone at No. 10 made decisions about this case. The case is developing as we speak—there are more news releases all the time—but perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, representing the Government today, can clarify how these two diametrically opposed courses of action can be modified.
In light of the SCO summit and its overt aims at securing more global influence at our expense, and this Government’s mishandling of our national security interests, it would be helpful for several steps to be laid out in the Minister’s response. What practical steps are being taken to compete with the economic opportunities that are offered to developing countries by China, thereby bringing more countries into our rules-based liberal system? Secondly, what is being done to counter the aggression of the Chinese Government towards Tibet and other nations surrounding the South China Sea? Thirdly, when will all the facts be released about the Government’s role in the failed prosecution? Lastly, given the information that has already come to light, will the Government now oppose a Chinese super-embassy in London in the interests of national security—although I just saw on my phone as I was standing up that a news release has just come out that the Government have now delayed yet again, for the second time, a decision on that embassy. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Lemos) (Lab)
Apparently, I have nine minutes to deal with the whole of the global security situation.
I thank all noble Lords and Ladies who participated in this debate, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, for what has turned out to be a very timely debate—I am sure she knew that when she called for it. Ministers like me are told to say it is an honour, and the speeches have all been brilliant. On this occasion it is an honour, and the speeches have all been terrific, so I am deeply grateful for that. I hope I can deal with the specific points that noble Lords have made as we go through, but if I run out of time, I will check Hansard and respond.
As noble Lords will know, the UK is not a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, but we respect each country’s right to choose its own path and its own partners, including which international groupings it associates with. The SCO serves as a platform for China and other member states to promote their interests and project leadership on the international stage—I will say a bit more about that in a moment. Our view is that all countries have the right to initiate new formats for multilateral co-operation.
Following the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, China hosted its Victory Day parade in Beijing, marking the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, noted. While noting the military dimension of the parade, it is important to clarify that this event was separate to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, and indeed, Prime Minister Modi did not attend. The UK recognises the significance of this anniversary for China and its people and respects their right to commemorate this occasion in their own history.
We will continue to exercise our own agency, including as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We remain strongly committed to the international rules-based system, which has supported peace, prosperity and co-operation for decades, and we will continue to encourage and call for China and other responsible members of the SCO to do the same.
The China audit has informed the UK’s consistent, long-term and strategic approach to China. As stated in the Statement made by the former Foreign Secretary, we will never compromise
“on our national security, recognising the complexity of the world as it is, engaging confidently, carefully and pragmatically, and delivering secure growth”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/6/25; col. 991.]
I know that noble Lords have asked for a very clear statement on our approach to China, but it is true to say that all speakers in this debate have acknowledged that we cannot have a simple or one-dimensional approach to the relationship with China.
I confirm we will continue to co-operate where our interests align, such as on climate change and global health, but we are prepared to challenge China where its actions undermine our values. Sometimes we will also compete with China for global growth opportunities, and we will continue to be vigilant against the full range of cyberspace and other threats from state and non-state actors, including those that emanate from China.
On the parliamentary espionage case, which the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, raised, the Prime Minister said at PMQs yesterday that he had sought legal advice, and he has published the witness statements. The view of the Government remains that we are disappointed that the case did not reach full trial and that that was the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions. As the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, acknowledged, this clearly has some way to go. There will be an Urgent Question on it, I think on Monday, but certainly next week, and noble Lords will have an opportunity on the Floor of the House to continue the discussion on that case.
On the question of China’s embassy application, as I think all noble Lords know, planning is quasi-judicial in nature. The case is before Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Ministers for decision, and I do not think I should comment further.
The recent SCO summit was striking in its failure to mention Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, drew our attention to some of the tragic consequences there. Instead, the gathering was another example of China using its diplomatic engagement with Russia to reduce Putin’s isolation on the world stage. We consistently challenge China’s and other countries’ political and military support for Russia, which prolongs the war and is not in China’s interest. China remains the essential state in helping Russia continue the war against Ukraine. That is the Government’s view. The UK continues to call on China to use its influence to support peace and stability. That includes urging President Putin to end the war, withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine and respect international law. With regard to the observation by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, the Government work closely with not only European but G7 partners to make common cause on that.
On the multilateral system, strengthening multilateral institutions, which a number of noble Lords mentioned, to uphold the global consensus against aggression and realise a just and lasting peace in Ukraine with full respect for the UN charter is critical. These groupings, such as the SCO—I think I am coming to the heart of the intentions of the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, in raising this debate—provide China with a platform to promote alternative norms, often prioritising state sovereignty and non-interference over universal human rights and democratic governance. The noble Lords, Lord Callanan, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Moynihan, referred to that. The UK’s response to these initiatives—this is really the heart of my comments—is to defend and strengthen the institutions that matter and that represent the international consensus, including the institutions that many noble Lords have mentioned, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, and to help reform and revitalise them so that they are more inclusive, effective and resilient in responding to global challenges. That was the challenge from the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, and I think it is important. We welcome China’s support for those institutions in which it is also an active partner. We are actively engaged in efforts to reform and revitalise key institutions through initiatives to reform the United Nations and our work with the multilateral development banks to ensure they are more representative, responsive and effective in addressing today’s global challenges.
I recognise the starting point of the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, that this is a changed world. China seeks to expand its global influence through the SCO and attempts to reshape the multilateral system to suit its own interests. Our response is clear. We stand firmly behind Ukraine, we defend the multilateral institutions that underpin global stability, and we are renewing bilateral partnerships of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, talked about across the global South. We will continue to engage China in a principled and measured way, as many noble Lords have encouraged us to do. We will continue to support the values and institutions that have helped deliver peace and prosperity around the world, and we will do so with confidence and in the spirit of genuine partnership.