Long-Term Strategic Challenges Posed by China

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, one of the significant things missing from this debate is the usual contributions from former Foreign Office diplomats. I note that there is not a single ambassador or permanent under-secretary speaking in this debate, and I wonder whether that is because they, like many, are confused by the changes in British policy over recent years. As some of your Lordships will know, before I was here, I worked for David Cameron. He had a very different view as to the development of the world. I recall a discussion with him about overseas aid. He said, “We need to increase overseas aid because we need to make these countries worth living in, so that people don’t all want to leave”. Part of the consequence of reducing 0.7% has been the reflection in cuts in aid, as previous speakers have mentioned. Our belt and road initiative is a lot of belt and no road at the moment.

We also have to face the fact that the world is changing rapidly, and not in our favour. It is 100 years ago this month that the British Empire and dominions reached its peak; it never grew bigger than it was in October 1923. That was the key pinnacle of an already financially weakened British state, but that was when its overseas reach got to its highest. We had behind us the Amritsar massacre, we had before us the Bengal famine: both of them human rights abuses that we managed to make excuses for, frankly. However, we were an imperial power, and in many ways we behaved quite similarly to China and not so dissimilarly from the United States. If we look at the United States and its treatment of Cuba, do we say, “Well, it’s okay to treat Cuba this way, but China and the Spratly Islands? No, that’s not on at all”. What we are seeing in many ways is that China is behaving largely in exactly the same way that the British Empire behaved, and in the way the United States behaved with its Monroe Doctrine, intervening all over Latin America from Chile to Nicaragua.

I do not put that forward as an excuse. However, reading the statement that was made at the summit in China this week, which I read on China’s internet rather than ours, what they basically said was, “We want to do our own thing—we don’t share your values”. They did not pretend to share our values; that is the important thing to remember. They actually repudiated our values. The only thing we have left now is the threat of a good example, and maybe some selective moves to downgrade certain products, such as cotton from Xinjiang. What we cannot do is have a big cold war with China. It will not and cannot work—the international economy is far too integrated for that.

What we can do is give the countries near China as much diplomatic support as we can. I know from visiting Vietnam that it feels somewhat under pressure, but the ruling party—which, incidentally, is also communist—believes that it somehow has to find a modus vivendi because Vietnam is so small and China is so big. The vice-president of Vietnam, whom I met when I was last there, said, “We have to be realistic. If we have trouble with China, you’re not going to come to defend us. You’re not going to be able to send troops here and battle for Vietnam. Apart from that, it would be somewhat of an irony; we are still clearing up after the last time you came to this country”. The best thing we can do is to give some sort of diplomatic support and, where we can, support such protest as exists.

I was interested in this week’s New Statesman, which has an article on China and what it calls the struggle for Chinese history and the fact that there is still an underground movement there. It says:

“As long as there has been repression in China, there has been resistance”.


It goes on to quote the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ian Johnson, who argues that victory for the regime’s repressive attitude was not total. Indeed, a brave group of independent filmmakers and writers continues

“to preserve an alternative version of the country's history and to stubbornly resist the party’s efforts to rewrite the past”.

As far as we can give any quiet support to that, we jolly well ought to. But we must realise that the limits of what we can do are exactly that: limits. We are a small country. When I was in the European Parliament, people in Europe used to be really surprised when I went to meetings. I said to them that Europe is a very small place and that we have fewer languages than India. People would ask me, “Fewer languages than India? They all speak English”; to which I replied, “That shows how much you know about India, for a start”. China and India are virtually the same size. Part of our strategy for China ought to be to give as much support as we can to India—which, frankly, also has some democratic problems at the moment.

The recent review has some very good home truths in it, although they are a bit buried. For instance, paragraph 13 says:

“Today’s international system cannot simply be reduced to ‘democracy versus autocracy’”.


That is absolutely right. It later says that we will need to work with countries such as China, among others, “to protect our shared”—note the word “shared”—

“higher interest in an open and stable international order, accepting that we may not share all of the same values and national interests”.

That is absolutely true. Someone in the Foreign Office wrote that; I presume they got it through the Ministers, otherwise it would not have appeared there. It is absolutely true that we have to be prepared to be flexible.

The review says on page 13 that some of the

“actions pose a threat to our people, prosperity and security”,

but

“we will engage directly with China bilaterally and in international fora so that we leave room for open, constructive and predictable relations”.

That is part of the way diplomacy works. We close our eyes to the fact that, at this time in Moscow, there are still talks going on between Russian and British diplomats about such things as nuclear proliferation in Iran. Behind-the-scenes contacts have not stopped; they should not stop; and there is absolutely nothing to be gained by us from them stopping. We have to encourage as much as we can.

The review states on page 31 that, as part of the 2023 review,

“the Government will also increase investment in the capabilities that will help us understand and adapt to China”.

I hope that all our Ministers carefully read—I am sure they do—the documents that come out of their own Foreign Office, because they contain a lot of grains of truth. There is far too much belligerence in the way we pursue our public discourse on relations, not only with China but with many other places in the world. We need to remember that the biggest secret of democracy is discretion, confidentiality and moving forward.

I finish with a story that is absolutely true. When I joined the Foreign Office in the early 1960s, there were still diplomats around from the 1930s. I remember one of them saying to me, “Richard, be very careful how you treat your enemies, because one day you might wake up and find that they’re your friends”. The example he gave was Ivan Maisky, who we refused to recognise as an ambassador until the day after Germany invaded Russia, at which point he was invited to the palace to be acknowledged as the ambassador, to be followed by dinner with the Foreign Secretary, who up till then had refused to meet him. Remember, you need to keep the channels open, and that one day your enemies might be, if not your friends, at least people you need a civilised conversation with, so just be careful.