Britain should not “pull the shutters down” on China, as it would be counterproductive to the national interest, the foreign secretary has told the Guardian.
In a warning to Conservative hawks, James Cleverly insisted there was not a binary choice to be made between treating China as either a threat or an opportunity, and said the UK’s approach needed to be more nuanced.
It comes as the government attempts to navigate Beijing’s growing economic and political reach, with influential Tory MPs pressing the prime minister and his cabinet to take a harder line.
Next week, Cleverly will set out the UK’s approach towards China explicitly in a major speech following the government’s refreshed integrated review of defence and foreign policy, which last month described the country as an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge”.
The head of the National Cyber Security Centre, Lindy Cameron, is also expected to issue a warning over the “dramatic rise of China as a technology superpower” amid concerns over the threat to security.
In an interview with the Guardian after the G7 summit of foreign ministers in Japan, Cleverly said: “I get why a number of my colleagues are hawkish. But it’s not in their interest or my interest or anyone else’s interest to just pull the shutters down on this relationship, because China will carry on carrying on whether we engage with them or not.
“We’re not going to get them to completely redefine themselves. But we do have influence, including with them. If we don’t engage, we lose that influence. I have no intention of throwing away what influence I do have, even with China.”
He suggested the UK needed to adopt a more sophisticated approach. “I keep being asked to sum up the nature of the relationship in one word. Are they competition? Are they a threat? Are they a challenge? Are they an opportunity? But we don’t distil any other bilateral relationship into one word.
“China is big, it’s influential, it’s important. It has a huge technological heft. It has an incredibly important role to play in environmental issues, economic issues, and so we have got to – and therefore we will – engage closely and regularly with China, because it would be really, really, really counterproductive not to do so.”
He added: “It’s not an on-off switch. It’s not even a volume knob. It’s not about dialling up or dialling down. It’s more like a graphic equaliser, because there are areas where we want to dial up the bilateral relationship.
“There are areas where we will want to dial back the relationship and they are not contradictory or incompatible. Throughout, we need to be clear-eyed, focused on what is in our national interest, and what is in the interest of the world more generally.”
Rishi Sunak remains under pressure from some of his own MPs to take a tougher stance towards Beijing after he rejected attempts by his predecessor, Liz Truss, to ratchet up Britain’s hostility by redesignating the country as a “threat” in the integrated review.
Cleverly’s remarks on engaging with China are likely to anger some on the Tory backbenches, such as former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, who has accused the government of being “asleep at the wheel” over international security concerns relating to the country.
However, the foreign secretary said that his willingness to engage with Beijing did not mean the government would not also hold it to account in “a number of areas” where they disagreed. “That doesn’t mean that we are not going to pull them up on the areas where we’ve got serious disagreement,” he said.
In his interview, Cleverly said he “fundamentally disagreed” that the Taiwan strait was a domestic matter for Beijing, insisting that it was in “everybody’s interests” to have a peaceful resolution to the situation which recently saw China launch military drills near the island.
He offered a mild rebuke to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who cautioned last week against Europe being drawn into tensions between China and the US over Taiwan.
“It’s in everybody’s interest across the whole world for there not to be conflict across the Taiwan strait … It is in the interests of everybody that this is resolved peacefully through mutual consent, and not by force.”
Cleverly also denied that the UK was a “vassal state” to any other nation after Macron controversially suggested that being a US ally did not mean being a “vassal”.
“We are able to have close coordination, but also disagreements with some of our closest friends in the world,” Cleverly said. “So I think the point is that each country has got to define its own relationship with other countries around the world.”
The foreign secretary also indicated that the UK, which was last month given the green light to join a major Indo-Pacific trade bloc, the CPTPP, could join other member states in blocking China from the partnership.
“It is a group of countries which value high standards, environmental standards, ethical standards, product standards … and we have no intention of allowing those standards to be diluted,” he said.