The UK and China: A Call for Cross-Party Consensus– rusi.org

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This is such a big and important issue for the UK’s future that unnecessary partisanship should be resisted wherever possible. Now the election is over, there needs to be a show of cross-party force to ensure that the newly elected government doesn’t flinch from building a fit-for-purpose China strategy. Here are some ideas, together with some key areas that no China policy can afford to ignore.

Authoritarianism is spreading like a virus, and, to extend that analogy, the UK needs to do what it can to ensure it remains immune. To protect UK economic interests, therefore, we would propose a 10–15 year Authoritarianism Immunity Strategy, with the goal of sustaining UK prosperity in an unstable world. Such a strategy would need to develop a government-wide understanding of dependency tolerance levels, effectively bolstering the central nervous system of UK public and private institutions against exposure to authoritarian influence. It would also need urgently to implement a plan to audit and reduce exposure to authoritarian influence in areas of critical infrastructure and across key value chains. Meanwhile, the same approach must be applied to investment screening, as well as essential UK institutions such as universities, where a strategy to prevent academic coercion is still lacking.