China has soured what was once a promising relationship

Speaking, appropriately enough, at the launch of a new generation of nuclear-powered and armed submarines in Barrow, the prime minister warned of the “epoch-defining challenge” from China. With palpable frustration, Rishi Sunak declared that the country is “behaving in an increasingly assertive way abroad” and that it represents “the greatest state-based threat to our economic security”.

He is entirely right about that. The curious case of the Electoral Commission hack in 2021, blamed by the security services on Chinese actors, confirms just how keen these agents are on probing the digital infrastructure of the British state, and, in this instance, harvesting the personal details of 40 million voters.

More targeted has been their fairly blatant hijacking of the email accounts of parliamentarians such as Sir Iain Duncan Smith and crossbench peer David Alton. They then impersonated them in almost comically crude fashion – proving that even a superpower has its limits.

Ironically, these hacks merely confirm how sensitive China is to the legitimate criticism of its regime, and of the far worse human rights abuses that are inflicted routinely on its Uyghur Muslim citizens, the Tibetans, and the inhabitants of Hong Kong – not to mention its menacing behaviour towards Taiwan.

Elsewhere, China has asserted itself in east Asia to the extent that it has violated the territorial integrity and sovereignty of almost all of its neighbours. It is also proving an indulgent friend to Russia and North Korea.

China denies that it was behind the hack on the Electoral Commission, but it is hard to see how the UK’s intelligence services could gain anything from “pinning it” on Beijing. The British government has enough to deal with in attempting to restrain Russia without publicly antagonising another superpower for no good reason.

The British people deserve to know what they have to fear from the East, and the Chinese cyber threat is plausible and real. The fear, now, is that China will find some way to disrupt the general election. Even the illness of the Princess of Wales has allegedly been exploited and weaponised through the spread of misinformation by Chinese and Russian entities.

Where once, a decade or two ago, Britain – like the rest of the West – could welcome China back into the world economy as a partner in globalised trade and the maintenance of international order, now the People’s Republic must at best be treated with suspicion. That prospective “golden age” has been cancelled, and one of its principal architects, David Cameron, now has to express regret for his promotion of the relationship during his own time as prime minister. A friendly pint with Xi Jinping will have to wait.

Like the grievous deterioration in Britain’s relationship with Russia, it is a powerful reminder that it will always be difficult to build friendly relations with any power that does not share, fundamentally, our democratic values; and how foolish it is to neglect the alliances – such as those we share with the European Union and Nato – that offer engines of collective prosperity and security under the rule of law.

The question now is what the UK can do about this broad-based threat from China – not just to Britain’s digital infrastructure and to the people of Hong Kong, to whom a continuing treaty obligation is owed, but also in the form of China’s international delinquency. Harsh words from a former close friend of Mr Xi, the now ennobled Lord Cameron, and symbolic sanctions on individuals, are of limited effect.

China is clearly a military superpower, and, depending on the measurement, either the largest or the second-largest economy on Earth. It provides the world with manufacturing, gadgets, smartphones, credit, investment, and much of the supply of electric cars. It is especially poignant, for example, that while all this diplomatic friction has been going on, the UK is also attempting to entice the Chinese to invest £1bn in a car battery gigafactory in the West Midlands. And, while Huawei has been pushed out of the UK’s 5G programme, China General Nuclear is still heavily involved in our next generation of nuclear power stations.

Whether it is labelled an “epochal challenge” or a “threat”, what is clear is that the risks from China are starting to weigh more heavily than the opportunities the country represents. It remains, for the moment, a matter of balance, and it is not yet in the national interests of the UK, or of the West as a whole, to give the process of “deglobalisation” another shove via the instigation of trade sanctions or a trade war (something that is perennially threatened by Donald Trump).

Aside from anything else, China possesses huge quantities of Western sovereign debt, and if trillions of dollars of US Treasury notes were dumped on the world’s financial markets, it would cause systemic damage to the global economy.

Furthermore, China should not be pushed into an even closer embrace with Russia, exacerbating the plight of Ukraine. It is not appeasement to temper our retaliation for acts of aggression with a sense of proportion. But keeping that perspective becomes more difficult with every act of Chinese interference.

The best response to China, therefore, is to strengthen Britain’s cyberdefences, and to continue to work closely with allies in the “Five Eyes” intelligence network, Aukus and Nato, and with our friends in the EU as well as those in the Indo-Pacific region, such as Japan, to maintain deterrence and develop counterintelligence techniques.

Caution must be the watchword where Chinese investment is concerned, and the West needs to make sure, through a naval and military presence, that China pursues reunification with Taiwan through peaceful means, and stops intimidating the countries around it.

We can still trade with China, invest in it, and travel there; we can host Chinese companies, banks and students in the UK – but China’s actions are souring what was once a promising relationship.